Motorola And Huawei Settle Patent Lawsuit

In case you hadn’t heard, Motorola Solutions and Chinese telecommunications company Huawei Technologies have been embroiled in a nasty patent lawsuit. In January, the Chinese company has filed a lawsuit to prevent Motorola from giving Nokia Siemens (which acquired Motorola’s wireless network for $1.2 billion last year) Huawei’s IP information. Today, Motorola and Huawei have issued a joint statement announcing that the two companies have settles all litigation. Both parties have agreed to withdraw and dismiss their claims from the courts.

Huawei has actually entered an agreement with Motorola Solutions and Nokia Siemens that allows Motorola Solutions to transfer its commercial agreements with Huawei for a fee, and allows Nokia to receive and use Huawei confidential information revealed to Motorola. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. And Motorola is also dismissing a prior complaint filed against Huawei, which alleged that the Chinese company was conspiring to steal trade secrets from former Motorola employees.

The backstory is that Huawei was claiming that because Motorola and the company has a previous licensing relationship (worth $880 million), Motorola’s wireless networking unit was provided with details on Huawei’s confidential intellectual property. Huawei was trying to ensure that Motorola does not transfer this confidential information to Nokia. Motorola, Huawei contended, did not provided any assurances that it will prevent disclosure of that IP information to Nokia and if this transfer of information did happen, Huawei would suffer from this.

It appears that Motorola ponied up the funds to pay off Huawei in this suit. In February, Huawei won a court order preventing Motorola from transferring the Chinese telecom-gear maker’s intellectual property to Nokia Siemens.

Greg Brown, President & CEO of Motorola said in a statement: “We regret that these disputes have occurred between our two companies. Motorola Solutions values the long-standing relationship we have had with Huawei. After reviewing the facts, we decided to resolve these matters and return to our traditional relationship of confidence and trust.”

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Pandora is sending user GPS, gender, birthday and more to ad servers

Looks like Pandora Radio for Android has been under fire as of late. If you guys didn’t hear they were issued a Subpoena recently over a few different issues, mainly regarding privacy and user data. Apparently there has now been even more information revealed from our friends over at Ars Technica that might have you all even more worried.

I know you all love Pandora Radio, as do I. So please don’t get to upset as I only share the news as I see it. I use Pandora very often, but I’ve yet to turn it on today after reading this.

Apparently after a company named Veracode did a bit more research they found some things that are pretty scary to say the least. According to them Admob was transmitting GPS, but that makes sense as most are driving while using the app, but then they found it randomly at all different times was reporting the users GPS. Then there was other references that appear to also log user data, gender, and possibly birthday. Additionally, the app itself appeared to be sending the users Android ID, and continually access the user’s GPS location for updates.

Veracode then wrote on its blog.

 “The SecureStudies library accesses the android_id and directly sends a hash of the data to http://b.scorecardresearch.com while the Medialets library accesses the device’s GPS location, bearing, altitude, android_id, connection status, network information, device brand, model, release revision, and current IP address.”

I don’t like the idea of them accessing many of those things, one in particular being my IP Address and my gender, that is not any of their business. Pandora has mentioned in the past that they require a certain level of access to user information so that it can continue delivering personalized music streams that we all know and love. Then again, according to Veracode, they aren’t just using that data for themselves, but rather for advertising purposes as well. There is no proof of this next comment, but the thought of them selling my personal information would make me not have a happy face. Ars Technica goes on to mention, “If the grand jury ends up coming to the same conclusion, Pandora (and other app makers) could be facing legal difficulties.”

What do you all think, and will you be dumping your favorite music streaming app over this? Did you just uninstall Pandora like I did? What about Amazon MP3 and the new cloud player, does it just cross reference the music you already have for the music suggestions it sends you, or are they also taking more information than we would like, or they need? Only time will tell. Stay tuned.

• [via Ars Technica]
   

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Security Flaw Found in Tumblr, Company Says It’s Now Fixed

It started with a tweet Saturday morning, sounding an alarm of a security breach in the popular microblogging platform Tumblr. “OMG… The Tumbeasts are spitting out passwords!,” it warned.

That tweet spread like wildfire, notifying the world of a coding error that opened a security hole with the potential of revealing users’ passwords, server IP addresses, API keys and personal information.

Fortunately, Tumbler reacted, fixing the problem and then issuing this official message about 5 to 6 hours after the flaw was discovered:

“A human error caused some sensitive server configuration information to be exposed this morning. Our technicians took immediate measures to protect from any issues that may come as a result.
We’re triple checking everything and bringing in outside auditors to confirm, but we have no reason to believe that anything was compromised. We’re certain that none of your personal information (passwords, etc.) was exposed, and your blog is backed up and safe as always. This was an embarrassing error, but something we were prepared for.
The fact that this occurred at all is still unacceptable, and we’ll be seriously evaluating and adjusting our processes to ensure an error like this can never happen again.
Please let us know if you have absolutely any questions.”

What caused the error? That’s still under intense discussion at The Hacker News and elsewhere in the hacker community, but many think the culprit was a errant piece of PHP code. Obviously, spelling counts.


Let us know in the comments if you think those who discovered the security flaw were more eager to broadcast its existence than notify the Tumbler coders who might have been in a position to quickly fix it.

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