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Android users are rolling their eyes over the newly introduced customization capabilities released in Apple’s iOS 7 like “dynamic” (live) wallpapers and backgrounds with the parallax effect. You can already do these things on Android and have been able to for some time. In fact, you can fully personalize your smartphone, from the homescreen widgets to the default apps, icon sets and more.

Barnes and Noble, which adheres to the ePub standard enhanced the tool which ensures ePUB files adhere to industry standards

Surely every country that has learned about NSA spying is hopping mad, and with good reason, but the EU has reacted to these revelations in typical bureaucratic fashion: They have proposed a couple of meaningless cloud regulations.

Intellectual Ventures may be running out of cash, but that doesn't mean it's slowed down the pace of evildoing. If you look over its recent lawsuits, you'll notice that over the summer, Intellectual Ventures was busy suing a bunch of banks, including Capital One (that lawsuit is embedded below). At least some of those lawsuits involve US patent 6,182,894 entitled: "Systems and methods for authorizing a transaction card." In short, it basically describes the concept of the CID or CVV number that is found on the back of most credit cards today, which you often have to enter when purchasing stuff online with a credit card. Now, we may question how the hell the idea of adding 3 numbers to the back of a card as a security measure should be patented in the first place, but let's leave that aside for a moment.

According to a new report from USA Today's Byron Acohido, those rocking Google's mobile operating system might not have that much longer to wait before they start getting fingerprint sensors of their own on their mobile devices.

I love Dropbox. I really do. With a Google AdWords campaign, and $50 or so, I was able to max out my free storage. That means I have around 24GB of free Dropbox storage to fiddle with. Granted, that's a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, 24GB isn't very much space.

Patent trolls are not only disruptive, but secretive as well. The FTC plans to find out how they really work.

Bloomberg reports that conversations between HTC and Microsoft have revolved around the idea of HTC putting Windows Phone onto its Android handsets as an alternative. As enticement to pursue this strategy, the report states that Microsoft has offered to cut or eliminate the licensing fee.

Yes, it’s true: In a classic example of parody coming to life, a newly published patent filing reveals Google’s ambitions to solve one of the most troublesome challenges known to humanity: Splitting the bill at the end of a meal.

Microsoft Corp. is talking to HTC Corp. about adding its Windows operating system to HTC’s Android-based smartphones at little or no cost. People with knowledge of the matter said that it's further evidence of the software maker’s struggle to gain ground in the mobile market.

We've written a few times about patent troll Innovatio, which claims to hold some patents on WiFi, saying that anyone using WiFi (including home users) are infringing, though it has chosen "at this stage" not to sue home users.

With this morning's revelation of how the NSA and GCHQ are trying to attack Tor, some of the presentations being used by the NSA to explain Tor are somewhat interesting or amusing. For example, in one presentation about the program EgotisticalGiraffe (I don't make 'em up, so don't ask), the NSA amusingly feels the need to highlight the fact that "terrorists" use Tor:

SOFTWARE titan Adobe Systems has warned that hackers breached its defences and stole source code along with credit card numbers and other information relating to nearly three million customers.

A round up of a number of events relevant to the Linux world for the past week.

Patent-holding giant Intellectual Ventures (IV) has been making the rounds seeking investors for a new patent-purchasing fund, according to a Reuters report. The company is apparently out of money, having spent the $6 billion it has raised since its inception in 2000. For the time being, it has stopped buying new patents.

According to new revelations from data pilfered by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency has for years been going after users of Tor. The Tor onion router project is used by countless numbers of users around the world in a bid to protect their privacy and provide a degree of anonymity. According to new revelations published today by the Guardian newspaper from data pilfered by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Tor users have been specifically targeted by the National Security Agency for years.

BitTorrent Sync by BitTorrent, Inc is a proprietary peer-to-peer file synchronization tool available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and BSD. It can sync files between devices on a local network, or between remote devices over the Internet via secure, distributed P2P technology, so in short you can setup your own cloud storage and share your files among your devices.

Today we learned just how determined the patent troll Lodsys is to avoid a ruling on the merits of its claims. When software security company Kaspersky Lab refused to surrender, Lodsys settled for nothing (yes, you read that right—absolutely nothing) rather than take its claims to trial.

A working group for Internet regulators is under severe criticism for a proposal that would put an end to the openness of the current WHOIS system for domain name registration records.

More than two in three IT professionals would consider ex-hackers for security roles, providing they have the right skills to do the job, a survey has found.

You want to update your openQRM Cloud environment? Here a detailed recipe for you!

Security biz RSA has reportedly warned its customers to stop using the default random-number generator in its encryption products - amid fears spooks can easily crack data secured by the algorithm.

The patent in question is U.S. Patent No. 7,346,545. That patent basically describes a simple idea familiar to anyone who has watched videos on the Internet: the idea of taking a video available for purchase, and showing it for free in exchange for viewing an advertisement first.

Back on June 30th we asked you, “Which of the following best describes your thoughts about the GPL?” The poll’s been active since, though for most of that time it’s been buried in the article What’s Your Take on the GPL? back in our archives. We took it down just this morning.

Of course, as you might expect, there's something of a "split" within the tech sector over whether or not there's support for Goodlatte's latest bill. On the one hand, you've got over 200 startups asking for that accelerated review process for questionable patents. At the same time, you've got a coalition of about 100 more stodgy old line businesses (some of whom are in the tech world) arguing that such a review would "undermine many valid patents." Frankly, that's hogwash, as we'll discuss in a bit.

Nvidia is now trying to get on Linux developers' good side. Yesterday, Nvidia's Andy Ritger e-mailed developers of Nouveau, an open source driver for Nvidia cards that is built by reverse engineering Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Ritger wrote that "NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able."

The (Amnesic) Incognito Live System is a Debian-based live CD/USB with the goal of providing complete Internet anonymity for the user. The product ships with several Internet applications, including web browser, IRC client, mail client and instant messenger, all pre-configured with security in mind and with all traffic anonymised. To achieve this, Incognito uses the Tor network to make Internet traffic very hard to trace.

Linux supremo Linus Torvalds has jokingly admitted US spooks approached him to put a backdoor in his open-source operating system.

A group of German hackers claimed to have cracked the iPhone fingerprint scanner on Sunday, just two days after Apple launched the technology that it promises will better protect devices from criminals and snoopers seeking access.

A major American computer security company has told thousands of customers to stop using an encryption system that relies on a mathematical formula developed by the National Security Agency (NSA).

A lightweight markup language is a modern system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text, and designed with a simple readable syntax. In fact, the syntax is so basic that anyone can quickly learn to use these markup languages. The key advantage of this type of language is that it is designed to be easy to enter the annotated text in a text editor, and at the same time easy to follow the document source.

One thing you can't do is create an unbreakable password. The best you can do is make the cracker need huge resources and nearly-endless time – in short, make it so tough it just isn't worth the cracker's time.

An elite group of nation-state hackers running roughshod through the financial sector and other industries in the U.S. has pioneered techniques that others are following, and has used sophisticated methods to go after hardened targets, including hacking a security firm to undermine the security service the company provided its clients.

Despite the rise in the number of patent trolls launching lawsuits affecting open source software, there are some glimmers of hope. The America Invents Act that was signed into law in September 2011 has provided new ways to prevent the issuance of over-broad software patents that could fuel future lawsuits.

The short version is this: Soverain had earlier stated that it would be asserting claim 35 of its key patent, 5,715,314, against Newegg. 35 is a dependent claim, which is reliant on the independent claim, in this case 34. It's the independent claims that are generally the key to a patent, as the dependent ones just build off of the independent ones and maybe add a minor thing or two. Wipe out the independent claims and the dependent ones generally go with them. So, throughout the case, Newegg and Soverain, basically argued over claim 34. That's what mattered.

In early September when the page was first removed, supposedly for “spamming,” Mr Kruse seemed confident the issue would be resolved and the page would eventually again be operational. As of yesterday, however, the page has completely disappeared. Visitors who attempt to visit the site are greeted with the notice: “Sorry, this page isn’t available. The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.”

It's an insecure world out there. Just how are you supposed to protect your company's valuable assets. It's a tall order, but this infographic outlines the scope of the problem and offers some ways to keep mobile users safe from harm. It's not fool proof by any means, but it's a start.

Pam Chestek is an intellectual property lawyer. She runs Chestek Legal, a practice that focuses on giving practical, legal advice on branding, marketing, and protecting and sharing content. In this interview she shares with me what caused her to challenge traditional wisdom back in law school, the kind of chaos involved in analyzing free and open source software through the lens of the law, and how creativity is at the heart of it all.

The Pirate Bay has long been a thorn in the side of copyright holders, but when Britain's record industry trade association asked Google to remove the notorious file-sharing site from its homepage, the search engine refused to comply.

Experts on privacy and Internet security have blasted the National Security Agency over reports it has secretly been working with the British government to crack encryption technology that billions of Internet users rely upon to keep their electronic messages and confidential data secure.

But Soverain actually had one final trick up its sleeve—a desperate attempt to pull victory from the jaws of defeat that was, in Cheng's telling, effectively based on a typographical error. The appeals court had invalidated claim 34 of the "shopping cart" patent, not claim 35. Instead of allowing what Newegg said was a mistake to be corrected, Soverain tried to literally make a federal case out of it. The patent company asked for a re-hearing from the panel, as well as from the full "en banc" court, saying that after months and months of arguing with Newegg over the value and validity of claim 34, it was actually claim 35 that should have been considered all along.

Yet another unfortunate patent decision has come out of the appeals court for the federal circuit. This involves a case where certain customers of Cisco products were being sued for patent infringement by TR Labs, and part of its argument was that certain Cisco equipment resulted in the infringement by those customers. In response, Cisco filed a lawsuit in federal court, asking for a declaratory judgment that TR Labs' patents were invalid. TR Labs hit back that it had not sued Cisco, had no intention of suing Cisco, and thus Cisco could not sue for declaratory judgment.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is not exempt from the "sequestration" budget cuts being imposed on government agencies. For now, one casualty of the cuts will be that agency's plan to open an office in Silicon Valley in the near future, according to a Sunday report by The Associated Press. The Silicon Valley office was an idea that has been suggested for years, and it looked like it was finally coming to fruition.

Regular readers of tech news sites are used to hearing about patent trolls. Soon, though, you might start hearing about them in surprising places: like on the drive home from work. The Internet Association has teamed up with the biggest trade groups representing restaurants, supermarkets, and retailers to launch a new ad campaign in print and radio outlets. The new campaign isn't tech-centric at all, and it emphasizes how trolls hurt "Main Street"-type businesses.

Chances are you’ve already heard that New Zealand passed a new Patents Bill this week making software patents illegal. So rather than summarize this news story, let me just pass along some links to articles that take a look at various angles on this exciting news.

The world's largest patent-holding company, Intellectual Ventures (IV), has opened up a Washington DC office, according to The Washington Post's Capital Business blog. The move appears to be a ramping up of the company's lobbying efforts in a year in which "patent trolls" have come under unprecedented criticism in Congress.

A major new patent bill, passed in a 117-4 vote by New Zealand's Parliament after five years of debate, has banned software patents. The relevant clause of the patent bill actually states that a computer program is "not an invention." Some have suggested that was a way to get around the wording of the TRIPS intellectual property treaty, which requires patents to be "available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology."

If you read Techdirt, you're almost certainly familiar with Larry Lessig, the law professor at Harvard who (among many other things) has been an avid advocate for copyright reform and campaign finance reform, an author of many books about copyright and creativity, a well-known public speaker whose presentations are stunningly compelling, entertaining and informative, and the founder of some important organizations including Creative Commons. Of course, as an expert on copyright and creativity, and someone who's actually been involved in some of the key copyright legal fights over the past decade (tragically, on the losing side), you might think that a record label would think twice before issuing a clearly bogus threat to sue him over copyright infringement.

Groklaw, the 11-year-old website devoted to covering legal disputes related to open source software, has announced it will shut down rather than risk the government reading its e-mail. Groklaw founder Pamela Jones (commonly known as "PJ") wrote today that she is not confident the government won't someday be able to crack her encrypted e-mails. "There is no way to do Groklaw without e-mail," she wrote. "So this is the last Groklaw article."

Computer worms are considered to be one of the best weapons in a computer attacker's arsenal. Through these computer worms, evil-doers intrude into computer systems to destroy files, attack other computer systems, steal data and so on. The concept of a computer worm is not new; attackers have been using worms to attack computer systems for decades now.