Patents stifle innovation and competition

Its long been known to most that patents are bad for business. The software business in particular suffers a great deal: Ridiculous patents such as “One click ordering” (Amazon) and other such totally obvious methods can from that point onwards only be done by the company who filed the patent. Patents are relatively easily obtained, since the patent officers are overworked and not particularly smart, leaving the true patent evaluation in courts by opposing patent lawyers, which is obviously really expensive. Consequently, larger companies with dedicated legal staff can easily bully a small company out of business or out of using a key method, rendering them uncompetitive. Simply because fighting a totally ridiculous patent is too expensive. The latest trend is the emergence of Patent Trolls – Companies formed by lawyers that buy a number of old patents and institute proceedings to all and sundry as a business model.

But wait there is hope! The US senate is to discuss and decide about a possible patent reform. Lets hope they see sense… Read more

Voice mashups at Internet Telephony Expo 07 in LA

3CX exhibited at the Internet Telephony show this week and today i had the opportunity to visit a few of the sessions about VOIP at the conference. One really interesting session was on voice mashups, by Thomas Howe. By marrying mashups and voice, business processes and customer service can be radically improved - cost effectively. For example assume that your flight is cancelled - rather then finding out at the airport, the airline could call you automatically (i.e using a voice mashup app) and notify you of the cancellation and offer to automatically rebook you on the next flight.

Because mashups make developing powerful applications so much easier, these types of applications are now much more cost effective to make.

I really recommend visiting Thomas hows blog to learn more about it. He can explain it much better then i can and i am sure you will see the amazing potential of voice mashups and see how you could apply it in your business!

Free cross site scripting scanner

OK, another post related to Acunetix. But what we are giving away today is pretty good i think. We have decided to make the cross site scripting functionality free - anyone can download it and check his website for cross site scripting vulnerabilities. This is a major security risk these days so this will really help the security conscious webmaster.

This is pretty significant technology, we spent some 5 years developing it and considerable money and time went into it. I hope it will be appreciated :-) here is the press release

Acunetix today launched a Free Edition of its popular web vulnerability scanner, which allows companies to check for cross site scripting vulnerabilities in their websites at no charge. The Free Edition of Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner (WVS) is available immediately at http://www.acunetix.com/cross-site-scripting/scanner.htm.

Germany to use Trojans to infiltrate Terrorist groups

German politicians have defended plans to email Trojan horse software to terror suspects in the hopes of monitoring their conversations. The measures have sparked a fierce civil liberties debate. More on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/03/german_trojan_plan/

An amazingly bad plan by german government too crazy for words. And this only months after an arguably even more ridiculous action by same government, involving the banning of security scanning tools http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/30/garmany_anti-hacking_law/