Patent-related wars are the latest fad

As if the legal system wasn't a complete mess already you can add the patent office to the list of incompetent departments that is spinning out of control. Just take a look at the mobile patent law suits infographic compiled by Reuters and keep in mind that this is just a tip of the iceberg...

As someone who has worked for a number of technology companies and has been through a few patent infringement law suits I can tell you that not all patents out there are legitimate and there are a bunch of companies out there whose sole business purpose is to sue each other over these crappy patents. Some of the technical patents I came across were so broad that they encompassed a large portion of the internet which is so commonly used that it belongs in the public domain - I can only imagine that whoever approved this was technically inept. Imagine if someone patented use of water and air today and suddenly we were all in violation.

Now the image above is just a subset of the mobile industry but when you consider every patent out there you can imagine how things can get real messy and real fast. Patent office gets paid to approve crappy patents, predatory companies sue each other over this crap, scummy lawyers get paid off and someone along the way makes a bunch of money while hardworking people are sucking on their thumbs. Another day, more bullshit - this is business as usual.

Image courtesy of Reuters

Your world just got hacked!

Computer security firm McAfee released a report in which it claims that hackers have spent the last 5+ years hacking into over 70 government, nonprofit and corporate entities and stealing obscene amounts of sensitive data. United Nations and International Olympic Committee are just the two organizations that came under attack. Most of the victims are located in the United States with a few others in Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere in the world. The report did not dwell into any details but suggested that these attacks could be coming from a single nation.

[Yahoo]

Microsoft's Bing still sucks!

Microsoft Bing URL Submission page

Ok, I am not exactly sure where to beging because Microsoft sucks at just about everything they do these days except the BSOD(blue screen of death) - which I think they might have actually pioneered. Anyways, I wanted to register the URL of my new website with Bing and so I went to the Bing URL Submission page to do just that. This is not the first URL I have submitted to search engines for indexing so I did not expect to run into any difficulties. Boy was I wrong! The 'captcha' would not let that happen. After trying to get past the captcha for about 20 minutes my frustration mounted to dangerous levels and I gave up on Bing - that's right f*** Bing! I mean c'mon this is the basics after all. If I can't easily submit my URL for indexing how in the world is Microsoft supposed to provide and accurate and up-to-date search of the web when it's missing a bunch of content? The reason Google is dominating the search is because they are on top of this shit unlike both Microsoft and Yahoo who take weeks to index a new site once submitted to them. After studying Bing's URL submission page I noticed just how poorly it was put together. First of all the last sentence of the first paragraph is missing a period. That's right, this kind of sloppiness does not look professional nor does it instill trust into users. Second, nowhere on this page does it mention whether 'captcha' is case sensitive or not. I mean for someone who is having a hard time getting past the damn captcha this is a critical piece of information when it comes to answering the very personal question of: "Am I being retarded or is Microsoft f***ing up?" Well naturally I tried it all: camel case, lowercase, uppercase - to no avail.

Captcha - camel case

Captcha - all lowercase

Captcha - all uppercase