Techpinions

I wouldn't have posted what I did if I agreed with your assertion that there's nothing in common. I also disagree with your assertion that what Apple's doing with patents is 'antics', but I know what you are saying.

This whole patent mess is, as I was trying to imply, complicated. A lot of it is up for interpretation. As I understand it, a lot of people are focusing on two things supposedly from the Apple-Samsung trial result: the obviousness of pinch-to-zoom and the trade dress stuff.

Regarding pinch-to-zoom being 'obvious', Steve Wildstrom[1] covered this nicely two days ago—it wasn't asserted at the trial. Nilay Patel also pointed out[2] that Apple doesn't have an exclusive patent for all pinch-to-zoom implementations, just theirs. So, the patents (ignoring, for the moment, the trade dress patents) that Apple asserted are in question. Apparently, there are alternative implementations in Android, but for whatever reason, Samsung decided to implement something else that was ultimately found to infringe.

On the trade dress…as I understand it, we don't allow copyright on object shapes, nor can you trademark it, so to allow for distinctive object appearance the concept of trade dress patents was created. Agree or disagree with them, these exist. There are some fairly interesting tablet and phone designs out there, and Samsung, for at least a couple of versions of tablets and phones, fairly slavishly copied Apple's appearance. They deserved to be slapped for this. There's a…

Siri was developed by SRI International, basically as the commercialization of the CALO project [0]. It was initially developed as an app, and was even available in the store. The project was then spun-off into a company, and the developers were working on versions for other platforms. Apple then bought the company, making it exclusively an iOS product and integrating it into the OS.

The voice recognition technology was indeed based on Nuance technology [1]. Nuance was also a spin-off from SRI.

EDIT: This was all after ScanSoft purchased Nuance, which means it had both Nuance and Dragon technology at the time. However, due to Nuance's history with SRI, I would lean towards that being the more likely option, if they hadn't been integrated by that point.

(I worked at SRI during the Siri spin-off time period, and worked with one of the Siri developers on another project.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO

[1] http://techpinions.com/nuance-exec-on-iphone-4s-siri-and-the-future-of-speech/3307

Back in October 1944, Koenig had suggested a theoretical way of securing a telephone call by having the recipient of a call add noise to the signal and then subtract it afterward. Only Bob could subtract the noise, because only he knew what he had added in the first place. An eavesdropper, Eve, simply would not know how to modify the noise, because she wouldn’t have access to the noise that had been added to the phone conversation in the first place.

Since that's not terribly clear, here's the explanation: https://techpinions.com/an-old-mystery-solved-project-c-43-and-public-key-encryption/18205

Amen. Not just bad faith; ignorant, myopic and ahistorical.

> this sounds like a traditional government project problem -- susceptibility to corruption, vanity, hubris etc.

said the person on a web forum (the web comes from CERN, a gov project) over the internet (the internet comes from DARPA, a gov project) on a computer (ever heard of the ENIAC? a gov project)

Tech bros mouthing off off-topicly about the government is the most tedious and boring thing ever.

https://techpinions.com/its-not-just-the-internet-how-government-built-the-computer-industry/8104