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Ahmed Abdul-Azal (right), an Iraqi national policeman, pounds a new steel post into the ground for concertina wire around Checkpoint 34, an outpost on a major Iraqi highway known as Route Tampa, during reconstruction efforts Feb. 26 after the checkpoint was heavily damaged by a coordinated attack by terrorists two days before. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Chris McCann CAMP STRIKER -- A savage attack on an Iraqi National Police checkpoint on the Iraqi highway known as Route Tampa that left eight policemen dead and wounded several others on Feb. 23 left scars on buildings and Iraqis alike, but did...

Commentary -- At a recent news conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sought to impugn the character of the free/open source world by implying that it had no respect for the intellectual property rights of others. It's not just the enormous ignorance embodied by this duplicitous braggadocio that caught my eye, it's the fact that the claim is coming from a man associated with Microsoft, which is far and away the most notorious IP thief of all time. One thing should be obvious. It's difficult for an open source project to steal code. After all, access to the code is offered...

Brigham Young University has accused pharmaceutical giant Pfizer of cheating the school out of profits and credit for the development of Celebrex, a blockbuster anti-inflammatory drug that has earned the company billions of dollars. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City against Pfizer and several of its predecessor companies after years of unsuccessful negotiations, BYU said. The suit seeks unspecified actual and punitive damages, but notes Celebrex sales have exceeded $20 billion. It also seeks corrections in 75 patents in order to credit Professor Daniel L. Simmons for his discoveries. The suit alleges Simmons...

A Chinese entrepreneur has registered an image of French captain Zinedine Zidane headbutting Italian defender Marco Materazzi in last month's World Cup final as a trademark for clothing, shoes, hats and beer products, according to reports. Zhao Xiaokai hopes to sell the mark for US$125,000, reports Chinese news site Xinhua Online. The image is a silhouette, apparently in an attempt to avoid infringing Zidane's image rights. Zidane has fought to protect his image rights before. Last year he and four other soccer stars – David Beckham, Luis Figo, Raul and Ronaldo – joined their club, Real Madrid, in filing infringement...

Ancient islanders get a leg up Bruce Bower From San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the Paleoanthropology Society and Society for American Archaeology meeting Fossils of a humanlike species dubbed Homo floresiensis that lived on the Pacific island of Flores between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago recently grabbed headlines because scientists deduced that this creature stood no more than 1 meter tall and possessed a surprisingly small brain. Nonetheless, H. floresiensis packed considerable weight on its diminutive frame and possessed far stronger legs than people do today, says William L. Jungers of the State University of New York at Stony Brook....

China gives BlackBerry maker a raspberry NEW YORK - The BlackBerry e-mail device is coming to China in the next few months. By then, thousands of Chinese may already be checking their e-mail on the new "Redberry." The Redberry is not a new version of the BlackBerry that's been designed by Research in Motion Ltd. for the Chinese market. It's the name being used by two unaffiliated Chinese companies selling a BlackBerry-like service on a non-BlackBerry mobile device. And it's yet another example of how the Chinese market is still more like the Wild West than Western-style capitalism, regardless of...

Embedded in a variety of consumer products like these are computer processors that Patriot Scientific of Carlsbad says are based on proprietary technology By Bruce V. Bigelow STAFF WRITER March 24, 2006 Something weird happened last summer at Patriot Scientific Corp. The company made money. Since the technology developer was launched in San Diego in 1987, Patriot had always lost money. Its quarterly losses were as predictable as the daily commuter traffic tie-ups in Sorrento Valley. As a corporate ne'er do well, Patriot financed its operations for some 18 years by issuing millions of shares of stock, which usually traded...

One more upscale automaker is jumping into the Chinese auto market as Volvo Car Corp. will begin making cars in China this year. Volvo will build its S40 sedan at a plant owned by Changan Ford, a Ford joint venture in the southwestern city of Chongqing, officials said. Late to the Chinese party, Volvo said it was confident Chinese manufacturing operations would be profitable as early as next year. Volvo said it could reach its Chinese manufacturing target of 10,000 cars a year in 2007, and it was working with a number of Changan Ford’s local suppliers to meet the...

Neuros Technology International CEO Joe Born in his open letter to congressmen James Sensenbrenner Jr. and John Conyers on HR 4569, the Digital Transition Content Security Act (aka: Analog Hole Legislation): …we believe the proposed bill will not only do nothing to protect against piracy, it will actually reduce legitimate media sales, unnecessarily harm consumers, and have a chilling effect on innovators of new media technologies…Today, we make a next generation digital VCR of sorts that would effectively be outlawed if HR 4569 becomes law….This device is meant to make it easier for consumers to adapt content they have already...

Sony BMG has struck a deal with the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit over copy-restriction software it used in music CDs, according to a settlement document filed at a New York court Wednesday. The record label has agreed to compensate buyers of CDs that contained the XCP and MediaMax DRM programs and to provide software utilities to allow consumers to uninstall both types of software from their computer. The furor over Sony's DRM software began at the end of October when a U.S. programmer discovered that XCP software on a Sony music CD had installed copy-restriction software on his...

Will the real Brazil please stand up? Is Brazil a poor country that needs more foreign aid from the United States -- even involuntary aid? Or is it an increasingly rich and powerful country that can seize foreign markets for itself? Indeed, is it so powerful that that it doesn't need to play by the rules? One source not to look to for answers is the Brazilian government itself, as we shall see. To an outside observer, it's apparent that the Brazilians clearly want to have it all three ways: being needy when it suits them, being export-y as they...

GENEVA - Most Americans have probably never heard of the World Intellectual Property Organization, headquartered here in Switzerland. Intellectual property is intangible property, such as software or music. Its value is very real. According to a study by Leonard Nakamura, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the total value of intellectual property in the United States is more than $5 trillion. That's more than a third of the value of the U.S. stock markets. Protected only by copyrights and patents, it is relatively easy to steal or counterfeit. (snip) WIPO and other international bodies are meeting to...

Officials launching a week-long anti-piracy campaign across the nation got a shot in the arm from a Shanghai court yesterday: Two Americans were among four people found guilty of selling pirated DVDs on the Internet. Randolph Hobson Guthrie III, the prime culprit, was sentenced to 30 months' jail and fined 500,000 yuan (US$60,459). Three accomplices - Wu Dong, Cody Abram Thrush, and Wu Shibiao were all given jail terms ranging up to 15 months and fines of between 10,000 (US$1,209) and 30,000 yuan (US$3,628). The two Americans will be expelled from the country after serving their prison terms, the judge...

Never before in the history of telecommunications has a more important warning been needed for current and potential VoIP (computer phone) users who have joined, or will be joining, in the inevitable paradigm shift from telephone to VoIP. Warning! Warning! Warning! Beware of VoIP internet service providers that operate on industry standard codec and industry standard protocols because they are PUBLICLY OPEN and INTERPRETABLE! This also includes, but is not limited to, peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. In plain terms, this means, if you subscribe to, or considering subscribing to a VoIP internet solution provider who operates on these industry standards –...

SigmaTel, Inc. (NASDAQ:SGTL), the Austin, Texas-based market leader for portable MP3 player technologies, today officially filed a formal complaint with the International Trade Commission (ITC) against Actions Semiconductor, based in Zhuhai, Guangdong, China, seeking to halt the infringement of SigmaTel's intellectual property rights. SigmaTel asserts that Actions Semiconductor infringed multiple SigmaTel patents in the design of System-on-Chip controllers for the Portable Digital Music player market. Actions' products have recently begun shipping into the United States retail market as components of MP3 players. SigmaTel seeks to stop shipment of products into the U.S. that use Actions Semiconductor integrated circuits or "ICs."...

For those who can't get enough of New York, good news is on the way in the form of a global marketing quest to emblazon the Big Apple's trademarks on everything from earmuffs to bathroom accessories. The city's marketing agency issued an invitation yesterday for proposals to license the city's name on a wide array of goods — including souvenirs, adult's and children's clothing, home furnishings and replica vehicles. Companies were also offered the rights to some of the best-known logos in the world, including the NYPD, FDNY and Staten Island Ferry.

If Hollywood's pampered millionaires, their trial attorney cronies and some pandering politicians have their way, innocent third parties could be held legally liable for the criminal acts of others. Such is the intention of legislation pending in the U.S. Senate, S. 2650 the "Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004."This misguided legislation would hold manufacturers of computers, software, TiVO, MP3 players and other technologies criminally liable if their legal products were misused to reproduce copyrighted material. Under the legislation, the mere production of such technologies would be regarded as an "inducement" to copyright infringement.

There is no cause for paranoia, but most IT security professionals will agree, that using the internet has serious security and privacy deficits. # If your anonymizer doesn´t block or spoof cookies and you have visited a specific website before without an anonymizer, this site may still be able to identify you. # Companies offering anonymizing services are promising not to disclose their log files to anyone. But can you really trust them? Law enforcing agencies do have access to these logs, and in these days of terrorist threat it would be quite unrealistic to assume that secret service agencies...

I was on the road back to Baghdad on the 28th when the transfer of authority to the Iraqi interim government was announced. Since I was exhausted and starving from the long road, I was therefore more interested in gobbling up my lunch of tishreeb and rice than the ceremonies on tv at the bustling restaurant near Kut. I thought it was a wise decision to announce the event two days before it was planned so I wasn't much surprised, though some people argue that it spoiled the whole thing. Actually, it took the unguarded Arab media by complete surprise,...