Bipartisan group offers sane alternative to SOPA. Guess what Hollywood thinks

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, also known as E-PARASITE) has been roundly condemned by a wide range of tech companies, consumer groups, digital rights advocacy organizations, and members of Congress concerned about the havoc the bill could wreak on both the First Amendment and the US’s international standing. At the same time, however, there’s been recognition that SOPA’s goal — namely, preventing offshore groups from profiting from the sale of ill-gotten digital goods — is a valid one.

Rep Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) have therefore teamed up to sponsor the Online Protection and ENforcement of Digital Trade Act, or OPEN. Like SOPA, OPEN is meant to combat digital piracy and widescale distribution by limiting the ability of said pirates to profit from their actions. Unlike SOPA, it treats such violations as trade disputes rather than criminal actions.

The new bill would require rightsholders to submit a complaint to the International Trade Commission and limits the type and nature of relief provided. While payment providers would still be required to cut off accounts and US ad services could no longer do business with the company, search engines would not be required to de-list content and no site blocks would be enacted.

Rightsholders would also lose the ability to unilaterally begin actions against companies without warning or prior notification and would be required to actually make a case and demonstrate that the site in question was infringing on their property. The MPAA hates it. Michael O’Leary, VP of Global Policy and External Affairs for the MPAA, blasted the legislation in a recent blog post. ” it [the legislation]… allows companies profiting from online piracy to advocate for foreign rogue websites against rightful American copyright holders. It even allows notification to some of these companies if they want to help advocate for rogue websites.”

That’s called filing an amicus, or “friend of the court” brief; it’s fairly common in cases and investigations. Who are these companies advocating for rogue websites? That’s Google. According to Lamar Smith, one of the chief sponsors and advocates of SOPA, Google’s position against the bill is purely self-serving. Writing in the National Review last week, Smith stated: ”Google recently paid a half billion dollars to settle a criminal case because of the search-engine giant’s active promotion of rogue foreign pharmacies that sold counterfeit and illegal drugs to U.S. patients.”

According to O’Leary, the bill’s other major problems are that the ITC is a lousy forum for handling such issues (it takes too  long and is supposedly too friendly with technology companies) and it doesn’t require search engines to censor results for allegedly infringing sites.

It’s hard to see how the two sides of this issue can come to an agreement. The MPAA dislikes OPEN because it doesn’t give the organization the extra-judicial authority to steamroll any site it pleases, and unilaterally destroy its access to income, search traffic, and advertising without the need for an investigation. Those are precisely the reasons why SOPA in its current form is unpalatable — and there’s precious little that can be done to fix it.

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HP announces it’s open-sourcing webOS

There has been an interesting turn of events today in the ongoing webOS saga. Newly installed HP CEO Meg Whitman announced via press release that her company had made the decision to make the mobile operating system open source, essentially giving the code away for anyone to work on.

Like a twist in a bad daytime soap, no one saw this coming. The move can be taken as the ultimate altruistic action from an executive that wants to make a splash, or as indication that HP didn’t know what else to do with it. The fact is, the reason behind the move is a little bit of both.

It’s no secret that HP has been in trouble for some time. The recent firing of Leo Apotheker was partly because of the fact that the world’s largest computer manufacturer had been hemorrhaging money due to its acquisition of Palm, and the failed efforts to sell hardware-based on webOS. The TouchPad was a colossal failure resulting in the recent fire sales of the tablet, as well as the fact that none of the phones being offered by HP were moving very well. This resulted in four straight quarters of HP downgrading its profit outlooks, as well as losing almost 40% of its stock value. Add to that the announcement that HP was going to cease production of computers and you get a lot of market confusion and consumer dissatisfaction.

Enter Meg Whitman, striding into the path of the whirlwind to assess the damage done to the company she took over. If you think that her first move was not to shop webOS around to potential buyers, you are deluding yourself. If you are on a sinking boat, and there is dead weight on the deck, that’s the first thing going overboard. Whitman and the board most assuredly took steps to evaluate the worth of the defunct division, then looked to potential suitors. Obviously there were no takers and with HP’s inability — or unwillingness — to create a new piece of hardware to prop up the investment made in the OS there weren’t many other options. This is where Whitman saw her opportunity to kill several birds with one stone.

Releasing the code to the developer community is the best move HP could have made. The company garners good will from consumers when they hear that a corporation is just giving something away, and HP gains a user base of experienced developers that are going to crowd source webOS into what it should have been in the first place. This move is, in some ways, a classic win-win. That noted, the press release had no mention of any webOS-based hardware efforts by HP, though this announcement means that other manufacturers would be open to working with it.

It will be interesting to see where webOS goes from here, will it compete with the likes of Android and iOS? Not likely, but it could make a run. This will, at least, ensure that webOS lives on.

Read more at HP

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How to read a circuit schematic

The basis of almost everything we discuss here on ExtremeTech is the transistor — but just above that is a topic that we usually skirt around because no one, even hardcore nerds, really know anything about it. We’re alluding to circuit schematics, of course; diagrammatic flow charts that describe the exact behavior of a computer chip, printed circuit board, or even your own home-made DIY electronics project.

Now, don’t worry, we’re not going to launch into a lesson that would be better suited to your second year of university — instead, we’re going to make you watch an excellent video made by Collin Cunningham of Make (embedded below). It’s just six minutes long, and by the time you’re finished you should know exactly what those triangular shapes (logic gates), zigzags (resistors), horizontal equals (capacitor), and various other symbols mean. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that you could grab a soldering iron, sandwich board, and leap right into your first DIY project — but it’s definitely a first good step.

Even cooler, with Collin’s video under your belt, you can now take a look at the schematic for the Intel 4004 (pictured below the video) — the world’s first single-chip CPU — and (very roughly) work out what’s going on.

Retina iPad 3 and Galaxy Tab 11.6 in February? Moore humbly disagrees

After vanquishing the first round of rumorsthat the iPad 3 would launch with a Retina-quality 2560×1600 300 PPI display, the next wave of rumors from unnamed sources and people-familiar-with-the-matter has has started to roll in — and this time it involves the iPad 3 and a high-res Samsung Galaxy Tab and some scheduled release dates.

The iPad 3 is coming in February, according to a Citi analyst, and it will have a 2,048×1,536 264 PPI screen — twice the resolution (but four times the pixels) of the iPad 2. More significantly, a trusted source has told BGR that Samsung is also readying a tablet for February; a monstrous 11.6-inch 2560×1600 tablet, probably featuring a cousin of the Samsung PenTile display that we covered back in May. The same source also said that the Galaxy Tab 11.6 would not “feel that much bigger,” and feature a 2GHz SoC — probably Samsung’s recently-announced Cortex-A15 Exynos 5250.

As to the feasibility of these rumors… Well, let’s try our best to understand the technical limitations first. To push that many pixels, the iPad 3 would probably need a new GPU, and thus a new SoC — but the A6 isn’t likely to arrive until mid-2012. Likewise, the Exynos that will power the Galaxy Tab 11.6 isn’t scheduled to arrive until mid-to-late 2012. So far, not so good.

Then we have the displays: LG and Samsung, who provide displays for the iPad 3, have stated that 2048×1536 is the highest res that they cancurrently squeeze into 10.1 inches, and even then the yields are low. It’s possible that Samsung has found a way to increase yields at the larger 11.6-inch size, but the timeline — with just two or three months to the rumored launch — seems impossibly tight. Finally, Sharp might have some secret sauce up its sleeve, but again we probably would’ve heard about it by now.

At this point, then, it seems very unlikely that we’ll see Retina- or approaching-Retina-quality tablets before the middle of next year. If Apple does launch a tablet in February, it is far more likely that we’ll see some kind of iPad 2S, much in the same way that Apple put off launching the iPhone 5. Samsung, however, with its crazy efforts to actually win some of the tablet market share, is obviously a much wilder cannon than Apple. Preempting the boys in Cupertino with a monster fondleslab could be exactly what the Koreans have in mind.

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Facial recognition is insecure, slow, and a wasted effort… for now

About 10 years ago, I tried out a program for Windows XP that let me login and unlock the computer using my face. My mind was summarily blown, but my pragmatic, nerdy forebrain quickly regained control. This was back when webcams had VGA (640×480) resolution or less, and state of the art processors were 1.4GHz AMD Athlons. How on earth was this program detecting and accurately identifying my face in just a few seconds?

It wasn’t, of course: It was simply analyzing a few key points on my face and making an educated guess. This was borne out by the fact that my sister, who unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) has a very similarly-shaped face to me, could unlock my computer. On two occasions my mother unlocked my computer with a printed photo of my ugly mug to find my stash of furry fandom porn. I never did find out why she unlocked it a second time, mind you. But false positives were just the beginning! There were false negatives, too — the times when my room was too dark, my camera lens too smudged or out of focus, or my makeup too thick, to make an identification.

The sad thing is, despite the intervening decade, facial recognition systems are still just as awful. The resolution of built-in webcams has improved, but it’s still just as easy to fool a system by holding up a photograph (or by wearing a prosthetic latex mask, if you prefer). In the case of Facebook and Google’s automatic face-recognition of uploaded photos, the increase in digital camera resolution has helped a lot, too, but the process itself takes an unfeasibly long time. With Ice Cream Sandwich we now even have enough processing power to squeeze facial recognition into a mobile device, but it’s slow — and don’t even try using it if you’re wearing a hat or happen to be in a poorly-lit area (which describes about 90% of the cases where you’d want to unlock your phone with your face).

The biggest deal breaker, though, is security. There is absolutely no way that facial recognition can ever be used as a biometric authenticator. You can get very close to 100% accuracy with supercomputers and high-resolution images, but network administrators need 100% certainty — and heck, such a system can still be bypassed by holding up a photo. On a smartphone, the problem is even worse: A Galaxy Nexus (or other ICS device) has no where near the resolution or processing power to accurately identify a face, and yet Google has somehow seen fit to include it. Do you know how many high-powered executives, politicians, and researchers have access to sensitive files and email through their smartphones? How much do you want to bet that some of them uses Face Unlock instead of the far-more-secure PIN Unlock method?

Another worrying trend is the facialification of social services. Facebook has been tagging the faces of your friends for a while, and now Google+ offers Find My Face. There are services like Face.com that provide an API for facial recognition, allowing third parties to police uploaded images (“is that a face or a breast?”) or websites that scour the internet for a celebrity (or the target of your creepy, stalkerish crush). All three services pose security and privacy concerns. You probably haven’t thought about this, but how do you think Google and Facebook identify faces? By storing the (very exact) details and dimensions of your face. How long will it be before that data is used for Minority Reportesque advertising?

Ultimately, though, security concerns will kowtow to coolness. Logging into a system using your face or having a computer pick a friend’s face out of a crowd is so sci-fi awesome that facial recognition is here to stay. On the positive side, our love for non-password-based logins and the proliferation of digital cameras in laptops and smartphones mean that we’re in great shape for retina and iris scanning, both of which are a lot more rugged than facial recognition. Whatever happened to fingerprint scanners on laptops, too? They would be perfect on the backside of smartphones.

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They’re kidding, right? Compact Flash group launches XQD, another flash card format

“Dear Santa, I’ve been hoping for new memory cards for Christmas. Can you make them incompatible with all my other cards, only faster, and with a random-letter-generator kind of name, say XQD?” If anyone wrote that letter, please raise your hand. There’s a new memory card format coming in 2012 that has lots of users scratching their hands and wondering, “Don’t we have enough card types already? Can’t we make CF faster or SD more rugged, or something?” The parentCompact Flash Association (CFA) says XQD has the speed and ruggedness pro photographers and videographers need to deal with 20-megapixel still cameras and full-HD video cameras. They imply it’s nothing for most users to get concerned about; their present and future may remain SD.

So here’s the CFA company line: CompactFlash, or CF, is an aging standard based on the even-more-aging PCMCIA (PC Card) standard. XQD cards are built around the faster PCI Express interface, which has a maximum transfer rate of 2.5Gbps, or real-world speeds of 125MB/sec to start and potentially 250MB/sec, which translates to 15 to 30 20-megapixel images per second. XQD is 25% smaller than a CF Card (see footprint comparison in the illustration above) although slightly thicker. An SD Card is 33% smaller than XQD. XQD will be more rugged than a CF Card, CFA says, which means way more rugged than SD Cards. XQD would be ideal for the next generation of high-end cameras beyond the $6,800 Canon 1D-X shown above that will have dual CF slots. XQD will be more like a miniature solid state drive (SSD) than just a downsized, speeded-up CF card, CFA says.

The landscape is littered with flash card standards that didn’t work. Example: the paper-thin, easily snapped SmartMedia Card. Example: the proprietary Sony Memory Stick, which was Sony’s way of showing that the industry leader in all things digital (in 1998) didn’t need no stinking industry standards. Hubris Stick was more like it. Role players Olympus and Fujifilm tried the same with xD cards and after eight years gave up and adopted SD Card. Despite both looking like smiley faces, xD is no relation to XQD, incidentally.

Supporters of existing cards also believe there’s always room for speed enhancements under existing specs such as CF. Memory companies have been hot-rodding them for almost as long as the cards have been out. (See this 2003 Geek.com story about ultrafast CF and SD cards.) Now, there’s a high-speed offshoot of CF called the CFast Card, based on the Serial ATA (SATA) interface. “These cards have begun to be used in the industrial market,” the association says, but “camera makers have not started supporting CFast cards.” With uncertainty about how soon XQD cards will come to market, that could well be never. The CompactFlash Association members will show XQD cards at a February trade show (CP+) in Japan and licensing will begin next year, they say. Hopefully the specs will include waterproof (or at least strongly water-resistant) and device-connector pins that can’t be damaged. Sometimes, the pins in your $1,000 DSLR can bend to protect a wrongly inserted $50 CF Card.

While breathtaking leaps are the hallmark of the tech industry — the iPod rather than a portable CD with 3.5-inch discs, digital not analog high-definition TV, Google not MSN or AOL broadband — there have also been spectacular failures of revolutionary tech. Just six years into the Windows PC business, IBM one-upped the competition with the MicroChannel bus architecture. It was technically better by far than the existing AT connector bus for expansion cards, but Compaq and itty-bitty upstart Dell tweaked existing tech and left IBM in the rear view mirror.

Best guess: There may be room for XQD two digital camera generations and three PCs down the road. Like USB or Bluetooth, the time from first product to critical mass may be half a decade. In other words, nothing to worry about for a couple years and by the time it arrives, your current computer’s 27-in-1 flash card bay will have XQD.

Read more at PC Mag, or the fantastically concise CompactFlash Association press release

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The Windows 8 tablet train wreck

Microsoft is on a knife edge: It is developing a version of Windows that could ensure its continued success in the computer market — or it could completely cannibalize Microsoft’s profits and lead to the slow, painful, obsolescent death.

Windows 8, when you cut to the chase, is a tablet-oriented, touch-first skin on top of Windows 7. If you take into account the actual software stack and runtime, callingMetro a “skin” isn’t accurate at all, but as far as consumers and companies are concerned, that’s exactly what it is. There are two problems with this: First, if you already use Windows 7 — and hundreds of millions do — there is little reason to upgrade to Windows 8, much in the same way that everyone eschewed Vista and stuck with XP. Second, if everyone goes out and buys a Windows 8 tablet, Microsoft would collapse in a frothing fit of unprofitability.

You see, Windows 8 tablets, especially ARM variants, will be used almost exclusively in Metro mode — or, more accurately, tablet mode. At this point, Windows 8 ceases to be a “PC” operating system in the conventional sense of the word and enters a market that is dominated by Apple and Android and apps that cost between one and 10 dollars. On the desktop, Microsoft charges anywhere between $30 (OEMs) and $125 (retail box) for a Windows license, with the average being around $60. Android, by comparison, is free, and effectively so is iOS. A Microsoft Office license is even more costly, with an average price in the hundreds of dollars region. Mobile word processing apps like the iWork suite or Documents To Go, by comparison, cost just a few dollars.

Here’s the tricky bit: Microsoft has free or cheap alternatives to Windows and Office in the form of Windows Phone 7, Office Mobile, and Office Web Apps. For around $15, OEMs can license an operating system that has all of the major mobile computing components and is a direct analog of the cross-platform iOS — but it can only be used on smartphones. To put this into perspective, though, remember that Microsoft gets around $15 per smartphone, or between $30 and $300 per desktop or laptop. If we look at Microsoft’s 2011 profits of $23 billion, 57% came from its Windows division (Desktop & Server) and 65% from Business (Office) (The totals come to 122% because of internal adjustments, and because Bing currently loses more than a billion dollars per year.) Windows Phone 7 and Xbox are flecks of crud on Ballmer’s heel in comparison.

Microsoft, then, simply can’t afford to put Windows Phone 7 on its tablet “PCs.” If, during the next upgrade cycle, hundreds of millions of people bought WP7 tablets instead of Windows 8 tablets, Microsoft would lose billions of dollars and eventually go out of business. Microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place: It needs to be a serious competitor in the tablet market, but it simply can’t compete with Apple and Android in terms of cost, a problem that is exacerbated by Apple’s profits deriving from hardware rather than software. Remember the HP TouchPad? It was fatter, slower, and heavier than the iPad — but cost more. Windows 8 tablets, even if Microsoft cuts the margins on its cash cow franchises, cannot compete with iOS or Android on price — it’s as simple as that.

Fortunately, at least if you’re a Microsoft fan, there is a way out of this razor-sharp dichotomy. One method is for Microsoft to stick to its guns and call these Windows 8 tablets — whether they’re x86 or ARM — PCs. The inexorable cost difference between Windows 8 tablets and the competition will be ameliorated by the sheer awesomeness of being able to do anything with a portable slate. This is the route that Microsoft is currently taking, and given Ballmer’s painstakingly conservative efforts to milk Office and Windows for as long as possible it’s really the only feasible path.

There’s another option, though; one that would scare MS shareholders and the industry itself into a shocked stupor. Microsoft could buy out Nokia and create a beautiful Windows Phone 7 tablet. With the hardware and software both in-house, MS could compete with Apple on cost and production values. Furthermore, Microsoft could give up on the Metrofied Start screen and focus on making Windows 8 a first-class desktop-and-laptop enterprise-oriented OS. There would be a dip in Windows and Office licenses as consumers shift from PCs to their WP7 tablets, but Microsoft could mitigate that by offering more subscriber services. Think of Xbox Live and Xbox TV, but on your WP7 tablet. Instead of paying $300 for an Office license, think of paying $5 per month for oodles of SkyDrive space and access to both offline and online Office suites.

After almost 30 years of thundering ahead in the same direction, it would take cajones the size of cantaloupes to rock the Windows revenue boat — but at the same time, going full steam ahead and squeakily stipulating that Windows 8 tablets are PCs dammit! is a risky ploy as well. After all, if there has ever been a time when the definition — and fate — of PC s in question, it is now.

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Why OEMs need months to deliver Android updates to your phone

For Android OEMs, getting a new version of the operating system onto devices can be a multi-layered endeavor fraught with peril. It’s not as easy as picking up the code from Google one afternoon, and pushing updates out the next. There is a significant amount of software development, testing, and certification to go through. Both Sony Ericsson and Motorola have released some details on the process, giving us a look at how Android gets from Google, to OEMs, to carriers, and ultimately to you.

The code drops

The whole process starts when Google drops the open source code into the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository. This usually happens around the time that the new Google experience device (that’s the Galaxy Nexus this time) is released. OEMs have to take that code, and integrate it with the in-house code trees to begin work. The only exception to this is the hardware partner for the official Google experience device, which gets the code early and works closely with Google. For the last two years, that was Samsung, and before that it was HTC.

The first order of business according to both companies is to start optimizing the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). This is the software layer in Android that gives the software access to device hardware. In the case of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Google used TI OMAP as the template for the operating system so many manufacturers have to replace the HAL.

Sony Ericsson, and indeed most OEMs, rely on a fairly consistent hardware design across a range of products. Chips are usually sourced from the same makers, and the internals reuse many smaller parts. Sony Ericsson uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors in phones, so a new HAL is required. At least its consistent design saves some time and will allow the company to update all 2011 phones.

Motorola is currently straddling both Tegra and OMAP-based products, so its task could be more complicated. The newer OMAP devices like the Droid Razr and Bionic could get preferential treatment because of easier development. In fact, Motorola’s OMAP devices are the only products it has confirmed will get Android 4.0. Users of the Photon 4G or Droid X2 could have a longer wait on their hands.

All OEMs also have to contend with small differences in various other hardware modules like audio, WiFi, and Bluetooth. The HAL will need changes on a per-device basis taking into account different form factors, screen sizes, and specs, too.

OEMs tweak and test

The next order of business is a bit more controversial: OEMs start changing Android to suit the needs of carriers and other partners. Patches, custom interfaces, and other miscellaneous changes are made, and the resulting software image is tested. Sony Ericsson went to great pains to point out that many of the internal patches it develops are useful for the Android platform in general, and it contributes those back to the AOSP.

All OEMs have to do extensive internal testing after making changes to the Android platform. A huge concern on a multitude of devices is battery life, and this is the phase to test that. Quite a few of the changes made to localization and features have the potential to turn out buggy and damage power efficiency. The carriers of course want to do network testing, which can occasionally root out still more bugs.

After what is ostensibly the final code has been internally tested, it sometimes has to be certified by regulatory agencies. The device will of course have been certified by regulators in various nations around the world prior to the original release, but sometimes new inspections are required. Any time software changes the function of a wireless chip, for example the Bluetooth stack in Android 4.0, that component needs to be re-certified, adding additional delays. Compliance with hardware standards may also need verification.

The rollout

The act of rolling the update out will vary greatly depending on the device and the carrier branding, if any. Motorola prefers to use a small group of testers to sweep for bugs one more time, then send the update to a group of a few thousand regular users. This is called a “soak test.” The manufacturer probably has dozens of test devices, but there is no way it can test every possible combination of software and settings. More than a few updates have been pulled back after a disastrous soak test. If all goes as planned, the update is released, and everyone can rejoice.

The entire process is a much more tangled web than we would have expected, and remember that OEMs have to do this for every device that gets updated. Sticking to a single hardware platform like Sony Ericsson or HTC has will be of help in getting all devices up to date. Motorola might leave some phones from the first half of 2011 behind for this reason.

Trying to get official word on the fate of one device or another in respect to updates can be nearly impossible, and this is why. The process is long and complicated. OEMs simply don’t want to say the wrong thing, and have to backtrack later. One component that is found to be non-compliant during testing can set things back dramatically.

These new details, especially Sony Ericsson’s forthrightness, help explain why the process takes so long. Hardware differences among different OEMs, and even different devices made by the same OEM, can require unique software builds. Certifying an upgrade takes time as well; apparently longer than actually building the software does. Add to that the lengthy carrier testing phase, and its no surprise that custom ROM makers can get updates out faster. They get to skip the more tedious bits.

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IBM Watson to battle patent trolls

IBM’s Watson is made of many parts: speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining. All of these factors were perfectly combined to beat Ken Jennings in Jeopardy, and now each of these components are slowly finding their way into other applications. Health plan company WellPoint, for example, is using Watson to investigate patient records to improve diagnosis, and in a self-referential,possibly universe-destroying twist, IBM itself is using Watson to help sell Watson (and other IBM products) to other companies. Now, using Watson’s data mining and natural language talents, IBM has created the Strategic IP Insight Platform, or SIIP, a tool that will revolutionize medicine — and perhaps patent trolling, too.

SIIP is tasked with scanning millions of pharmaceutical patents and biomedical journals to discover, analyze, and record any info pertaining to drug discovery. SIIP looks for the names of chemical compounds, related diagrams, the company and scientist who invented and works with the compounds, and any related words. So far, IBM has extracted 2.5 million chemical compounds from 4.7 million patents and 11 million journals between 1976 and 2000. From this vast pool of information, IBM applies analytics to create a truly terrifying database that can improve R&D productivity, secure competitive intelligence that other companies might not have, identify potential acquisition targets or collaborators, and more.

In the short term, though, IBM has donated its database of 2.5 million compounds to the “open chemistry” National Institutes of Health. This information will be doubly useful because many of the compounds come from older patents that have expired, meaning science institutes around the world now have unprecedented access to data that was previously very hard (or expensive) to obtain. There’s a video describing SIIP and IBM’s contribution to the NIH at the end of the story.

But why stop there? What if the next step is training a cousin of IBM Watson to parse every kind of patent for useful information?

Patents, in theory, are all about sharing novel ideas and discoveries in exchange for protection. It’s that utopian ideal of standing on the shoulders of giants; an enterprising individual should be able to build a company based on the work of his forebears, and then create or discover his own novel invention to perpetuate the cycle. In reality, that’s impossible because of the time, money, and effort required to pore through thousands or millions of patents and journals. Watson could change all that.

Then there’s battling the patent trolls. SIIP is almost entirely about analyzing the state of play and producing actionable analytics. If a malevolent patent troll targets your company, SIIP could help you find prior art, or perhaps secure a protective licensing deal with an IP behemoth like IBM. On the flip side, though, this powerful weapon could be used for the forces of evil: SIIP could also help patent trolls find companies that are weak enough to be forced into a lawsuit or licensing agreement.

Either way, with the inexorable march of big data and the seemingly never ending slew of frivolous patents, software or otherwise, it really was about time that someone attempted to make sense of the intellectual property morass. With almost 6,000 patents filed in 2010, some 25% more than the nearest competition (Samsung), and almost 50,000 patents in total — the most of any company in the world — who better to tackle the problem than Big Blue?

Read more about SIIP

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Sick of smudges on your screen? Get a candle

Who would have guessed that the solution to one of the biggest problems for a technophile would be simple candle soot? It may seem implausible, but researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have indeed proven that the carbon residue released when burning a candle can be used to create a coating that is both oil and water resistant. Simply put, by making the screens on your mobile devices dirty with soot, you can keep them from smudged with fingerprints. Of course the process to make this happen is much more scientific then slapping a pile of soot on your device, so please don’t be rushing for your fireplace.

While the hurdle of liquid resistance in electronic screens is nothing new, no one has come up with a practical solution until now. A team from MIT has come the closest with an expensive form of nanolithographics that never gained footing because of the complexity and cost associated with it. By using a candle, the German research team has cleared said hurdle, with a caveat which we will cover later. The process they discovered is deceptively simple: By using the carbon residue from a lit candle, the team was able to coat a glass slide with black soot. While this substance is relatively sticky in itself, it can easily be washed off with a bit of elbow grease. The researchers decided to give the soot a coating of silica to protect it since the chemical makeup of the soot was not what they were after, but the way it created a rough surface on the glass at microscopic levels. From that point, the team baked the slide in an oven at 600C (1112F) which served to make the soot transparent. The result was a thin, cheap, clear coating that repelled both oil and water molecules while leaving the screen clean and dry, or “superamphiphobic” in scientific terms.

Pictured above is a 5-micrometer drop of solvent that has been dropped on this superamphiphobic surface. If you look closely you can see that it actually bounces off the treated area rather than breaking and spreading. Because of the rough surface created by the coated soot, the surface tension of the liquid is not broken allowing it to stay in droplet form. Unfortunately, though, as we mentioned, there is a caveat: The coating right now is very fragile — it can simply be scratched off a treated surface with a sharp object, rendering the whole process useless. Imagine putting a treated phone into the same pocket as a set of keys…

The Max Planck team will surely come up with a way to perfect their discovery, however, as there is simply too much money to be made with this breakthrough. It seems that putting another sealant on top of their current coating may do the trick.

The other applications for the soot coating are wide and varied. Imagine having a vehicle that needs no windshield wipers because the glass actually repels water. How about medical equipment thatcuts down on the chance of infection because their surfaces don’t allow germs to settle on them? This is a technology that we will definitely see in the future because of the availability of cheap commercial soot particles. Once the process has been perfected to where it can’t be scratched off, it will be the new standard much like Gorilla Glass has become.

Read more at Technology Review

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