Stories by Loek Essers

Hackers could start abusing electric car chargers to cripple the grid, researcher says

Hackers could use vulnerable charging stations to prevent the charging of electric vehicles in a certain area, or possibly even use the vulnerabilities to cripple parts of the electricity grid, a security researcher said during the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam on Thursday.

Samsung's 3G patent ruled invalid in Germany

A patent that Samsung considers essential to the 3G standard was invalidated by the German Federal Patent Court that ruled in favor of Apple.

Hackers turn a Canon EOS camera into a remote surveillance tool

The high-end Canon EOS-1D X camera can be hacked for use as a remote surveillance tool, with images remotely downloaded, erased and uploaded, a researcher said during the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday.

Blocking antiporn ban protest mails was justified, European Parliament president says

The President of the European Parliament has justified filtering 457,325 protest emails sent to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) -- 106,771 of them from the same address -- as necessary in order to ensure the functioning of the Parliament's email services.

Sony countersues Red over seven camera patents

Sony has countersued high end digital camera maker Red Digital Cinema for patent infringement, two months after Red alleged Sony cameras infringed its patents and called for the cameras to be destroyed.

Switzerland to upgrade supercomputer to improve Alps weather forecasts

The Swiss National Supercomputing Center will upgrade its supercomputer with Nvidia graphics processors to enable the system to more accurately predict the weather in the steep mountains of the Swiss Alps.

Mozilla introduces JavaScript API as part of common payments interface

Mozilla plans to introduce a common API (application programming interface) to make online payments easy and secure on ((web)) Firefox OS devices.

Cisco plans to buy UK femtocell maker Ubiquisys

Cisco is planning to buy femtocell maker Ubiquisys for US$310 million in cash and retention-based incentives, the company announced on Wednesday.

In wake of gTLD security criticism, ICANN announces emergency back-up registry operators

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has selected three emergency back-end registry operators to guarantee domain names within a new generic top-level domain (gTLD) will resolve in the event of a failure at a new TLD operator, it said on Tuesday.

USPTO reinstates three Apple patent claims -- but not one key to $1.05B Samsung suit

The USPTO has reinstated three claims in an Apple patent it had earlier said it was minded to reject -- but not the claim involved in Apple's US$1.05 billion dollar lawsuit against Samsung, according to documents filed by Samsung with a Californian court on Monday.

Huawei loses to ZTE in French patent suit

Networking and telecom equipment vendor Huawei has lost a patent lawsuit it filed in France against ZTE over a USB connector patent, ZTE said on Friday.

Google pledges not to sue open-source users or developers over specified patents

Google will not sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked, the company said on Thursday.

Facebook starts testing targeted ads in News Feed

Facebook has started displaying targeted ads in some users' desktop News Feeds in a test of Facebook Exchange ad delivery system.

Spanish Linux user group files European antitrust complaint against Microsoft

Spanish Linux user group Hispalinux on Tuesday filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft over the use of the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot feature in Windows 8 PCs.

Nokia uses its patents to block Google's VP8 video codec

Nokia said on Monday it is not prepared to license any of its patented technologies that might be essential to the VP8 video codec that is backed by Google.