SOPA’s dead: What to watch out for next?

The WTO authorized Antigua to suspend U.S. copyrights: Will there be a new Pirate island in the Caribbean?

The World Trade organization (WTO) today authorized Antigua to suspend U.S. copyrights, which means they can move forward with plan to start a download portal offering movies, music and software without paying royalties to the American companies that own them.

The Quirky OXO spat worth a read if you’re into IP …

Quirky accuses OXO of copying one their designs: A dustpan with spikes to comb off the fluff which sticks to the brush.

According to LiveStrong what would you expect to find in American panties?

Velveeta, “that gooey product has a permanent home in many American panties” claims an article on LiveStrong! Really?

White House Petition: Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz …

Likely more symbolic than to have the outcome it pleads for I signed the White House petition to “Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz.”

If you would like to lean a little into the pain of Aaron’s persecution The New York Times article Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26, Apparently a Suicide and Lawrence Lessig’s blog Prosecutor as bully are good places to start.

Sign the White House petition here.

Links: TechDirt’s Carmen Ortiz Releases Totally Bogus Statement Concerning The Aaron Swartz Prosecution

Is there really a US Patent on 3D Printing?

Some people regard ex Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, now with Intellectual Ventures, as a patent troll who is trying to corner the market on 3D printing.

How to get Google maps back onto your upgraded iPhone …

You lose Google’s maps when upgrading from iOS 5 to iOS 6, or when buying the new iPhone 5. Some say that Apple’s map solution is immature and ask “How can I restore Google maps to my iPhone?”

Here’s how: As a web app! Follow these simple instructions …

Jack Daniel’s lawyers: The most remarkably polite cease-and-desist order you could hope to receive …

When an author used cover art that the good folk at Jack Daniel thought diluted their brand, what did they do? Like any other lawyer would, they wrote out a cease-and-desist demand. But unlike any other such order I’ve ever read, this one is remarkably respectful, compassionate and offers the author compensation to effect the requested changes … really!

DRM: Defective by design …

Stop SOPA and PIPA Now!

How to embed a Flickr photo into your hosted WordPress blog …

I recently googled for a simple way to use a Flickr image in a WordPress post – and couldn’t find one. Flicker provides the code to your own photos, not to other people’s images (from an option in All Sizes). Some solutions relied on plugins, others on bookmarked applets. I just wanted to know how to drop in the appropriate <img src="http://flickr.com/photo.jpg"> tag. Here’s how to do exactly that …

Apple’s dark side emerging: iPhone patent will allow third parties to turn OFF your camera!

What the hell is Apple thinking? New Apple patent US20110128384 will allow 3rd parties to disable your camera …

Go the F**k to Sleep: How an act of viral piracy put a book at the top of Amazon’s Bestsellers in Books …

Viral piracy has pre-orders of Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés‘ book Go the F**k to Sleep at first place on Amazon’s Bestsellers in Book.

University of Cambridge slaps down UK banks for trying to censor a thesis that points out active PIN vulnerabilities they’d rather not deal with

Rather than fix a well know PIN vulnerability in verifying card transactions UK banks would rather keep the problem under wraps — to the extent of asking Cambridge university to censor a thesis one of its computer students had published on the subject. The university’s response to the banks is — spot on!

“… you seem to think that we might censor a student’s thesis, which is lawful and already in the public domain, simply because a powerful interest finds it inconvenient. This shows a deep misconception of what universities are and how we work … censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values … Accordingly I have authorised the thesis to be issued as a Computer Laboratory Technical Report. This will make it easier for people to find and to cite, and will ensure that its presence on our web site is permanent …”

For your reading pleasure, the university’s full response can be found here

What’s in a brand name? Depends how you look at it …

Microsoft has been spectacularly successful at claiming simple words that aught not be trade marked. Windows, Office, Project, Exchange, Outlook, Entourage, Word, Access, Excel and Money come to mind. But they’ve been equally unfortunate at making up others like WinCE for Windows Compact Edition (officially Windows Embedded Compact) for hand held computers — it didn’t work well and, for many users, lived up to its initials.

Perhaps worst of all trade marks was Zune, Microsoft’s failed competitor to Apple’s iPod, when seen from the other side of the glass, assisted by a graphic hinting at the sphincter, you might understand why the product got such a bum deal … especially when one of the few poop pop colours it came in was brown!

UPDATE 1/11/2011: Am I the only one wondering what Verizon was thinking when they introduced their 4G wireless service with the letters LTE? It stands for Long Term Evolution, but most will associate it with “lite” as in a light weight version. Really? Well … okay, by all accounts it’s not quiet up to the 4G spec anyway.