Lifeboat Foundation

Hmmm; maybe it also that folks are tired of dealing with the patent process that is extremely costly by the time your patent is approved; not to mention the time to push things through.

Litigation and prosecutions that rely on patents (failure to resolve disputes, e.g. by sharing ideas, out of court) is down very sharply, in part because firms that make nothing at all (just threaten and/or litigate) have been sinking after much-needed reform.

The past half a decade saw gradual improvement in assessment of patents in the United States, but there is a growing threat and pressure from the patent microcosm to restore patent maximalism and chaos.

Continue reading “Number of New Patent Cases in the US Fell 25% Last Year, Thanks in Part to the Demise of Software Patent Trolls” »

An EU report lays out a set of rules for how humans interact with robots and artificial intelligence.

It seems the dark web is now making it easier for disgruntled employees to take their revenge to the next level, we learn from the KrebsOnSecurity article, “Rise of Darknet Stokes Fear of the Insider.” The article cites Gartner analyst Avivah Litan; she reports a steep increase in calls from clients concerned about vindictive employees, current or former, who might expose sensitive information on the dark web. Not surprisingly, companies with a lot of intellectual property at stake are already working with law-enforcement or private security firms to guard against the threat.

How, exactly, is the dark web making worker retaliation easier than ever before? Writer Brian Krebs explains:

Noam Jolles, a senior intelligence expert at Diskin Advanced Technologies, studies darknet communities. I interviewed her last year in ‘Bidding for Breaches,’ a story about a secretive darknet forum called Enigma where members could be hired to launch targeted phishing attacks at companies. Some Enigma members routinely solicited bids regarding names of people at targeted corporations that could serve as insiders, as well as lists of people who might be susceptible to being recruited or extorted.

The article does bring up many of the same points that many have raised with self driving cars; and folks still don’t seem to understand that we have thousands if not millions of laws in the US alone that must be reviewed and possibly changed to address this technology on the roads. When you look at every state, each county, and each town or city’s laws around driving on their roads; it could be a long and painful period for companies and consumers before the legal side of things catch up.

Self-driving car technology is not yet ready for prime time. Driver assist is.

The Legal challenges and potential liability are immense.

Continue reading “Self-Driving Cars Will Fail” »

Friedman argues that man is actually a fairly adaptable creature. The problem is that our capacity to adapt is being outpaced by a “supernova,” built from three ever faster things: technology, the market and climate change.

Man has sped up his own response times. It now takes us only 10–15 years to get used to the sort of technological changes that we used to absorb in a couple of generations; but what good is that when technology becomes obsolete every five to seven years? The supernova is making a joke of both patent law and education. Governments, companies and individuals are all struggling to keep up.

Friedman’s main cause for optimism is based on a trip back to St. Louis Park, the Minneapolis suburb where he grew up. This is perhaps the most elegiac, memorable part of the book — a piece of sustained reportage that ranks alongside “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” Friedman’s masterly first book about the Middle East. He points out that the same communal virtues that made Minnesota work when he was young have survived — and are still useful. But somehow, the passages that lingered with this reader were the ones about the good old days that have disappeared — when baseball used to be a sport that everybody could afford to watch, when local boys like the young Friedman could caddy at the United States Open, when everybody in Friedman’s town went to public schools.

Continue reading “The Message of Thomas Friedman’s New Book: It’s Going to Be O.K” »

Nice article raising old concerns and debates on ethics. Synbio like any technology or science can in the wrong hands be used to do anything destructive. Placing standards and laws on such technologies truly does get the law abiding researchers, labs and companies aligned and sadly restricted. However, it does not prevent an ISIS, or the black market, or any other criminal with money from trying to meet an intended goal. So, I do caution folks to at least step back assess and think before imposing a bunch of restrictions and laws on a technology that prevents it from helping those in need v. criminals who never follow ethics or the law.

When artists use synthetic biology, are they playing God, or just playing with cool new toys? Scientists Drew Endy and Christina Agapakis weigh in on the ethics.

Continue reading “The Ethics of Synthetic Biology” »

Hmmm.

Technological and human rights implications for the world

China adopted the highly controversial cyber security law on 7th November 2016. The legislation which will take effect in June 2017 was passed by its largely rubber – stamp parliament emphasizing the ‘objective need’ of China as a major internet power. The stated objective of the law is to counter the growing threats such as hacking and terrorism. Overseas critics of the law are not amused as it has already triggered concerns among foreign business and rights groups that the law threatens to shut foreign technology companies out of various sectors which China deems as ‘critical’. The legislation also incorporates contentious requirements for security reviews and for data to be stored on servers in China.

Continue reading “China’s stringent cyber security law; Technological and human rights implications for the world” »

Though Cheok acknowledges that sex robots could fulfill sexist male sexual fantasies, he believes robot-human marriages will have an overwhelmingly positive effect on society. “People assume that everyone can get married, have sex, fall in love. But actually many don’t,” he says. And even those who do might be in search of a different option. “A lot of human marriages are very unhappy,” Cheok says. “Compared to a bad marriage, a robot will be better than a human.”

Though various sex robots are on the market, there are none that come close to resembling a human sexual partner—and there’s certainly nothing like the type of humanoid robot capable of replicating a loving relationship. However, Cheok believes the greatest technological difficulty in creating love robots is not a mechanical challenge, but a matter of developing the software necessary to build a robot that understands human conversation skillfully enough for the job.

Once that problem has been addressed, Cheok sees no problem with romances between man and machine. “If a robot looks like it loves you, and you feel it loves you, then you’re essentially going to feel like it’s almost human love,” he says. Cheok points out that in Japan and South Korea, there are already cases of humans falling in love with computer characters. Cheok also compares robot love to human emotions for other species, such as pet cats. “We already have very high empathy for non-human creatures. That’s why I think once we have robots that act human, act emotional, or look human, it’s going to be a small jump for us to feel empathy towards robots,” he says.

Continue reading “Experts predict human-robot marriage will be legal by 2050” »

Consumer rights law forbids retaliation for poor scores.