Today in Techrights

• Lack of Patent Quality Means Lack of Patent Validity and Lack of Legal Certainty
• Data Engine Technologies (DET) Just One Among Many Microsoft-Connected Patent Trolls That Pick on Microsoft’s Biggest Competitors
• Alice/Mayo and Hatch-Influenced US Patent Office
• Funded by the Public to Prey on the Public: The Absurdity of Patent Sales and ‘Enforcement’ by Government
• Lockpath Patents Demonstrate That the US Patent Office — Unlike US Courts — Keeps Ignoring 35 U.S.C. § 101/Alice
• The Eastern District of Texas and Its Patent Trolls Affinity Not a Solved Issue
• More ‘Blockchain’ Nonsense in Pursuit of Bogus, Nonsensical Software Patents
• A Warning About MPEG-G, the Latest Software Patents Trap That Threatens Innovation Everywhere
• MIT and the Prior Art Archive Perpetuate Existing Problems
• Links 20/10/2018: Mesa 18.2.3 Released, FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 1

Security: Cracking, Elections and Apache

• Hack [sic] on 8 adult websites exposes oodles of intimate user data

  A recent [crack] of eight poorly secured adult websites has exposed megabytes of personal data that could be damaging to the people who shared pictures and other highly intimate information on the online message boards. Included in the leaked file are (1) IP addresses that connected to the sites, (2) user passwords protected by a four-decade-old cryptographic scheme, (3) names, and (4) 1.2 million unique email addresses, although it’s not clear how many of the addresses legitimately belonged to actual users.

• Professors discuss election security, voting systems at panel

  Amid questions of election security and potential system hacking in the upcoming midterm elections, Engineering prof. J. Alex Halderman spoke at the University of Michigan Alumni Center Thursday night about vulnerabilities in U.S. voting systems. Last June, Halderman appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to testify about such.

  [...]

  “If an attack takes place, we won’t necessarily see the physical evidence," Halderman said. "The physical evidence that it took place is a discrepancy between what’s written on a piece of paper and what a computer total of that paper says. Because elections are so complicated, they’re so noisy, because the [crackers] can hide their traces in various ways, we won’t necessarily see when something like this happen for the first time. We've got to be ready.”

• Apache Access Vulnerability Could Affect Thousands of Applications

  A recently discovered issue with a common file access method could be a major new attack surface for malware authors. Vulnerabilities in Apache functions have been at the root of significant breaches, including the one suffered by Equifax. Now new research indicates that another such vulnerability may be putting thousands of applications at risk. Lawrence Cashdollar, a vulnerability researcher and member of Akamai's Security Incident Response Team, found an issue with the way that thousands of code projects are using Apache .htaccess, leaving them vulnerable to unauthorized access and a subsequent file upload attack in which auto-executing code is uploaded to an application.

Colibri - A Browser Without Tabs

Almost all browsers are competing with each other in terms of functionality, speed, and performance. Though I did recently settle for Firefox as my default browser, I am still looking for better options. And this quest of mine took me to Colibri - A Browser without Tabs. And I was really interested in finding out what this meant. How could a browser be without tabs? It’s like a car without wheels. So here is a review of Colibri.

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