Monthly Archive:: September 2009

A long-term patent battle between Microsoft and a California- and Singapore-based security software company known as Uniloc has found Microsoft on the winning side... again. The said battle began about six years ago when Uniloc first sued Microsoft for allegedly infringing a patent of a technology that decries piracy by way of an activation key. Microsoft was supposed to have violated the patent by integrating the technology into the Windows XP and Office products' activation sequences that we all know and love. In short: Microsoft won the original case in 2003, Uniloc appealed and eventually won the appeal in April 2009 after many years of long and drawn out legal proceedings, and Microsoft appealed the appeal and won that appeal just recently, now not having to pay the US$388 million from the last appeal. Oh, and Uniloc already has plans to appeal.

Since the early days of the internet, it has fallen under control of ICANN, which in turn was bound by an agreement with the US Department of Commerce. As the internet grew bigger and more pervasive, intentional calls for severing the ties between ICANN and the US government grew stronger. Today, the US has ceded control over ICANN.

"ARM comes of age with a major PC design breakthrough this week. The Cambridge-based company will see a microprocessor based on one of its low power cores sitting side-by-side with an Intel Core Duo in a Dell laptop PC. The key to ARM's success is Dell's plan to run Linux as a second rapid boot operating system on its Windows latptop... The high-end laptop called the Latitude Z will use the ARM-based processor to run a second Linux based operating system which will allow the machine to boot up quickly for specific applications such as music and video playing. The PC runs Windows 7 on a 1.4GHz Intel Core Duo processor as its main CPU. Still this marks a significant design win for ARM which finds itself sitting side-by-side with its main processor rival in a big brand name PC."

Microsoft have released their free anti-virus and anti-malware software (codenamed 'Morro') to the public, under the name of 'Microsoft Security Essentials'.

The European Union has stated today that it is taking the "exploding" iPhone issues very, very seriously. EU consumer watchdog Meglena Kuneva has explained that if national authorities find out that manufacturing faults are the cause of the issue, the iPhone will face an EU-wide recall.

As you all undoubtedly know, the European Union and Microsoft are trying to work out some sort of a settlement regarding the Internet Explorer case. Microsoft made a very detailed proposal for a browser ballot screen earlier this year, and the EU was relatively satisfied. Now, various browser makers have told Reuters that they are not satisfied with Microsoft's proposal.