A Federal judge has ordered Dish Network to disable almost all of its customers' digital video recorders after parent company EchoStar Communications lost a patent-infringement suit brought by TiVo:
Thursday's ruling from U.S. District Judge David Folsom in Marshall, Texas, demands that within 30 days, EchoStar must basically render useless all but 192,708 of the DVR units it has deployed.
The decision comes four months after a jury ruled that EchoStar should pay TiVo $73.9 million because it willfully infringed TiVo patents that allow the digital storage of TV programming.
Crap. This could be inconvenient. All those Lost episodes we've saved could be...um...yeah.
Update, 3:43 pm CDT (20:43 UTC): The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington has granted a temporary stay of injunction to give Dish Networks time to work something out with TiVo. (I couldn't find the actual order online.) So we get to keep our DVR for the time being.
The FBI spent $170 million on broken software, which it has since scrapped. Now it's planning to spend $450 million on, one hopes, working software:
Because of an open-ended contract with few safeguards, [San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp.] reaped more than $100 million as the project became bigger and more complicated, even though its software never worked properly. The company continued to meet the bureau's requests, accepting payments despite clear signs that the FBI's approach to the project was badly flawed, according to people who were involved in the project or later reviewed it for the government.
David Kay, a former SAIC senior vice president who did not work on the program but closely watched its development, said the company knew the FBI's plans were going awry but did not insist on changes because the bureau continued to pay the bills as the work piled up.
Along the way, the FBI made a fateful choice: It wanted SAIC to build the new software system from scratch rather than modifying commercially available, off-the-shelf software. Later, the company would say the FBI made that decision independently; FBI officials countered that SAIC pushed them into it.
Upton Sinclair's wisdom notwithstanding, consultants have an obligation to inform clients about problems before they become too large to solve. Consultants also have an obligation to make appropriate build-or-buy recommendations to clients; in this case, if SAIC made such recommendations, there doesn't seem to be any evidence.
On the other hand, the Post article suggests the FBI had almost no clue what they were doing, bolstering SAIC's claims that they told them so.
Still, even assuming the best possible facts in SAIC's favor, they should have done the right thing, whatever that "right thing" was at any point in the relationship. Like, for example, testing the software, even if the FBI didn't think testing was important.
When a project like that blows up, everyone looks bad. Sometimes the consultant just has to walk away before that happens.
I wonder what spammers are actually thinking almost as much as I wonder why they bother me.
I've had a blog-spam problem for about three weeks now targeting my referral logs. Spammers with robots use robots that act like people browsing the blog, but they appear to come from gambling sites so that the site URLs show up in the system logs. Some blogs' referral logs are searched by Google and other sites, so the theory here is that the referral spam will generate a lot of inbound links into their sites driving up their search rankings. Sadly for all concerned, this doesn't actually happen; Google is too smart.
Then there's comment spam, like this thoughtful thing I got from a vistor in India this morning:
Remember to let her into your bedbug, then you can start to make it partial.
I don't care about Christopher Fargis, he is vivid, pubescent, and anatomic and I am not going to refracture about it. Dyno-blast Jason Chan hunch our lettering. Our hydraulic corer guard a specious otherness Sammy Schenker is a scornful chelicera? Then Mazen Nesheiwat skyjacks a blurriest nunnery. We will commend on the glitter; we will generalize on the commissure; we will never flick.
My to go cardiograph overconcentrates in the hole. Harmonic Airy Phanhyaseng lip the ambidexter. Therefore unless Gerald Cheatham solemnify Minh Nguyen, she westernize my fattiness but disvalue him
The trick here is that someone is monitoring the spammer's email address, and the subject of the spam comment suggests that anyone emailing the spammer will get information about a gambling site.
Some actual person had to enter the comment, though. The IP address of the comment shows that actual person to be in India, where I can only assume he or she was paid a few cents to copy the nonsense into the comment and submit it to the blog.
It's sad, really. But, in an absurd way, interesting poetry.
Chicago Tribune transportation reporter Jon Hilkevich channels Cecil Adams:
The actual answer is fuzzy, depending on the location, the time of day, vehicle traffic volumes, when the walk button is activated—and luck too.
Many pedestrians refuse to press walk buttons due to suspicions they are a trick or a placebo concocted by the traffic gods to keep walkers calm while breathing fumes from tailpipes as they wait for green lights at busy street corners.
Steve Travia, IDOT's bureau chief of traffic for the Chicago area[, says:] "The bottom line is that if you don't push the walk button, the walk signal may never come up."
Of course, if you're in New York, don't bother, because 80% of their "walk" buttons are disconnected.
The ACLU's case over AT&T sharing its phone records with the government got dismissed:
"The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities," U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said.
Any adversary of this country who can't figure out what phone records went to which agency is probably too stupid to be much of a threat, in my opinion.
I was all set to rant that Kennelly was a Bush (either flavor) or Reagan appointee, but no, he's one of ours. Still, the whole thing smells bad, not least because the judicial branch really ought to stand up to the executive, since the legislative isn't.
I don't know whether this is funny or sad. The Italian government is using the frequent-flier records of several CIA operatives to build their prosecution:
It is unclear whether the operatives intended to take advantage of the free flights garnered at government expense—CIA personnel on such assignments are permitted to fly expensive international business class—or whether they simply were attempting to bolster their covers as private-sector executives.
So keep this in mind, all you road warriors: Someday someone may track your movements based on your quest for Executive Platinum.
The President (922 days, 4 hours remaining) still has not yet appointed an Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Cyberterrorism, despite computer security problems up the ying since before the post was created:
Critics say the year-long vacancy is further evidence that the administration is no better prepared for responding to a major cyber-attack than it was for dealing with Hurricane Katrina, leaving vulnerable the information systems that support large portions of the economy, from telecommunications networks to power grids to chemical manufacturing and transportation systems.
"What this tells me is that [Chertoff] still hasn't made this a priority," said Paul Kurtz, formerly a cybersecurity adviser in the Bush administration and now a chief lobbyist for software and hardware security companies. "Having a senior person at DHS...is not going to stop a major cyber-attack on our critical infrastructures," he said, "but [it] will definitely help us develop an infrastructure that can withstand serious attacks and recover quickly."
Just to expand on the notion that computer security is a big problem right now, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has estimated that 88.9 million identity records have been compromised since Choice Point announced its security breach in February 2005. That's just in the United States, by the way.
For my part, I nominate Bruce Schneier to be our top cyber-security official. I wonder if he'd even take the job, given its total lack of administration support.
I've spent the past few days drafting an analysis of my business. It turns out to be a lot harder than writing software. That is all.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."—Jan L.A. Van De Snepscheut