Was Apple’s Victory, Really A Victory?

As we heard this week Apple had won an injunction barring Samsung from selling some of its Galaxy smartphones in Europe.

However, it is likely that an update from Android 2.x to Android 3.0 will resolve the patent issue, which concerns the way photos are viewed on a touchscreen.

According to OS news, only the Gallery application infringes the patent in question, and Samsung has confirmed it will update the software to get around the problem.

“The injunction has been granted due to the method of scrolling in the Gallery. If that’s replaced, there is no more reason to uphold the injunction,” said Bas Berghuis van Woortman, one of Samsung’s lawyers.

The injunction doesn’t come into effect until mid-October, giving the Korean phone maker plenty of time to change the software. OS news points to evidence showing that although Apple entered into battle with three patents and a community design, all but the Gallery patent were thrown out by the judge.

The swipe-to-unlock patent will likely be declared invalid, the judge wrote, specifically referring to the Neonode N1m mobile phone as prior art, which has the exact same unlock method as the Iphone.

Apple’s complaint about the design of Galaxy smartphones was also thrown out, with the judge citing numerous cases of prior art, including the LG Prada. And in the case of the Android GUI patent, the judge cited the Nokia 7710 as prior art.

Although Samsung’s PR firm in the UK hadn’t heard anything about an Android update, Samsung said that it expects only the Netherlands to be affected by the ruling. It said, “[The] ruling is an affirmation that the GALAXY range of products is innovative and distinctive. With regard to the single infringement cited in the ruling, we will take all possible measures including legal action to ensure that there is no disruption in the availability of our GALAXY smartphones to Dutch consumers.

“This ruling is not expected to affect sales in other European markets. We will continue our plans to introduce new products and technologies that meet and exceed consumer expectations. And we will defend our intellectual property rights through the ongoing legal proceedings around the world.”

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RIM Heads To The Cloud

Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM) will take the wraps off of a new cloud-based social music sharing service called BBM Music, as companies begin to bet on entertainment delivered over the Internet that incorporates social networking features.

Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry phones, said select music from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music and EMI would be available for the users.

A closed beta trial of the BBM Music service is starting on today in Canada, the United States and the UK, the company stated.

The music service is expected to be commercially available to customers later this year for a monthly subscription of $4.99 in a number of countries, it said.

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Radio Antennas Made Fashionable

Ohio State University researchers armed with sewing machines and computers have designed a way to weave radio antennas into clothing in an effort to give wearers more flexible and reliable communications capabilities.

Utilizing plastic film and metallic thread, the researchers are attempting to outfit American soldiers with better and less intrusive wireless technology, though they say the hands-free design could be applicable to others, including police, firefighters and the elderly.

The researchers outline their antenna design in the journal IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters. They acknowledge the concept of wearable antennas isn’t new (combine what they’re doing and some of the invisibility cloak designs that would be woven into clothing and you’d really have something!).

But the OSU researchers claim their design is an improvement over past efforts in that it boosts antenna range fourfold by utilizing a computer controller that fits on a belt and works with multiple antennas that can send and receive signals in all directions. Network coding that coordinates communications among antennas also plays a key role.

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Lenovo Tablet Hits The Market

Lenovo’s business-oriented tablet, the ThinkPad Tablet, is now available for purchase and should start shipping within a week. The 10-inch Android device, which Lenovo officially announced a little more than a month ago, boasts an impressive mix of consumer and business-friendly features that might please both the user and their IT department.

Like other Android 3.1 Honeycomb tablets on the market, the ThinkPad Tablet has a 1280 x 800 multitouch display, 1GB of memory, front- and rear-facing cameras and a NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core processor. It comes in a 16GB model for $499, a 32GB version for $569 and a 64GB option for $669. Basic specs and price-wise, the ThinkPad Tablet is on par with the competition.

What sets the ThinkPad apart, however, are the enterprise-oriented tools like remote administration in case the tablet gets lost or stolen, support for Cisco VPN, and full device encryption. Free apps included like Documents to Go, PrinterShare, and Computrace underscore the tablets professional target audience.

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AES Encryption Cracked

CRYPTOGRAPHY RESEARCHERS have identified a weakness in the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) security algorithm that can crack secret keys faster than before.

The crack is the work of a trio of researchers at universities and Microsoft, and involved a lot of cryptanalysis – which is somewhat reassuring – and still does not present much of a real security threat.

Andrey Bogdanov, from K.U.Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Dmitry Khovratovich, who is full time at Microsoft Research, and Christian Rechberger at ENS Paris were the researchers.

Although there have been other attacks on the key based AES security system none have really come close, according to the researchers. But this new attack does and can be used against all versions of AES.

This is not to say that anyone is in immediate danger and, according to Bogdanov, although it is four times easier to carry out it is still something of an involved procedure.

Recovering a key is no five minute job and despite being four times easier than other methods the number of steps required to crack AES-128 is an 8 followed by 37 zeroes.

“To put this into perspective: on a trillion machines, that each could test a billion keys per second, it would take more than two billion years to recover an AES-128 key,” the Leuven University researcher added. “Because of these huge complexities, the attack has no practical implications on the security of user data.” Andrey Bogdanov told The INQUIRER that a “practical” AES crack is still far off but added that the work uncovered more about the standard than was known before.

“Indeed, we are even not close to a practical break of AES at the moment. However, our results do shed some light into the internal structure of AES and indicate where some limits of the AES design are,” he said.

He added that the advance is still significant, and is a notable progression over other work in the area.

“The result is the first theoretical break of the Advanced Encryption Standard – the de facto worldwide encryption standard,” he explained. “Cryptologists have been working hard on this challenge but with only limited progress so far: 7 out of 10 for AES-128 as well as 8 out of 12 for AES-192 and 8 out of 14 rounds for AES-256 were previously attacked. So our attack is the first result on the full AES algorithm.”

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Beetel Teletech, part of India’s Bharti Enterprises that controls top mobile carrier Bharti Airtel (BRTI.NS), unveiled a tablet computer priced at 9,999 rupees ($220) on Wednesday.

The 7-inch tablet, branded Beetel Magiq, uses Google’s (GOOG.O) Android operating system and supports both 3G and Wi-Fi networks, Beetel said in a statement.

Beetel is one of the largest makers of fixed-line phones in India. A company spokesman said China’s Huawei HWT.UL was their manufacturing partner for the tablet.

India is the world’s second-biggest and the fastest-growing market for mobile phones, although computer penetration is still low.

Apple Inc (AAPL.O) began iPad sales in India in January this year, while Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) launched its Galaxy Tab in India in November last year.

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Best Buy Stuck With TouchPads

Best Buy is sitting on a boatload of 200,000 HP Touchpads and wants to send them back to HP.

According to Allthingsd, Best Buy stocked its warehouses with around 270,000 HP Touchpad tablets. However, the retailer has been unable to sell the tablets and has only sold at most 25,000, even with a $100 discount, so Best Buy is requesting that HP take back all of the unsold devices.

Furthermore, it is being said that things are so bad that HP EVP Todd Bradley might have to go to Best Buy’s headquarters and plead with executives to exercise patience. It appears that the Touchpad is suffering from poor sales in many stores across the country, with Wal-Mart also said to be an unhappy camper.

Update…HP will stop making the HP Touchpads…….

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Sprint To Debut Cloud Services

Sprint will introduce cloud services to all sizes of businesses in the fourth quarter, a Sprint executive said on Wednesday.

A Sprint spokeswoman said more details would be announced at a later date, but confirmed the executive’s comments in an interview published Wednesday.

Paget Alves, head of Sprint business markets, said in the interview that Sprint’s offerings to businesses will include selling its network infrastructure as a service available on-demand.

Sprint will also offer software, security apps and Internet hosting.

Verizon and AT&T offer similar services, and Alves was said that the carriers are “in a unique position because our business is centered around the cloud.”

Sprint plans to offer services that rely on the company’s own data center, unlike Verizon, which is using capacity from Terremark, which Verizon purchased for $1.4 billion in January.

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VoIP Ideal Platform For Controlling Botnets

Botnets and their masters can communicate with one other by calling into the same VoIP conference call and exchanging data using touch tones, researchers demonstrated at Defcon.

This gives the botmasters — whose top goals include remaining anonymous — the ability to issue orders from random payphones and disposable cellular phones, say researchers Itzik Kotler and Iftach Ian Amit of security and risk-assessment firm Security Art.

Using phones and the public phone networks eliminates one of the prime tools bot fighters have: taking down the domains of botnets’ command and control servers, the researchers say. If the botmaster isn’t using a command and control server, it can’t be taken down.

In fact, the botmaster can communicate with the zombie machines that make up the botnet without using the Internet at all if the zombies are within a corporate network. So even if a victim company’s VoIP network is segregated from the data network, there is still a connection to the outside world.

In addition to its stealth, the VoIP tactic employs technology that readily pierces corporate firewalls and uses only traffic that is difficult for data loss prevention software to peer into. The traffic is streamed audio, so data loss prevention scanners can’t recognize patterns of data they are supposed to filter, the researchers say.

The downsides of VoIP as a command channel are that it severely limits the number of zombie machines that can be contacted at once, and the rate at which stolen data can be sent out of a corporate network is limited by the phone system. But Kotler and Amit say the connections are plenty big to send commands in.

During their demo at the conference, the pair had an Asterisk open source IP PBX stand in as the corporate PBX. A virtual machine representing a zombie computer on a corporate network called via TCP/IP through the PBX and into a corporate conference call. A BlackBerry, representing the botmaster dialed in over the public phone network to the same conference call.

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iPad Rivals Have Better Chance In Europe

Would-be rivals to Apple’s iPad have a better chance in Europe than they do in the United States, but they need to drop prices fast to grasp the opportunity, IT research firm Forrester said on Tuesday.

Apple’s relatively small retail presence in Europe — with 52 stores compared with 238 in the United States — offers a chance to the likes of Samsung, Acer and Research in Motion, Forrester said.

But their prices cannot yet compete with Apple, which has far larger scale in the tablet market and an efficient supply chain. Forrester said emerging challengers from China and Taiwan would likely step in soon with cheaper offerings.

“There is this opportunity for iPad challengers, but the competition is very fragmented. Competing with Apple will require a different approach from what we’ve seen so far,” said analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, the author of the Forrester report.

Apple still has the tablet-computer market almost to itself after launching the iPad a year and a half ago. It has sold close to 30 million iPads, whose prices start at about $500.

Forrester expects Apple to sell 80 percent of all consumer tablets in the United States and 70 percent in Europe this year.

It expects 2011 worldwide tablet sales to reach 48 million units, with half of those sold in the United States, 30 percent in Europe, 15 percent in Asia and 5 percent in Latin America.

Forrester surveyed almost 14,000 online adult consumers in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Britain, and also interviewed product strategists from manufacturers, telecommunications operators and retailers.

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