Google Lawyer Touts Oracle Trial Victory

 Google Inc.'s general counsel lauded the courtroom victory won by the Internet giant Wednesday against Oracle Corp. as a warning for firms considering filing patent litigation in the future.

A federal jury had decided earlier in the day that Google didn't infringe two of Oracle's patents that protect its Java technology, as Oracle had alleged.

The win for Google came as its high-profile San Francisco trial with Oracle over both patent and copyright claims related to Google's Android mobile phone software drags into its second month, and appears to be drawing to a close.

"I think you've seen a lot of patent cases filed lately, and most of them have not resulted in successful outcomes for plaintiffs," said Google General Counsel Kent Walker. "That may send a message to those who might want to do these things in the future."

Mr. Walker declined to say how much Google has spent to defend itself against Oracle's infringement allegations, but said such lawsuits can cost about $5 million per patent to defend.

Oracle originally asserted seven patents against Google, though that number had been whittled down to two by the time the trial began last month.

It wasn't immediately clear if Oracle will appeal the patent verdict.

An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment.

The patent verdict capped a second phase of the ongoing trial. A first phase had been focused on Oracle's copyright infringement claims.

That first phase ended with a mixed verdict, as the jury found Google infringed on copyrights protecting Java interfaces, but couldn't decide if that was acceptable under the fair use doctrine—which allows for some limited use of copyrighted material.

The trial is expected to resume next week, though the jury has been dismissed.

Mr. Walker said he expects the judge overseeing the case to issue a ruling on the copyrightability of the Java interfaces some time in the next couple of weeks.

If the judge rules that some or all of the interfaces can be protected with copyrights, Oracle is expected to pursue damages that could be significant.

Mr. Walker said a ruling that the interfaces are protected "would be a real threat to software development," which often relies on making legal use of others' code.

Google's general counsel said excessive patent litigation partly results from flaws in the U.S. patent system, which can issue legal protections to broad or obvious ideas.

"The goal is to make sure we have high quality patents," Mr. Walker said, "so that a patent doesn't become a lottery ticket" in court.

Google's partners have faced a number of additional infringement suits related to Android, which is developed according to an open source model that makes use of outside engineering.

Earlier this week, Google closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings, which has a broad portfolio of thousands of patents.

Home How To How to delete yourself from the Internet

 

You may not feel like the flotsam and jetsam that make up the facts of your life are important, but increasingly companies are using that dry data to make your every online step as indelible as if written in blood. Here's how to take back your digital dignity.

by Seth Rosenblatt   April 19, 2012 6:19 PM PDT

The Internet companies that power your online life know that data equals money, and they're becoming bolder about using that data to track you. If they get their way, your every online step would be not only irrevocable, but traceable back to you. Fortunately, there are some positive steps you can take to reclaim your online history for yourself.

The online privacy software company Abine, which makes Do Not Track Plus, also offers a service called DeleteMe, which removes your data from numerous tracking sites and keeps it from coming back. In an unusual gesture, though, they've made public how to do for yourself everything that DeleteMe does. Here's my take on their advice.

Be warned, though. The following are not easy instructions, and it's not because they're technically complex. They require a tenacity and wherewithal that is likely to either exhaust you, drive you borderline bonkers, or both. (And no, I haven't followed the instructions to remove myself because it's essential to my job that I can be found by strangers.)

Step 1: Prepare yourself: You're going to have to be polite.
These instructions require patience for the antics of others and determination to get the job done. It's not a bad idea to get something inanimate to take your frustrations out on, because often getting your data successfully removed or changed will require the good faith of the person you're dealing with. Things are not likely to go your way the first time around.

Step 2: Aggressively track sites that aggressively track you.
This is where the DeleteMe service comes in. They currently charge you $99 to un-track you from the tracking data clearinghouses, which in turn sell your data to others entities. You can follow Abine's list of services and do the deed yourself, and that means writing many e-mails, sending numerous faxes, and placing enough phone calls to make you wish for a time machine so you can go back to the 19th century to do violence unto Alexander Graham Bell.

One thing that isn't clear from Abine's list is that most of these data aggregators will re-add you within a few months, so I recommend at least bi-annual checks to see if they've sucked up your data again. Be tenacious, be polite, and if this is important to you, stick with it until you get what you want.

If you're concerned about privacy and people making connections between your birthday, your address, and your Social Security number, you owe it to yourself to perform at least one Web search for your name and see what comes up. You might be unpleasantly surprised.

Step 3: To protect your reputation, removal must be done from the source.
To get Google, Bing, and other search engines to notice a change in information as it is presented on the Web, the original site hosting that information must change. It doesn't matter which site is the source. It could be Facebook, or a local blog, or a gaming forum. If it's showing up in search results, it has little to do with the search engine and everything to do with the site of origin. Once that site has changed, then you'll see a change in the search results.

Getting something removed from a site is not a scientific process, even though you must be methodical about it. Ask politely, and as I noted above, you're likely to have to ask more than once and using more than one way to communicate. You likely will have to be a rake at the gates of Hell, but one that uses words like "please" and "thank you".

Look for the name of a writer, or Web site manager, and if no contact information is listed, do a WhoIs search by typing "whois www.site-name.com". Be sure to include the quotes. That will tell you who registered the site, which is a good place to start on smaller Web sites. Look for phone numbers, e-mail, and fax numbers, and follow up your initial communication.

Once you have a name, even if you can't find a phone number or e-mail, you can probably take an educated stab at one. Use a site like E-mail Format to help you out. And in your e-mail, be sure to explain clearly, concisely, and logically why your request ought to be honored.

A willingness to compromise can get you better results, too. If, for example, your initial request to fully remove your name gets refused, see if asking to have your identity anonymized will work. And if one person at the site you've contacted keeps stalling you, see if there's another you can contact instead.

Step 4: Get Google to hustle on search engine changes.
If you've been successful in changing a site, but Google is still showing the older version, you can use Google's URL Removal Tool to accelerate the process. Note that this will require a Google account, and that if you get Google to change, you're going to have to submit requests to other major search engines like Bing separately.

Step 5: Paint over the bad with good.
In cases where you can't get the site to remove the content that's negatively affecting your reputation, you can create new, fresh, positive content to counteract it. The idea is that the Positive You will bury the Negative You. Rick Santorum is a great example of how this can work in reverse, and no, I'm not going to link to it for you.

You can also use social-networking sites to bury bad news. From About.Me to Flickr to Twitter, social networks tend to rank highly in search results. By creating and maintaining accounts that use your real name, you can elevate the social networking results for your name and, ideally, drop the results you want to bury onto the second page of results. Since studies show that second-page results are viewed significantly less often than first-page, this could be a successful burying strategy.

However, a key component of this is linking the networks, so be prepared to do far more social networking than you had been.

Step 6: Go (politely) nuclear. Get a lawyer.
If you suspect something is actually defamatory, seek out legal advice. Gather your evidence, be polite and firm, and seek out someone who can guide you through the thorny legal thicket. This will also depend on your country -- England has much broader defamation and libel laws than the United States does -- and your budget.

There is no foolproof method for changing how you're presented on the Internet, whether looking at purely personally-identifiable data or the much more subjective presentation of your personal reputation. However, if these are concerns of yours, you're not alone out there, and these six steps will give you concrete actions you can take to reclaim your identity and repair how others see you.

Two billion-transistor beasts: POWER7 and Niagara 3

     By Jon Stokes |

A 300mm Power 7 processor wafer

In years past, an ISSCC presentation on a new processor would consist of detailed discussion of the chip's microarchitecture (pipeline, instruction fetch and decode, execution units, etc.), along with at least one shot of a floorplan that marked out the location of major functional blocks (the decoder, the floating-point unit, the load-store unit, etc.). This year's ISSCC is well into the many-core era, though, and with single-chip core counts ranging from six to 16, the only elements you're likely to see in a floorplan like the two below are cores, interfaces, and switches. Most of the discussion focuses on power-related arcana, but most folks are interested in the chips themselves.

In this short article, I'll walk you through the floorplan of two chips with similar transistor counts—the Sun's Niagara 3 and IBM's POWER7. Most CPU geeks will already know a lot of the information I'll give below, but many readers will appreciate having it all together in one place.

Niagara 3: threads and I/O

Sun's Niagara 3

Sun's 1 billion-transistor, 16-core Niagara 3 processor is a great example of modern multiprocessor-turned-SoC (system on a chip). Everything about this design is focused on pushing large numbers of parallel instruction streams and data streams through the processor socket at once. The shared cache is small, the shared pipes are wide, and the end result is a chip that's all about maintaining a high rate of flow, and not one that's aimed at collecting a large pile of data and chipping away at it with heavy equipment.

Each of the 16 individual SPARC cores that make up Niagara 3 support up to eight simultaneous threads of execution, for a total of 128 threads per chip. Logically, the chip is laid out so that all of the cores communicate with a unified 6MB L2 cache via a crossbar switch that's placed in the middle of the chip. This combination of cores and L2 connected via a switch forms the basic compute architecture of the SoC.

So that the chip can talk to the outside world, the L2 caches are connected to a variety of I/O interfaces: memory, PCIe, 1G/10G Ethernet, and coherency links. All told, those links can push a total of 2.4Tb/s worth of data through a single Niagara 3 socket—that's a lot of bandwidth, but you need it to feed that many threads. Let's take a quick look at each of these I/O links in turn.

Coherence: Niagra 3's coherence links are the equivalent of the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) on Intel's Nehalem parts, or of HyperTransport for AMD. These links can be used to connect up to four of the chips together without any additional routing chips (this is what's meant by saying Niagara 3 can be used in a four-socket glueless configuration). Each Niagara 3 chip has two 1.6GHz coherence controllers, which are connected to six coherence links. Each individual link consists of 14 unidirectional lanes that give the link a total bandwidth of 9.6Gb/s.

Memory: Also attached to the L2 is are two DDR3 memory controllers, each of which hosts two memory channels, for a total of four channels of DDR3.

PCIe and Ethernet: A PCIe controller supports two 5Gb/s PCIe ports, and an Ethernet controller supports two 1G/10G Ethernet ports.

IBM's POWER7

IBM's POWER7

At 1.2 billion transistors, IBM's new 45nm POWER7 processor is only a little bigger than Niagara 3, but it couldn't be more different. If Niagara 3 is an army of guys with shovels, POWER7 is a giant bulldozer.

POWER7 has only half the cores (eight) and one quarter of the threads (32) of Sun's chip, but that doesn't mean it falls short in the horsepower department. Each POWER7 core has a ton of very fast execution hardware, and the overall layout of the machine's very wide execution core is a straightforward evolution of the design that I first described in a series of articles on the PowerPC 970. (I talked more about POWER7's execution core in an earlier article comparing it to Intel's Tukwila Itanium.)

Where Niagra 3 keeps a large number of relatively weak cores busy by moving data onto and off of the chip using ample I/O resources, POWER7's approach to feeding a smaller number of much more robust cores is to cache large amounts of data on-chip so that the cores can grind through it in batches. This being the case, POWER7 has the most remarkable on-chip cache hardware of any processor on the market.

First in the chain is the 32KB L1 data cache, which has seen its latency cut in half, from four cycles in the POWER6 to two cycles in POWER7. Then there's the 256KB L2, the latency of which has dropped from 26 cycles in POWER6 to eight cycles in POWER7—that's quite a reduction, and will help greatly to mitigate the impact of the shared L3's increased latency.

The POWER7's L3 is its most unique feature, and, at 32MB, it's positively gigantic. IBM was able to cram such a large L3 onto the chip by making it out of embedded DRAM (eDRAM) instead of the usual SRAM. This decision cost the cache a few cycles of latency, but in exchange IBM got a 3.5x improvement in power efficiency and a 3x improvement in cache density. IBM has actually been talking up the use of eDRAM for on-chip cache since at least 2002, so in this regard POWER7 represents the fruition of years of work on this approach.

On the I/O side, POWER7 features two DDR3 memory controllers that can do up to 100GB/s total. The chip's SMP links (the same as Niagara's coherence links) can do 360GB/s (or almost 2.9Tb/s) of bandwidth, but this amount appears to be divided between internal and external SMP links. The chip doesn't contain the other I/O options—PCIe or Ethernet—that Niagara has.

Ultimately, these two server-class processors show that there are two very different ways to spend a billion transistors, and each design will be good for different applications. Sun's Niagara is aimed at networked server operations where lots of simultaneous, lightweight requests have to be serviced—databases, Web servers, and the like. In contrast, POWER7 has the horsepower to grind through a smaller number of more compute-intensive tasks at a high rate of speed. Both parts have their place in the server ecosystem of 2010.