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Jury Rules Masimo Smartwatches Infringe Apple Design Patents; Apple Wins $250 In Damages: Apple was handed a victory today by a jury in Delware, which ruled that two of Masimo's smartwatches and chargers "willfully violated Apple's patent rights in smartwatch designs," according to Reuters. The reward? $250 in damages. 9to5Mac reports: Apple previously accused Masimo of using litigation to boost the launch of its own smartwatch product. In October 2022, Apple filed two patent infringement lawsuits against Masimo. The first lawsuit accused Masimo of copying the Apple Watch design. The second said that Masimo's technical features infringed on Apple patents covering technology used in the Apple Watch. Reuters reports: "Apple convinced a federal jury on Friday that health monitoring tech company Masimo's smartwatches infringe two of its design patents. The jury, in Delaware, agreed with Apple that Masimo's W1 and Freedom watches and chargers willfully violated Apple's patent rights in smartwatch designs, awarding the tech giant $250 in damages. Apple's attorneys told the court the 'ultimate purpose' of its lawsuit was to win an injunction against sales of Masimo's smartwatches after an infringement ruling." The jury, however, also determined that Masimo's smartwatches "did not infringe on Apple patents covering smartwatch inventions that the tech giant had accused Masimo of copying." The two companies continue to battle it out over patent infringements regarding the Apple Watch's blood oxygen sensor. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former Nvidia Engineer Discovers 41-Million-Digit Prime: Former Nvidia engineer Luke Durant, working with the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), recently discovered the largest known prime number: (2^136,279,841)-1 or M136279841 (where the number following the letter M represents the exponent). The achievement was detailed on Mersenne.org. Tom's Hardware reports: This is the largest prime number we've seen so far, with the last one, M82589933, being discovered six years prior. What makes this discovery particularly fascinating is that this is the first GIMPS discovery that used the power of data center GPUs. Mihai Preda was the first one to harness GPU muscle in 2017, says the GIMPS website, when he "wrote the GpuOwl program to test Mersenne numbers for primarilty, making his software available to all GIMPS users." When Luke joined GIMPS in 2023, they built the infrastructure needed to deploy Preda's software across several GPU servers available in the cloud. While it took a year of testing, Luke's efforts finally bore fruit when an A100 GPU in Dublin, Ireland gave the M136279841 result last October 11. This was then corroborated by an Nvidia H100 located in San Antonio, Texas, which confirmed its primality with the Lucas-Lehmer test. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JetBrains Offers Free Use of WebStorm and Rider IDEs: An anonymous reader quotes a report from InfoWorld: Select developers now are getting free access to JetBrains' WebStorm and Rider IDEs. The company on October 24 announced it has launched non-commercial licenses for its WebStorm JavaScript and TypeScript IDE and the Rider cross-platform .NET and game development IDE. As of now, developers using these IDEs for non-commercial purposes, such as open source project development or content creation, can use them for free. JetBrains views the move as expanding the availability of these IDEs to a broader swath of developer roles. More than two-thirds of developers code outside of work as a hobby and nearly 40% code for educational and learning purposes outside of work, the company said."Previously this year, JetBrains released other products under the same terms for non-commercial use, including RustRover, an IDE for Rust development, and Aqua, an IDE designed for test automation," notes InfoWorld. "JetBrains also provides community editions of IntelliJ and PyCharm, IDEs for Java and Python, respectively, which can be used to build proprietary and commercial software." JetBrains has an FAQ section with additional details about the change. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Company Behind Arc Is Now Building a Second, Much Simpler Browser: The Browser Company is developing a new, much simpler browser distinct from Arc, which has proven too complex for mainstream adoption despite a strong following among power users. The Verge's David Pierce reports: Arc is not dying, [says CEO Josh Miller]. He says that over and over, in fact, even after I tell him the YouTube video the company just released sounds like the thing companies say right before they kill a product. It's just that Arc won't change much anymore. It'll get stability updates and bug fixes, and there's a team at The Browser Company dedicated to those. "In that sense," Miller says, "it feels like a complete-ish product." Most of the team's energy and time will now be dedicated to starting from scratch. "Arc was basically this front-end, tab management innovation," Miller says. "People loved it. It grew like a weed. Then it started getting slow and started crashing a lot, and we felt bad, and we had to learn how to make it fast. And we kind of lost sight, in some ways, of the fact that we've got to do the operating system part." The plan this time is to build not just a different interface for a browser, but a different kind of browser entirely -- one that is much more proactive, more powerful, more AI-centric, more in line with that original vision. Call it the iPhone of web browsers, or the "internet computer," or whatever other metaphor you like. The idea is to turn the browser into an app platform. Miller still wants to do it, and he wants to do it for everyone. What does that look like? Miller is a bit vague on the details. The new browser, which Miller intimates could launch as soon as the beginning of next year, is designed to come with no switching costs, which means among other things that it will have horizontal tabs and fewer ideas about organization. The idea is to "make the first 90 seconds effortless" in order to get more people to switch. And then, slowly, to reveal what this new browser can do. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US Copyright Office Grants DMCA Exemption For Ice Cream Machines: The Librarian of Congress has granted a DMCA exemption allowing independent repair of soft-serve machines, addressing the persistent issue of restricted repairs on McDonald's frequently malfunctioning machines. ExtremeTech reports: Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass a digital lock protecting copyrighted work. That can be the DRM on a video file you download from iTunes, the carrier locks that prevent you from using a phone on other networks, or even the software running a McDonald's soft serve machine that refuses to accept third-party repairs. By locking down a product with DRM, companies can dictate when and how items are repaired under threat of legal consequences. This is an ongoing issue for people who want to fix all those busted ice cream machines. Earlier this year, iFixit and Public Knowledge submitted their request for an exemption that would have covered a wide swath of industrial equipment. The request included everything from building management software to the aforementioned ice cream machines. Unfortunately, the Copyright Office was unconvinced on some of these points. However, the Librarian of Congress must be just as sick as the rest of us to hear the ice cream machine is broken. The office granted an exception for "retail-level food preparation equipment." That means restaurant owners and independent repair professionals will be able to bypass the software locks that keep kitchen machinery offline until the "right" repair services get involved. This should lower prices and speed up repairs in such situations. Public Knowledge and iFixit express disappointment that the wider expansion was not granted, but they're still celebrating with some delicious puns (and probably ice cream). "There's nothing vanilla about this victory; an exemption for retail-level commercial food preparation equipment will spark a flurry of third-party repair activity and enable businesses to better serve their customers," said Meredith Rose, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Video Game Libraries Lose Legal Appeal To Emulate Physical Game Collections Online: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this year, we reported on the video game archivists asking for a legal DMCA exemption to share Internet-accessible emulated versions of their physical game collections with researchers. Today, the US Copyright Office announced once again that it was denying that request, forcing researchers to travel to far-flung collections for access to the often-rare physical copies of the games they're seeking. In announcing its decision, the Register of Copyrights for the Library of Congress sided with the Entertainment Software Association and others who argued that the proposed remote access could serve as a legal loophole for a free-to-access "online arcade" that could harm the market for classic gaming re-releases. This argument resonated with the Copyright Office despite a VGHF study that found 87 percent of those older game titles are currently out of print. "While proponents are correct that some older games will not have a reissue market, they concede there is a 'healthy' market for other reissued games and that the industry has been making 'greater concerted efforts' to reissue games," the Register writes in her decision. "Further, while the Register appreciates that proponents have suggested broad safeguards that could deter recreational uses of video games in some cases, she believes that such requirements are not specific enough to conclude that they would prevent market harms." A DMCA exemption for remote sharing already exists for non-video-game computer software that is merely "functional," as the Register notes. But the same fair use arguments that allow for that sharing don't apply to video games because they are "often highly expressive in nature," the Register writes. In an odd footnote, the Register also notes that emulation of classic game consoles, while not infringing in its own right, has been "historically associated with piracy," thus "rais[ing] a potential concern" for any emulated remote access to library game catalogs. That footnote paradoxically cites Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) founder and director Frank Cifaldi's 2016 Game Developers Conference talk on the demonization of emulation and its importance to video game preservation. "The moment I became the Joker is when someone in charge of copyright law watched my GDC talk about how it's wrong to associate emulation with piracy and their takeaway was 'emulation is associated with piracy,'" Cifaldi quipped in a social media post. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FBI Investigates Claims China Tried To Hack Donald Trump's Phone: Joe Biden's administration is investigating alleged Chinese efforts to hack US telecoms infrastructure amid reports hackers had targeted the phones of former president Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance. Financial Times: The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said they were investigating "unauthorised access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by actors affiliated with the People's Republic of China." The statement followed a report in the New York Times that Chinese hackers had accessed US telecoms networks and targeted data on Trump and Vance's phones. The FBI declined to say if the hackers had targeted their phones. Steven Cheung, Trump's campaign spokesperson, blamed the alleged attack on Kamala Harris, the US vice-president and Democratic presidential nominee. But he declined to say if US authorities had informed the campaign about the hacking effort. Cheung said: "This is the continuation of election interference by Kamala Harris and Democrats who will stop at nothing, including emboldening China and Iran attacking critical American infrastructure, to prevent president Trump from returning to the White House. Their dangerous and violent rhetoric has given permission to those who wish to harm president Trump." Further reading: Chinese Hackers Targeted Trump and Vance's Phone Data (CNN); China Sought To Hack Trump, Vance and Campaign Phones, Officials Say (Washington Post); Chinese Hackers Targeted Phones of Trump, Vance, and Harris Campaign Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Climate Scientists Respond To Attacks on Objectivity: Climate scientists who were mocked and gaslighted after speaking up about their fears for the future have said acknowledging strong emotions is vital to their work. From a report: The researchers said these feelings should not be suppressed in an attempt to reach supposed objectivity. Seeing climate experts' fears and opinions about the climate crisis as irrelevant suggests science is separate from society and ultimately weakens it, they said. The researchers said they had been subject to ridicule by some scientists after taking part in a large Guardian survey of experts in May, during which they and many others expressed their feelings of extreme fear about future temperature rises and the world's failure to take sufficient action. They said they had been told they were not qualified to take part in this broad discussion of the climate crisis, were spreading doom and were not impartial. However, the researchers said that embracing their emotions was necessary to do good science and was a spur to working towards better ways of tackling the climate crisis and the rapidly increasing damage being done to the world. They also said that those dismissing their fears as doom-laden and alarmist were speaking frequently from a position of privilege in western countries, with little direct experience of the effects of the climate crisis. Read more of this story at Slashdot.