Quotulatiousness

September 21, 2013

Why wind and solar power can’t meet our needs

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

Robert Bryce explains why — no matter how much we might want it to be so — alternate forms of energy like wind and solar power cannot cover our demands:

That 32 percent increase in global carbon dioxide emissions reflects the central tension in any discussion about cutting the use of coal, oil and natural gas: Developing countries — in particular, fast-growing economies such as Vietnam, China and India — simply cannot continue to grow if they limit the use of hydrocarbons. Those countries’ refusal to enact carbon taxes or other restrictions illustrates what Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, calls the “iron law of climate policy”: Whenever policies “focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reduction, it is economic growth that will win out every time.”

Over the past 10 years, despite great public concern, carbon dioxide emissions have soared because some 2.6 billion people still live in dire energy poverty. More than 1.3 billion have no access to electricity at all.

Now to the second number: 1. That’s the power density of wind in watts per square meter. Power density is a measure of the energy flow that can be harnessed from a given area, volume or mass. Six different analyses of wind (one of them is my own) have all arrived at that same measurement.

Wind energy’s paltry power density means that enormous tracts of land must be set aside to make it viable. And that has spawned a backlash from rural and suburban landowners who don’t want 500-foot wind turbines near their homes. To cite just one recent example, in late July, some 2,000 protesters marched against the installation of more than 1,000 wind turbines in Ireland’s Midlands Region.

Consider how much land it would take for wind energy to replace the power the U.S. now gets from coal. In 2011, the U.S. had more than 300 billion watts of coal-fired capacity. Replacing that with wind would require placing turbines over about 116,000 square miles, an area about the size of Italy. And because of the noise wind turbines make — a problem that has been experienced from Australia to Ontario — no one could live there.

[…]

In 2012, the contribution from all of those sources amounted to about 4.8 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, or roughly one-half of a Saudi Arabia. Put another way, we get about 50 times as much energy from all other sources — coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear and hydropower — as we do from wind, solar, geothermal and biomass.

September 20, 2013

A few setting changes for more annoying iOS 7 features

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:59

I haven’t yet upgraded my iPhone to the latest OS — I don’t want to be one of the doughty pioneers who discovers new bugs on my own phone — but many others have already made the plunge. While I’m sure some of the new features are great, there are bound to be some changes which are less-than-stellar. In the Telegraph, Richard Gray has a few things you might want to change:

Contacts names on text messages

On the locked screen, messages flash up with the contacts name and a fragment of their message. However, in the new iOS, the message no long displays their full name by default.

Instead it will only show their first name. While this may feel friendlier, for anyone with more than one David or John in their contacts book, it will be confusing.

To restore formality back to your world, access Settings, select Mail, Contacts, Calendars.

Then under the Contacts section, select Short Name and then select the option you prefer — First & Last Name, First Initial & Last Name or just if you are the public school sort, pick Last Name Only.

Control Centre while using an App

The new look control centre is designed to be easy to access — simply swipe up from the bottom of the screen and the frosted-glass effect pane will appear.

Great. Unless of course you are using an app or playing a game that requires just such an action, like the hugely popular Temple Run — then up pops the control centre exactly when you don’t want it.

Fortunately it is possible to turn this off so the control centre will not open when you are using apps.

Access Settings and then select Control Centre. Turn off Access with Apps and no longer will the Control Centre intrude upon your App using experience.

H/T to Nicholas Packwood for the link.

September 19, 2013

After smartphones, genius machines?

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

In the Daily Beast, Robert Herritt reviews the latest book by Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.

Cowen’s main background assumption is that in the not-too-distant future various kinds of “genius machines” will be everywhere. In the workplace, business negotiations and client introductions “will be recorded, processed, and analyzed [and] … [e]ach party to the communications might receive a real-time report on when the other people are likely lying …” At the supermarket, “[y]our shopping cart will use GPS to track your moves through the store, including which aisles you visit most often.” As for our personal lives, “[a] woman might consult a pocket device in the ladies’ room during a date that tells her how much she really likes the guy. The machine could register her pulse, breathing, tone of voice … or whichever biological features prove to have predictive power.”

Even a few years ago, this forecast would have sounded silly, but that was before many of us trusted Match.com algorithms to suggest potential spouses and smartphones came with fingerprint scanners. Cowen’s not talking about flying cars (that futurist mainstay that always seems both just out of reach and comically unnecessary), but rather slightly more sophisticated versions of the technologies that many of us already use.

The bad news, he tells us, is that the rise of the machines will only worsen the wage polarization we are seeing today. Cowen predicts a situation where 10 percent to 15 percent of Americans are “extremely wealthy” with “fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives.” Most of the rest will see stagnant or falling wages but will benefit from plenty of “cheap fun and also cheap education.” For those wondering, this vanishing middle ground is where the book gets its catch-phrase title.

What will determine whether you end up a high earner or a low-wage left-behind will be, in large part, your answer to some variation on the following questions: “Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you?”

September 15, 2013

Bruce Schneier on what you can do to stay out of the NSA’s view

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:44

Other than going completely off the grid, you don’t have the ability to stay completely hidden, but there are some things you can do to decrease your visibility to the NSA:

With all this in mind, I have five pieces of advice:

  1. Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself. Yes, the NSA targets Tor users, but it’s work for them. The less obvious you are, the safer you are.
  2. Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec. Again, while it’s true that the NSA targets encrypted connections — and it may have explicit exploits against these protocols — you’re much better protected than if you communicate in the clear.
  3. Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA — so it probably isn’t. If you have something really important, use an air gap. Since I started working with the Snowden documents, I bought a new computer that has never been connected to the Internet. If I want to transfer a file, I encrypt the file on the secure computer and walk it over to my Internet computer, using a USB stick. To decrypt something, I reverse the process. This might not be bulletproof, but it’s pretty good.
  4. Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors. My guess is that most encryption products from large US companies have NSA-friendly back doors, and many foreign ones probably do as well. It’s prudent to assume that foreign products also have foreign-installed backdoors. Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software. Systems relying on master secrets are vulnerable to the NSA, through either legal or more clandestine means.
  5. Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations. For example, it’s harder for the NSA to backdoor TLS than BitLocker, because any vendor’s TLS has to be compatible with every other vendor’s TLS, while BitLocker only has to be compatible with itself, giving the NSA a lot more freedom to make changes. And because BitLocker is proprietary, it’s far less likely those changes will be discovered. Prefer symmetric cryptography over public-key cryptography. Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can.

Since I started working with Snowden’s documents, I have been using GPG, Silent Circle, Tails, OTR, TrueCrypt, BleachBit, and a few other things I’m not going to write about. There’s an undocumented encryption feature in my Password Safe program from the command line; I’ve been using that as well.

I understand that most of this is impossible for the typical Internet user. Even I don’t use all these tools for most everything I am working on. And I’m still primarily on Windows, unfortunately. Linux would be safer.

The NSA has turned the fabric of the Internet into a vast surveillance platform, but they are not magical. They’re limited by the same economic realities as the rest of us, and our best defense is to make surveillance of us as expensive as possible.

Trust the math. Encryption is your friend. Use it well, and do your best to ensure that nothing can compromise it. That’s how you can remain secure even in the face of the NSA.

Reining-in the NSA … while it’s still even theoretically possible

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

In TechDirt, Glyn Moody on the fleeting opportunity to rein-in the NSA:

In the wake of the continuing leaks about the NSA’s activities, most commentators are understandably still trying to get to grips with the enormity of what has been happening. But John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the UK’s Open University, tackles a very different question on his blog: what is likely to happen in the future, if things carry on as they are?

Naughton notes that the NSA’s mission statement includes the following phrase: “to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances.” “Under all circumstances” means that as the Internet grows — and as we know, it is currently growing rapidly — so the NSA will naturally ask for resources to allow it to do tomorrow what it is doing today: monitoring more or less everything that happens online. Naughton then asks where that might lead if the political climate in the US remains sufficiently favorable to the NSA that it does, indeed, get those resources:

    The obvious conclusion therefore, is that unless some constraints on its growth materialise, the NSA will continue to expand. It currently has 35,000 employees. How many will it have in ten years’ time? Who can say: 50,000, maybe? Maybe even more? So we’re confronted with the likelihood of the growth of a bureaucratic monster.

    How will such a body be subjected to democratic oversight and control? Let me rephrase that: can such a monster be subjected to democratic control?

September 13, 2013

The fatal challenge facing Apple and Samsung – boredom

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

The Register‘s Andrew Orlowski speculates that we’ve hit PEAK SMARTPHONE:

Apple’s keynotes seem to command more mainstream front-page press attention than ever before — but each time, there’s less and less to report. Is the modern smartphone era limping to a close?

Apple’s announcements on Tuesday about the iPhone 5S and 5C were wearily predictable. Cupertino just doesn’t seem to be where the action is any more.

It is almost as if Apple and its arch-rival Samsung have exhausted themselves by suing each other around the world — and now look like two very knackered boxers agreeing to shuffle their way through the remaining rounds to the bell, rather than risk throwing big punches.

[…]

But the warning signs are there. Samsung reportedly held “crisis talks” this after sales of the Galaxy S4 failed to meet its expectations, Apple iPhone sales have declined for the past three quarters, and, well, “Peak Apple“.

Samsung piled on gimmicky and slightly creepy features like eyeball tracking, simply because it could. Apple’s user-facing innovation (the A7 64-bit chip is the real star of the show) entails building in a fingerprint scanner — a commodity laptop part for the past 10 years. Indeed, the only “radical” moves by Apple are adding colours to a slightly cheaper (but certainly not cheap) iPhone and rejecting NFC (or “Not F*cking Connecting”, as it’s known around here), which is a technology flop. Not so radical, then.

The stark truth is that smartphones, like computers, were only ever a means to an end — and once the services and apps markets matured, the smartphone itself became less … important. It didn’t really matter what access device you were carrying. The PC reached a point where the devices became beige boxes competing on price, and the smartphone era is drawing to the point where it doesn’t really matter what black rectangle you’re carrying — provided it accesses the services and apps you want. Fetishising the access devices is as strange as thanking LG or Panasonic for creating BBC2. No wonder both Samsung and Apple are looking at new higher-margin peripherals such as watches.

September 7, 2013

Maybe the conspiracy theorists just aren’t paranoid enough

Filed under: Government, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

Bruce Schneier on the destruction of public trust in government agencies:

I’ve recently seen two articles speculating on the NSA’s capability, and practice, of spying on members of Congress and other elected officials. The evidence is all circumstantial and smacks of conspiracy thinking — and I have no idea whether any of it is true or not — but it’s a good illustration of what happens when trust in a public institution fails.

The NSA has repeatedly lied about the extent of its spying program. James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has lied about it to Congress. Top-secret documents provided by Edward Snowden, and reported on by the Guardian and other newspapers, repeatedly show that the NSA’s surveillance systems are monitoring the communications of American citizens. The DEA has used this information to apprehend drug smugglers, then lied about it in court. The IRS has used this information to find tax cheats, then lied about it. It’s even been used to arrest a copyright violator. It seems that every time there is an allegation against the NSA, no matter how outlandish, it turns out to be true.

Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald has been playing this well, dribbling the information out one scandal at a time. It’s looking more and more as if the NSA doesn’t know what Snowden took. It’s hard for someone to lie convincingly if he doesn’t know what the opposition actually knows.

All of this denying and lying results in us not trusting anything the NSA says, anything the president says about the NSA, or anything companies say about their involvement with the NSA. We know secrecy corrupts, and we see that corruption. There’s simply no credibility, and — the real problem — no way for us to verify anything these people might say.

September 6, 2013

Bruce Schneier on taking back the internet

Filed under: Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

From his article in yesterday’s Guardian:

This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back.

And by we, I mean the engineering community.

Yes, this is primarily a political problem, a policy matter that requires political intervention.

But this is also an engineering problem, and there are several things engineers can — and should — do.

One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order. If you have been contacted by the NSA to subvert a product or protocol, you need to come forward with your story. Your employer obligations don’t cover illegal or unethical activity. If you work with classified data and are truly brave, expose what you know. We need whistleblowers.

We need to know how exactly how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems. I already have five stories from people like you, and I’ve just started collecting. I want 50. There’s safety in numbers, and this form of civil disobedience is the moral thing to do.

Two, we can design. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.

We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems — these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.

The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs to dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.

Update: Glenn Greenwald retweeted this, saying it was “not really hard for a rational person to understand why this is newsworthy”.

Yahoo goes out of its way to lose more long-term users

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:11

I moderate a few special interest groups on Yahoo Groups, and I’m subscribed to a couple of dozen others. There’s nothing flashy or exciting about the service: it’s been relatively stable for years, with few changes or disruptions. For most users, this has been ideal. This week Yahoo not only introduced a new logo, they also tossed a stink bomb into the placid Yahoo Groups with a new user interface called “Neo”. They apparently rolled out the changes to a few groups last month, but most users and list owner/moderators hadn’t been given any notice that the change was coming. The Register‘s Kelly Fiveash on the diabolical scheme to annoy long-term users of Yahoo Groups:

‘WTF! MORONS!’ Yahoo! Groups! redesign! traumatises! users!
‘Vile, unfriendly interface’ attacked by world+dog. But format stays

Yahoo! has told thousands of users who are complaining about the Purple Palace’s pisspoor redesign of its Groups service that it will not be rolled back to the old format — despite a huge outcry.

The Marissa Mayer-run company revamped Yahoo! Groups last week, but it was immediately inundated with unhappy netizens who grumbled that the overhaul was glitchy, difficult to navigate and “severely degraded”.

In response, Yahoo! told its users:

    We deeply value how much you, our users, care about Yahoo! Groups … we launched our first update to the Groups experience in several years and while these changes are an important step to building a more modern Groups experience, we recognise that this is a considerable change.

    We are listening to all of the community feedback and we are actively measuring user feedback so we can continuously make improvements.

But the complaints have continued to flood in since Yahoo! made the tweak by changing its “classic” (read: ancient) interface to one dubbed “neo” that appeared to have been quickly spewed on to the interwebs with little testing before going live.

And — while the company claimed it was listening closely to its users about the new look Yahoo! Groups — it has ignored pleas from thousands of people who want it to reverse the update.

For users who access Yahoo Groups through the website, the new design has completely befuddled many, hiding functions (and even group names) and making it far more difficult to search for older posts (you reportedly have to search by message number: no other searches are supported). Even for those who only receive email updates, the Neo redesign included odd and sometimes completely unreadable email formatting, broken links, and other highly irritating issues.

This is the real problem with “free” services: when things go wrong, as a user of the service, you don’t have much leverage to complain or to get things fixed.

September 3, 2013

Social media and the new alienation problem

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

Russell Taylor went to a wedding recently, in a rural area outside the range of cell towers and wifi signals. Some of his fellow guests treated the lack of connectivity as if it were the end of the world. The constant need to be “connected” has other unhealthy aspects:

Where social media differs from telephone, radio or television is in turning its users into broadcasters. This makes it useful as a business tool and as a gazette for news of interest to family and loved ones; but it also enables bores and exhibitionists to publish their every passing thought. This self-absorbed waffling does little to bring people together. On the contrary, it appears to distort their perception of others, until they become mere abstractions: bit-part players in the story of their lives.

This phenomenon was seen in extremis in the reaction of onlookers to the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby earlier this year. Rather than running to his aid, finding a policeman or simply freezing in terror, dozens of bystanders whipped out their phones and started filming the horror show unfolding before them. Possibly they figured that by the time the police had done a risk assessment and checked their diversity training was in order, the killers would be at home with their feet up; in which case, capturing some incriminating video evidence was the responsible thing to do. But I doubt it. It’s far more likely that they saw someone being butchered and simply thought, “Wait until they see this on Facebook”.

When your first reaction to seeing someone murdered is to film it and post it online, you are no longer an active moral being; you’re a detached observer of the world around you. If this is a symptom of the always-connected age, so too is faux concern. Consider those Facebook posts that ask you to ‘like’ a sob story about a complete stranger. They have to be among the most pitiful and inauthentic expressions of human emotion ever devised, making the wearing of a charity wristband look like donating a kidney by comparison. When someone being hacked to death is an exciting ‘I was there’ moment and compassion is demonstrated by means of a mouse-click, something is seriously awry with our moral compass.

The big question is whether social media has contributed to this apparent atomisation of society, or if people’s use of it is merely a symptom. Or could the relationship between the two be dialectical? If so, habitual users of social media can expect to see their usage increase as their resemblance to well-adjusted human beings diminishes. Time will tell how much further they have to fall, but once you start treating murder as status update gold, you must already be somewhere near the bottom.

Microsoft buys Finland

Filed under: Business, Europe, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:16

Oh, sorry, I misread the headline … it should say “Microsoft buys Finland’s tech sector“:

Microsoft has agreed a deal to buy Nokia’s mobile phone business for 5.4bn euros ($7.2bn; £4.6bn).

Nokia will also license its patents and mapping services to Microsoft. Nokia shares jumped 45% on news of the deal.

The purchase is set to be completed in early 2014, when about 32,000 Nokia employees will transfer to Microsoft.

While Nokia has struggled against competition from Samsung and Apple, Microsoft has been criticised for being slow into the mobile market.

Describing the deal as a “big, bold step forward”, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told the BBC that his company was in the process of transforming itself from one that “was known for software and PCs, to a company that focuses on devices and services”.

“We’ve done a lot of great work in the two-and-a-half years that we’ve been in partnership with Nokia, going literally from no phones to 7.4 million smart Windows phones in the last quarter that was reported,” he said.

But he admitted: “We have more work to do to expand the range of applications on our product.”

I guess we can now retire the “Microsoft is buying RIM Blackberry” rumours…

September 2, 2013

South Korea decides against the F-35 and the Eurofighter Typhoon

Filed under: Asia, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

The South Korean government is in the same situation as the Canadian government: needing to purchase replacements for Cold War era combat aircraft and having a very limited budget to do so. After analyzing their specific needs, South Korea isn’t going to buy either the F-35 or the Eurofighter Typhoon:

On August 18th South Korea selected Boeing’s F-15SE Silent Eagle as the sole candidate for Phase III of its Fighter eXperimental Project (F-X) over Lockheed Martin’s F-35A and the Eurofighter Typhoon. The decision has drawn vociferous criticism from defense experts who fear the selection of F-15SE may not provide the South Korean military with the sufficient Required Operational Capabilities (ROCs) to counterbalance Japan and China’s acquisition of 5th generation stealth fighters.

In hindsight, Zachary Keck of The Diplomat believes that Republic of Korea’s (ROK) preference for the F-15SE over two other competitors was “unsurprising.” After all, Boeing won the previous two fighter competitions with its F-15-K jet. In 2002 and 2008, South Korea bought a total of 61 F-15K jets from Boeing. South Korea’s predilection for the F-15SE is understandable given its 85% platform compatibility with the existing F-15Ks.

However, the most convincing explanation seems to be the fear of “structural disarmament” of the ROK Air Force should it choose to buy yet another batch of expensive fighters to replace the aging F-4 Phantom and F-5 Tiger fighters. Simply stated, the more advanced the fighter jet, the more costly it is. The more expensive the jet, the fewer the South Korean military can purchase. The fewer stealth fighters purchased, the smaller the ROK Air Force.

Here is a mock-up of the F-15SE, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Mockup of the F-15SE Silent Eagle

Mockup of the F-15SE Silent Eagle

September 1, 2013

India moves government email away from US-based email services

Filed under: Government, India, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Vinay Mandalia discusses the quite rational response of the Indian government to the recent discovery that the US intelligence services have had full access to all email communications hosted on US email services:

The Government of India is planning to ban the use of US based email services like Gmail for official communications and is soon going to send out a formal notification to its half a million officials across the country asking them to use official email addresses and services provided by National Informatics Centre.

The move is intended to increase the security of confidential government data and information after it was revealed earlier that NSA may be involved in widespread spying and surveillance activities across the globe.

In a statement to reporters here J. Satyanarayana, secretary in the department of electronics and information technology, said that data of Indian citizens using US based email services like Gmail is residing on servers which are located outside India and for now the government is concerned about the large amount of official and critical data that may be resident on those servers.

Expect a lot of other US “allies” to suddenly discover that their internal communications have been an open book to their “friends” for the last 10-20 years and decide to take similar measures.

H/T to Techdirt for the link.

The military tablet – appearing now in combat zones around the world

Filed under: Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Strategy Page talks about the US Air Force use of Windows tablet computers for aircraft pilots and the wider adoption of tablets in the rest of the military:

Air forces all over the world are catching up when it comes to iPads. These devices were soon being adopted by officers and troops after they first appeared in 2010, without waiting for official permission. The iPad mini showed up in 2012. While using PDF files to replace maps and manuals was one of the first military uses, this was quickly followed by military-specific smart phone apps.

Early on combat pilots in Afghanistan, like many businesses, discovered how useful the iPad could be on board. U.S. Marine Corps helicopter pilots found the iPad a useful way to carry hundreds of military maps, rather than the hassle of using paper versions. Marine commanders quickly realized this “field expedient” (a military “hack” that adopts something for unofficial use while in the combat zone) worked, and made it official. That meant buying iPads for this and getting to work coming up with more uses. Meanwhile, support troops that have to handle a lot of data, quickly found ways to get it done on iPads. This was pretty simple for technical troops who rely on lots of manuals. They are often already available in PDF format, and can easily be put on an iPad. But the iPads are basically hand-held computers, and can do so much more. The troops quickly began making that happen themselves.

About the same time iPad appeared the U.S. Army decided to establish an app store (the Army Marketplace) for military smart phone users. This quickly included the iPad, which soldiers were instant big fans of. The army app store included an “App Wanted” section where users could post descriptions of an app they need. If a developer (in uniform, or an army approved civilian with access to the Army Marketplace) was interested, a discussion could be started on an attached message board. The army found that many needed apps were quickly created and made available at the Army Marketplace. Developers could charge for their apps, although the army is also would pay developers to create needed apps that have been described by military smart phone users. The other services quickly adopted a similar attitude towards app development and many of the U.S. Army apps have shown on smart phones outside the country.

August 29, 2013

New Zealand bans (most) software patents

Filed under: Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Hurrah for New Zealand:

A major new patent bill, passed in a 117-4 vote by New Zealand’s Parliament after five years of debate, has banned software patents.

The relevant clause of the patent bill actually states that a computer program is “not an invention.” Some have suggested that was a way to get around the wording of the TRIPS intellectual property treaty, which requires patents to be “available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology.”

Processes will still be patentable if the computer program is merely a way of implementing a patentable process. But patent claims that cover computer programs “as such” will not be allowed.

It seems there will be some leeway for computer programs directly tied to improved hardware. The bill includes the example of a better washing machine. Even if the improvements are implemented with a computer program, “the actual contribution is a new and improved way of operating a washing machine that gets clothes cleaner and uses less electricity,” so a patent could be awarded.

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