From the BBC

The world's biggest mobile phone maker, Nokia, has filed a lawsuit against Apple claiming the iPad 3G and iPhone infringe five of its patents.

Nokia claims the infringements involve technology used to enhance speech and data transmission and antenna innovations for compact devices.

This is the latest salvo in a long-running legal battle between the two companies.

Nokia and Apple are embroiled in another dispute concerning the iPhone.

"We've taken this step to protect the results of our pioneering development and to put an end to continued unlawful use of Nokia's innovation," said Paul Melin, general manager of patent licensing at Nokia.

In a statement, the company said that during the past two decades Nokia has invested about $51bn (£34bn) in research and development and has rounded up 11,000 patents.

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The co-creator of Flash media software has said it has a future, despite Apple's attempts to kill it off.

The video and animation software owned by Adobe has been heavily criticised by Apple boss Steve Jobs.

Jonathan Gay told BBC News that Flash "will continue to be the dominant tool" for media on the internet.

He also said he thinks iPhone users will see "support for Flash...sometime in the next few years".

Mr Gay, who is no longer involved with developing the video and animation software, helped to create the FutureSplash software that later became Flash, and describes himself as its "architect".

Apple's iPods and iPhones have proved hugely popular, and few doubt the technologies have helped to promote innovation in smartphones and portable music players.

But Apple founder Steve Jobs's decision to challenge Flash, which is used to help distribute a vast array of media across the internet, has come under close scrutiny.

IBM has been left with egg on its face after it distributed virus-laden USB keys to attendees at Australia's biggest computer security conference.

Delegates of the AusCERT conference, held over the past week at the Royal Pines Resort on the Gold Coast, were told about the malware problem in a warning email this afternoon by IBM Australia chief technologist Glenn Wightwick.

The incident is ironic because conference attendees include the who's who of the computer security world and IBM was there to show off its security credentials.

Some attendees may have thought they were experiencing dejavu as Telstra was left red-faced at the 2008 AusCERT conference for also distributing malware-infected USB drives.

"At the AusCERT conference this week, you may have collected a complimentary USB key from the IBM booth," Wightwick wrote.

"Unfortunately we have discovered that some of these USB keys contained malware and we suspect that all USB keys may be affected."

By MIGUEL HELFT and ASHLEE VANCE

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, overtook Microsoft, the computer software giant, on Wednesday to become the world’s most valuable technology company.

In intraday trading shortly after 2:30 p.m., Apple shares rose 1.8 percent, which gave the company a value of $227.1 billion. Shares of Microsoft declined about 1 percent, giving the company a market capitalization of $226.3 billion.

Apple retained the spot at the close, even as both shares declined. Microsoft dropped 4 percent to end the day with a market cap of $219.2 billion and Apple fell 1.1 percent to end at $222.1 billion.

The only American company valued higher is Exxon Mobil, with a market capitalization of $282 billion.

This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history, as Apple had been given up for dead only a decade earlier. But the rapidly rising value attached to Apple by investors also heralds a cultural shift: Consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the leading force shaping technology.

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see the "this is not a banana" toon at top...

Adobe has acknowledged a "critical" security flaw in its Reader, Acrobat and Flash Player software.

Adobe says the vulnerability potentially enables hackers to take control of affected computer systems.

Users running Windows, Macintosh or Linux might all be open to attack.

The company is working to fix the problem. In the meantime, users of Reader, Acrobat and Flash are advised to ensure their anti-virus software is up to date.

"It doesn't really get any worse than a 'zero-day' vulnerability like this," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, a security software company.

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Adobe estimates that more than 95% of computers worldwide have Flash Player installed.

Argument strengthened

Apple has been criticised for preventing its popular iPhone and iPad devices from viewing Adobe Flash animations and videos.

Apple boss Steve Jobs recently wrote an open letter explaining that Adobe's Flash was, amongst other things, "the number one reason Macs crash".

Mr Cluley said: "The more people who are concerned about Adobe's products and the ability for them to be written securely, the more it backs up Steve Jobs' argument that Adobe's software is buggy.

"The crux of the problem is that Adobe have overloaded some of their programs with so many bells and whistles, that with lots of code, there is a much higher chance that there will be a bug.

"This vulnerability exploits a feature of a PDF file format that will not be widely used.

"A simpler code might have led to a simpler life."

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see the "this is not a banana" toon at top...

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"Microsoft has done a pretty good job with Bing and with HTML5," Jobs said.  Apple mobile devices will now carry three third party search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing.

His reference to HTML5 is significant given his blunt criticism of Adobe's Flash widely used by web designers, especially online advertising.  

Flash, he repeated, hogged battery life, was unreliable, unstable on the Macintosh operating system (used in various flavours on all Apple devices and computers) and was a technology that had had its time.

Flash does not run natively on any Apple mobile device in a family of more than 100 million devices in the market - iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. "No-one else comes even close to that," Jobs said.

How far iAds will cut into the market Google AdWords have dominated for many years is yet to be seen.

Apple had introduced iAds "to help our developers make money," he said.  Selling of ads began in the US eight weeks ago and already companies such as Nissan, Chanel, Citi, Target, Disney and Campbells, had committed to spending $US60 million over the remaining months of 2010.

Google said yesterday recent changes to Apple's developers agreement would effectively cripple Google's advertising tools for the iPhone, creating "artificial" barriers to competition.

Apple changed the language of the agreement on Monday. As written, it appears to prohibit certain third-party ad agencies from collecting critical usage data from iPhone applications.

see toon at top...

Adobe has fixed a "critical" security flaw that had the potential to allow hackers to take control of affected computer systems.

The bug was first spotted in early June week following a small number of targeted attacks.

The security update is one in a bumper update package that fixes a total of 32 documented vulnerabilities.

Adobe's Flash and Reader software have emerged as prime targets for hi-tech criminals in the past year.

Users running Windows, Macintosh or Linux were all thought to be vulnerable to attack.

Security firm Websense said the flaw was being exploited via e-mails that prompted recipients to open booby-trapped websites seeded with malware.

Users visiting the websites would have their computers infected with trojans and other malicious programs that opened a backdoor into the machine.

Adobe urged users to apply the update as soon as possible.

Microsoft Corporation has said it will temporarily legalize pirated software used by Russian nongovernmental organizations and independent news media in an effort to shield them from attacks by authorities who crack down on critics by accusing them of violating the company’s copyrights.

Microsoft will issue a “unilateral NGO software license” that will run automatically until 2012 and cover “the software already installed on their PCs,” Microsoft’s senior vice president Brad Smith said on his blog on Monday. NGOs and independent news organizations won’t need to take any steps to benefit from the license’s terms, he said.

The move will hopefully prevent NGOs from falling victim to “nefarious actions taken in the guise of anti-piracy enforcement,” Smith said.

“Now our information will fully exonerate any qualifying NGO, by showing that it has a valid license,” he wrote.

Come 2012, Microsoft wants to move NGOs to its existing donation program, Infodonor, because it better enables organizations to keep their software up-to-date. The temporary legalization of pirated software stems from the fact that some NGOs in a number of countries, including Russia, are unaware of the program or do not know how to navigate the process, which involves ordering the donated software through a Microsoft partner, Smith said.

Last year, the company donated $390 million worth of software to 42,000 NGOs around the world.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/microsoft-blankets-ngos-media-with-free-licenses/416089.html

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Steve Jobs, the mad perfectionist, even perfected his stare.

He wanted it to be hypnotic. He wanted the other person to blink first. He wanted it to be, like Dracula’s saturnine gaze, a force that could bend your will to his and subsume your reality in his.

There’s an arresting picture of Jobs staring out, challenging us to blink, on the cover of Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “Steve Jobs.” The writer begins the book by comparing the moody lord of Silicon Valley to Shakespeare’s Henry V — a “callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king.”

Certainly, Jobs created what Shakespeare called “the brightest heaven of invention.” But his life sounded like the darkest hell of volatility.

An Apple C.E.O. who jousted with Jobs wondered if he had a mild bipolarity.

“Sometimes he would be ecstatic, at other times he was depressed,” Isaacson writes. There were Rasputin-like seductions followed by raging tirades. Everyone was either a hero or bozo.

As Jobs’s famous ad campaign for Apple said, “Here’s to the crazy ones. ... They push the human race forward.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/opinion/limits-of-magical-thinking.html?hp

See toon at top...

Adobe has halted development of its Flash Player for mobile browsers, surrendering to Apple in a war over web standards as the company surprised investors with a restructuring plan.

While the matter might seem like dry tech babble for the average person, it is likely to improve the browsing experiences of tens of millions of iPhone and iPad users, who have trouble accessing sites built with Flash.

That is because Adobe's decision means web developers who currently use Flash tools to produce web content will likely move over to the newer HTML5 technology, which Adobe embraced on Wednesday in the US.

Adobe's concession to Apple and its late founder Steve Jobs, who famously derided Flash as an inefficient power-hog, came as the design software specialist warned that revenue growth will slow next year.