NetStumbler.com

Vonage has petitioned the U.S. Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit to defer its appeal and order a retrial of its patent dispute with Verizon. The company cited the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the KSR International v. Teleflex suit, which stated that the current test for patent obviousness is too stiff for suspect patents to be challenged. “According to the Supreme Court’s ruling, if you patent an orange picker, and then someone else comes along and puts a glove on it to protect the oranges against bruising, you can’t patent this new invention as ‘novel’ as it is just an obvious improvement of the original invention. The Supreme Court’s decision thus focuses on keeping only what’s truly novel and original protected by patents,” said Vonage chief legal officer Sharon O’Leary.

In March, a jury found Vonage guilty of infringing three Verizon patents and told the VoIP startup to pay $58 million worth of damages as well as royalties on future sales. The Federal Circuit agreed last week to allow Vonage to continue signing up customers during the appeals process.

Verizon deputy general counsel John Thorne said Vonage’s latest action has “no merit. Thorne regarded it as “a delaying tactic to avoid final resolution of the appeal.” Verizon plans to submit a brief on May 2 in response to Vonage’s motion.
Via [zdnet.com]

With the ease in cracking the Wireless Equivalent Protection (WEP) code, many experts have recommended the use of Wi-fi Protected Access (WPA) to secure home wireless Internet networks. Unlike WEP, which hackers can breach in as little as 60 seconds, WPA appears to be a formidable protocol. “We have had a very close look at WPA and we can’t find anything to exploit,” said Erik Tews, one of the researchers at the Darmstadt Technical University in Germany who discovered a method to break into a WEP-equipped network much more quickly. A brute force dictionary attack may defeat WPA and its later variant, WPA2, but this would entail the hacker to use millions of different words or combinations of words to obtain the correct password. As such, AirDefense wireless security expert Amit Sinha is endorsing the use of a non-dictionary password with WPA. “If you use one which is long enough – at least 20 characters – then it becomes unfeasible for a hacker to mount a brute force attack, because finding your password would take longer than the entire history of the universe.”
Via [bbc.co.uk]