Apple has been dealt a severe blow having been told that it no longer has a monopoly on the letter “i” as part of the name for its products.

A trademarks tribunal has knocked back Apple’s bid to stop a small company from trademarking the name DOPi for use on its laptop bags and cases for Apple products.

Apple argued that the DOPi name – which is iPod spelt backwards – was too similar to its own popular portable music player, which has sold in excess of 100 million units worldwide.

Apple has long since relied on its legal muscle to pursue any individual or company it sees as infringing on its copyright and trademarks.

But its ambitions to make widespread claims on the letter “i” came to a grinding halt when the tribunal rejected Apple’s claim that punters might be confused into thinking that they were buying an Apple product.

While the case does not affect Apple’s current trademarks, companies wanting to use the “i” prefix will have a better chance of getting away with it, lawyers say.

Every month, like clockwork, Microsoft releases security bulletins and every month people ask me if it’s small or a big release. While the exact details of the patches are generally treated as news, the expected workload each month really shouldn’t be a guessing game because Microsoft’s patch releases are predictably cyclical.

I don’t have any special inside knowledge, and I can’t speak for Microsoft, but when I look at the publicly available information it’s pretty clear to me how the cycle works.

60 Day QA Cycle

A 30 to 60 day QA cycle on a Microsoft patch is typical, and it’s actually pretty easy to tell how many days a patch was probably in QA. If you are curious, download the patch manually and take a look at the date the file was digitally signed. This isn’t an absolutely accurate date because a patch could drop in and out of the QA process several times, but it’s a reasonable approximation.

Using this method I calculated the average dates for the Dec 2009 patches at 54 days, November 2009 patches at 36 days, and October 2009 at 45 days. It’s not too hard to jump from those numbers to an average 60 day cycle.

Iran has arrested 30 people suspected of belonging to a U.S.-linked cyber network gathering information on Iranian nuclear scientists and sending people abroad for training, a news agency reported on Saturday.

It said the group sought to recruit people through the Internet for training in Iraq with the People’s Mujahideen Organization, a leftist exile group which launched attacks on the Islamic Republic from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq

“Thirty people were arrested in connection with an organized American cyber war network via a series of complex security measures in the field of information technology and communications,” the Fars news agency said.

Tehran’s general and revolutionary court said one of the group was linked to an outlawed sect — a reference to the Baha’i religious minority, the agency said.

“Among the charges against this network are creating an intelligence gathering network, including identification of the country’s nuclear scientists and staging illegal demonstrations and encouraging the public to take part in them after the presidential elections,” it said.

Talks with China over censorship have reached an apparent impasse and Google, the world’s largest search engine, is now “99.9 percent” certain to shut its Chinese search engine, the Financial Times said on Saturday.

It said in a report on its website Google had drawn up detailed plans for closing its Chinese search engine.

The newspaper cited a person familiar with the company’s thinking as saying that, while a decision could be made very soon, Google was likely to take some time to follow through with its plans.

That would be in order to bring about an orderly closure as the company takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by authorities, it said.

China warned Google on Friday against flouting the country’s laws, as expectations grow for a resolution to a public battle over censorship and cyber-security.

The Association of Flight Attendants is pushing Congress to fund combat training as part of a four-point plan that the union says would improve security inside aircraft cabins. The Los Angeles Times reports the union “hopes that lawmakers will include money to put some of their ideas into action under an upcoming funding bill for the Federal Aviation Administration.”

Toyota has for years blocked access to data stored in devices similar to airline “black boxes” that could explain crashes blamed on sudden unintended acceleration, according to an Associated Press review of lawsuits nationwide and interviews with auto crash experts.

The AP investigation found that Toyota has been inconsistent – and sometimes even contradictory – in revealing exactly what the devices record and don’t record, including critical data about whether the brake or accelerator pedals were depressed at the time of a crash.

Le superviseur européen à la protection des données interpelle la Commission européenne dans le cadre des négociations sur l’ACTA, se déclarant hostile aux dispositifs de surveillance généralisée et de riposte graduée voulus par l’industrie américaine.
L’Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) est au coeur des négociations entre 39 Etats et porte sur l’adoption d’orientations politiques dans la lutte contre la contrefaçon. Malgré la portée de ces tractations, celles-ci sont toujours menées dans le plus grand secret.
Si des informations ont pu filtrer, c’est avant tout du fait de fuites et non d’une communication maîtrisée des parties. Ainsi vendredi 19 février un brouillon du document filtrait sur Internet. On y découvre notamment les propositions faites par les autorités américaines, auxquelles ne sont pas étrangers les lobbys et partisans de la défense, dure, du droit d’auteur.

Nissan Motor Co (7201.T), Japan’s third-biggest car maker, said it will recall about 540,000 vehicles worldwide due to potential defects in brake pedal pins and fuel-gauge components, mostly in the United States. Nissan said five models from 2008 to 2010 model years, including the Titan truck and Armada SUV, would be recalled due to the risk of the brake pedal pins partially disengaging, causing a loss of normal braking ability.

General Motors Co is recalling 1.3 million compact cars in North America to address a power steering problem that has been linked to 14 crashes and one injury, the company said on Tuesday.
U.S. safety regulators opened an investigation on January 27 into approximately 905,000 Cobalt models in the United States after receiving more than 1,100 complaints of power steering failures. The complaints included 14 crashes and one injury.

Toyota Motor Corp has decided to cancel production at two U.S. plants for a total of two weeks in anticipation of a drop in sales in the wake of its massive recalls, Japan’s Chunichi Shimbun reported on Tuesday.