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• Logic and lawyers

  22 mai 2013, par Mans — Law and liberty

  Reading about various patent litigation cases, I am struck by the frequency with which common logical fallacies such as the Appeal to Consequences are committed. We shall look at a couple of recent examples.

  In conjunction with the Federal Circuit ruling in CLS Bank v. Alice Corp., Judge Moore, joined by three others, filed a dissenting opinion wherein we find the following :

  I am concerned that the current interpretation of § 101, and in particular the abstract idea exception, is causing a free fall in the patent system. [...] And let’s be clear : if all of these claims, including the system claims, are not patent-eligible, this case is the death of hundreds of thousands of patents [...].

  A footnote adds :

  If the reasoning of Judge Lourie’s opinion were adopted, it would decimate the electronics and software industries. [...] There has never been a case which could do more damage to the patent system than this one.

  From the above, I get the impression Moore is primarily concerned with protecting the system, maintaining the status quo, less with ruling in line with the logical consequences of statute and case law. Furthermore, her argument rests on the premise that a weaker patent system would “decimate the industries,” a notion supported by little evidence, yet presented by Moore as an obvious truth. In fact, research exists suggesting that many important innovations are never actually patented. Let us also not overlook the fact that European companies do not appear to be suffering from the much weaker patent protection for software afforded there.

  Judge Moore’s reasoning can be summarised in three steps :

  1. Ruling this way could be disruptive to the patent system.
  2. The industry relies on patents.
  3. Therefore we must not rule this way.

  Not only does she commit the aforementioned logical fallacy, she does so by way of invalid arguments.

  The second example of such fallacious reasoning comes from the Supreme Court ruling in Bowman v. Monsanto :

  We have always drawn the boundaries of the exhaustion doctrine to exclude that activity [copying], so that the patentee retains an undiminished right to prohibit others from making the thing his patent protects. [...] That is because, once again, if simple copying were a protected use, a patent would plummet in value after the first sale of the first item containing the invention. The undiluted patent monopoly, it might be said, would extend not for 20 years (as the Patent Act promises), but for only one transaction. And that would result in less incentive for innovation than Congress wanted. Hence our repeated insistence that exhaustion applies only to the particular item sold, and not to reproductions.

  Here we find the same pattern repeated. The aim of the court appears to have been ensuring the continued validity of this class of patents, not reaching a logical conclusion regarding the question of infringement. Once again, we can break the reasoning down into three steps :

  1. A non-infringement ruling would weaken the patent.
  2. Weaker patents would provide less incentive for innovation.
  3. Therefore we must rule infringement.

  As in the first example, the argument presented in step two is at best questionable, and no supporting evidence is provided.

  These are, unfortunately, not the only examples of such fallacies ; one might even describe them as ubiquitous. Does a law education not include any material on logical reasoning ? Ought it not ? While we can never hope to find any kind of universal truth on which to base our laws, we should at least strive to make our system logically consistent. If we do not, notions such as fairness and justice lose their meanings.

• Imagick refresh

  25 septembre 2013, par Mikko Koppanen — Imagick

  After some hiatus I’ve been getting back on fixing bugs on Imagick and getting the code into more representable condition. This hiatus has been a result of busy work schedule and getting a new start-up running in Kuala Lumpur.

  While fixing a bug related to clone keyword I came across the following resource : http://www.rubblewebs.co.uk/imagick/. The page contains quite a nice collection of Imagick operations and is definitely worth checking out.

  On the other news, the development has been moved to Github. As I’ve been the most active developer of Imagick in the past years I decided to move the code to Github where rest of my projects are located : https://github.com/mkoppanen/imagick. For the past few days there has been quite a lot of development, mainly working on removing the excessive use of macros in the code to make things more readable and debuggable. This might be a good place to give thanks to Remi for fixing quite a lot of compile warnings and raising bugs regarding Fedora Packaging Policy. Most likely there will be a couple of beta releases in the near future.

  As mentioned in the previous post Windows builds are now available via http://windows.php.net and my builds provided here should be considered obsolete.

• Interfacing to an Xbox Optical Drive

  1er octobre 2013, par Multimedia Mike — xbox

  The next generation Xbox is going to hit the streets soon. But for some reason, I’m still interested in the previous generation’s unit (i.e., the original Xbox). Specifically, I’ve always wondered if it’s possible to use the original Xbox’s optical drive in order to read Xbox discs from Linux. I was never curious enough to actually buy an Xbox just to find out but I eventually came across a cast-off console on a recycle pile.

  I have long known that the Xbox has what appears to be a more or less standard optical drive with a 40-pin IDE connector. The only difference is the power adapter which I surmise is probably the easiest way to turn a bit of standardized hardware into a bit of proprietary hardware. The IDE and power connectors look like this :

  
  
  

  Thus, I wanted to try opening an Xbox and plugging the optical drive into a regular PC, albeit one that supports IDE cables, and allow the Xbox to supply power to the drive. Do you still have hardware laying around that has 40-pin IDE connectors ? I guess my Mac Mini PPC fits the bill, but I’ll be darned if I’m going to pry that thing open again. I have another IDE-capable machine buried in my closet, last called into service when I needed a computer with a native RS-232 port 3 years ago. The ordeal surrounding making this old computer useful right now can be another post entirely.

  Here’s what the monstrosity looks like thanks to characteristically short IDE cable lengths :

  
  

  

  Click for larger image

  
  

  Process :

  1. Turn on Xbox first
  2. Turn on PC

  Doing these things in the opposite order won’t work since the kernel really wants to see the drive when booting up. Inspecting the 'dmesg' log afterward reveals interesting items :
  

  <br />
hdd: PHILIPS XBOX DVD DRIVE, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive<br />
hdd: host max PIO5 wanted PIO255(auto-tune) selected PIO4<br />
hdd: UDMA/33 mode selected<br />
[...]<br />
hdd: ATAPI DVD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache<br />

  Why is that interesting ? When is the last time to saw disk devices prefixed by ‘hd’ rather than ‘sd’ ? Blast from the past. Oh, and the optical drive’s vendor string clearly indicates that this is an Xbox drive saying ‘hi !’.

  Time To Read
  When I first studied an Xbox disc in a normal optical drive, I noticed that I was able to read 6992 2048-byte sectors — about 14 MB of data — as reported by the disc table of contents (TOC). This is just enough data to play a standard DVD video animation that kindly instructs the viewer to please use a proper Xbox. At this point, I estimated that there must be something special about Xbox optical drive firmware that knows how to read alternate information on these discs and access further sectors.

  I ran my TOC query tool with an Xbox Magazine demo disc in the optical drive and it reported substantially more than 6992 sectors, enough to account for more than 2 GB of data. That’s promising. I then tried running 'dd' against the device and it was able to read… about 14 MB, an exact quantity of bytes that, when divided by 2048 bytes/sector, yields 6992 sectors.

  Future (Past ?) Work
  Assuming Google is your primary window into the broader internet, the world is beginning to lose its memory of things pertaining to the original Xbox (Microsoft’s naming scheme certainly doesn’t help searches). What I’m saying is that it can be difficult to find information about this stuff now. However, I was able to learn that a host needs to perform a sort of cryptographic handshake with the drive at the SCSI level before it is allowed to access the forbidden areas of the disc. I think. I’m still investigating this and will hopefully post more soon.