Editorials

The wonderful topic of “kill switches” in smart phones has arisen again with three major cities claiming a directly connection between iPhone theft and the addition of a kill switch into Apple devices. Now the news is pushing stories with titles claiming a 50% reduction in “smart phone” theft. These claims are simply not true. The first thing to note is that Apple is not the only company with a smart phone and the second is that there was already a reduction in theft of Apple device prior to the lunch of the iPhone 6. The demand and allure of the iPhone 5 line was not really enough to get a thief’s hear racing.

Valve has decided to remove the game Hatred from their project green light program and the decision has been met by strong comments for and against the move (which has led to them putting it back). The game is, shall we say, interesting in that it puts the player in the role of someone that is planning to go out and kill a large number of innocent people. The trailer shows a number of disturbing images (in our opinion) including a scene of the main character putting a gun in someone’s mouth and pulling the trigger. From most aspects the game is not good for anything other than just senseless violence, but then again there are many other games in genre that follow the same story line and they are still available.

It was only a couple of days that the internet broke open with the news that The Pirate Bay was offline and that their offices had been raided by police. It looked like the end of the world for the file sharing community and a major win for the copyright gang. However, as it turns out, neither of these is likely to be even remotely close to the truth. Although The Pirate Bay has become synonymous with copyright infringement that was not really the intent of the site nor is pulling TBP down going to have any real impact on piracy and copyright infringement. This, like many other very public takedowns will end up being little more than a footnote in the ongoing war between the copyright cartels and… well everyone else.

The US patent system is broken. There is not really much more to say about that it is and has been broken for many years and probably will continue to be broken for many years to come. Now why am I bringing this up? Well in looking over the way patents are filed, processed, and approved you will find that there are a large number of patents that are essentially the same thing just with a little twist. This type of patent allows for someone to put a legal hold on a very broad concept and then comeback and sue someone at a later date. Over the last few years we have watched a number of companies work the system with this type of patent and worse.