Rambus won a huge victory Wednesday when a San Jose jury found that the company did nothing wrong when it patented key memory technologies that an industry group was incorporating into the standards for dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips.
Since those chips and their successors are in virtually every personal computer and many other electronic devices, Rambus would reap billions of dollars in royalties if it can enforce those patents.
Oops, they did it again: someone who was supposed to guard sensitive personal records messed up and let them get stolen.
This time, the victims were 51,000 current and former employees of Agilent Technologies, whose Social Security numbers and home addresses were on a laptop stolen from an Agilent contractor. A reader tipped me off to the story this evening, and I wrote the basic facts here.
The Agilent episode is just the latest in a long string of similar cases involving companies like Gap and Verisign and government agencies like the Federal Trade Commission. Although there’s no evidence that the thieves in this cases used the personal data to commit identity theft on a massive scale, the potential is there.
I want to like Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. In January, I even wrote a piece saying I trusted him more than I trusted President Bush and the Democratic Congress to keep us out of a real recession.
But since then, it seems like he’s gone from slow-to-react to panicky overdrive. In a front-page column in Wednesday’s Mercury News, I argue that the Fed runs a real risk of hurting taxpayers and damaging the economy with its recent series of actions: the $30 billion bailout of Bear Stearns, the government’s offer to swap solid Treasury bonds for shaky mortgage bonds and Tuesday’s three-quarter-point cut in interest rates.
In my Sunday column, which we’ve already posted online, I discuss President Bush’s controversial crusade to convince Congress to give him essentially unfettered power to snoop on Americans suspected of consorting with terrorists.
Like many civil libertarians, I’m upset that the Bush administration wants to eliminate the already minimal justification that the intelligence agencies must make to a secret court to eavesdrop on Americans. (Under current law, the feds can start wiretapping anyone, but must quickly get permission from a secret court — a court that has almost never said no — to continue.)
To me, this is just an extension of Bush’s systematic trampling of civil rights in the name of fighting terrorism. We’ve got the Patriot Act (which the bright-as-a-bullet Bush confused with his new proposal, the “Protect America Act,” during his news conference Thursday). We have the establishment of indefinite detention without charges and military-only trials for aliens held at Guantanamo. And of course, there’s the waterboarding, extraordinary rendition and Abu Ghraib nastiness.
Sadly, Congress, despite all its posturing and pontificating, has gone along with all of it. That just hands victory to the terrorists: fear of them is making us abandon core American values.
Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig (right), a strong advocate for Internet freedoms, just told readers of his blog that he won’t run for Congress after all.
In his video message announcing the decision not to run (click below to watch it), Lessig said he was committed to ending the influence of lobbyist and PAC money in politics.
But after consulting the polls, he concluded that “there was no possible way” to win against the popular Speier, who has a long track record as a consumer-rights crusader. “We would lose this race….in a big way,” he said.
The notion of a little-known professor challenging the accomplished Speier was always rather quixotic. But Lessig is a hero to many in the Silicon Valley tech community, and hopefully he will find another way to make his ideas a part of the debate.
(Photo of Lawrence Lessig courtesy of Stanford News Service.)
The struggling Wireless Silicon Valley project has gotten a new lease on life.
As I discuss in detail in a column today, Covad Communications, in partnership with Cisco Systems, has agreed to build a test site for the civic project in downtown San Carlos.
I’m an unabashed fan of California’s parks – national, state and regional. Every weekend, I go hiking in one of them. And it never ceases to amaze me that I can climb a mountain, walk along the beach or trek through ancient redwoods, all within an hour’s drive of my house.
But it’s easy to take the parks for granted. Indeed, the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger thinks we won’t mind if the state closes 48 state parks — 17 percent of the total — and halves the number of lifeguards on state beaches to save a few million dollars as part of the budget crisis. (Full details about the proposal in this story by the Merc’s Paul Rogers. Links also include a full list of parks targeted for closure.)
Hanni’s crusade, which gained adherents after JetBlue had an American-style meltdown last Valentine’s Day, prompted passenger-rights legislation in Congress and half a dozen states and nudged the sluggish Department of Transportation to increase compensation for involuntary bumping. (Today, Assemblyman Mark Leno introduced a passenger-rights bill in the California legislature.)
But as I discuss in my Wednesday column, real progress on improving airline customer service has been slow.
To many Rambus investors and insiders, the Los Altos company is a brilliant inventor of computer memory technologies that can’t get fair royalties out of crooked, conspiratorial memory-chip makers despite a decade of negotiations and litigation.
To memory chip makers and others in the computer industry, Rambus set and sprung a nasty trap by encouraging a collaborative standards group to adopt technologies that Rambus was quietly patenting. Once the manufacturing train couldn’t be stopped, Rambus unveiled its patents and demanded exorbitant royalties.
Both sides are presenting their best arguments right now to a jury in federal court in San Jose. As I discussed in the column, the weight of the evidence over many years of litigation clearly shows that both Rambus and the memory makers behaved badly.
The current movement for airline passenger rights was born Dec. 29, 2006, after 