Author: Serkadis

A week after its introduction, Facebook Home arrived for a handful of Android phones on Friday. Prior to using the Facebook-centric launcher, I didn’t think I’d personally see any value in it. After installing it on my Galaxy Note 2 and using it for a while, however, my skepticism was diminished and 24 hours later, Facebook Home still resides on my Android smartphone.

The novelty could wear off, of course, and heavy users of Android widgets won’t care for Facebook Home since you can’t use them with the launcher. However, the software is well designed, shows no signs of lag — at least on my handset — and already had an effect that Facebook is aiming for: More engagement.

I know I used Facebook more in the past day then I typically do because it’s almost addicting to flip through status updates on the lock screen, like them and post comments. But if you just want the new Chat Heads feature without Facebook Home, an updated Facebook Messenger app is all you need; it works on Android 2.2 and up.

If you do install Facebook Home, let me pass on two quick tips. First, some of the full-screen photos on your lock screen may look pixelated and you may only see part of the image. You can tap and hold any status update photo on the home screen and it will reduce the picture so you can see all of it, making it clearer. Second, to keep Facebook Home but not use it as your default launcher, you not only have to clear it as the default launcher, but also go into Facebook Home settings and disable it there. If you don’t, you’ll see Facebook Home every time you unlock your phone.

Facebook is concentrating on smartphones right now, but I suspect support for Android tablets will soon follow. And when it does, it would be wise for Facebook to focus on smaller slates. This week, new data surfaced showing that five of the top six Android tablets all have 7-inch screens. These five account for nearly a third of the entire Android tablet market, with devices from Samsung, Amazon and Google (made by Asus) topping the list. While the usability of Facebook Home might have surprised me, the success of small slates doesn’t: I saw the light in early 2011 when I dumped the original iPad for a smaller Samsung Galaxy Tab.

These days, my Galaxy Note 2 doubles as a small slate while pulling duty as a smartphone. I like the combination of large screen with support for cellular voice calls. That’s why I’m disappointed that the U.S. version of the new Galaxy Note 8.0 was stripped of its voice calling support. The international model keeps this function. Still, I’m intrigued in the new $399 tablet, mainly because of the S-Pen support — something I didn’t think I’d like at first, but eventually came to appreciate — and the ability to run two apps as the same time on the 8-inch display.

I may take a run to a nearby retailer to get some hands on time with the Galaxy Note 8.0 and share impressions next week. For now, take a look at this overview from nearby Philly native, Brad Linder. He posted a video look on his Liliputing site and while the slate experienced some hiccups, looks to be a nice combo of hardware and software.

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Say what you will about Rackspace as a cloud computing provider and OpenStack steward, but don’t say the company isn’t fighting the good fight against patent trolls. Its latest effort is a challenge to the validity of a patent that an entity called Rotatable Technologies is using to sue, well, just about anyone developing mobile applications that take advantage of a rotating screen display. Yes, the same rotating screen display that’s been a staple of smartphones since the iPhone first graced consumers in 2007.

Rackspace General Counsel Alan Schoenbaum detailed the legal challenge in a blog post on Friday. You can read the details there and in its petition to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, but the gist is that Rotatable sued Rackspace (as well as Apple, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Target, Whole Foods Market and numerous other large companies) and then told Rackspace it was ready to settle the claim for $75,000, possibly less. Classic troll behavior.

And even though its USPTO challenge will end up costing much more than $75,000, Rackspace decided to stick it to Rotatable and stick up for everyone else who has developed a rotatable mobile app. Some already have been sued and others might be, and all they did was utilize a feature of the operating system their apps run on. It’s the equivalent of suing Microsoft Office users for infringement if you thought Office had infringed your patent.

As Schoenbaum explained during a phone call, this is standard operating procedure in patent troll cases. Because of a legal theory called patent exhaustion, patent holders can only sue one party in the chain of infringement (e.g., you can sue Apple for using the rotatable screen technique in iOS or you can sue anyone who’s building apps using it). And it’s often a lot more effective to shake down lots of users — be they individuals, small businesses or corporations — for relatively small settlements than it is to target one or two big companies.

Small businesses, especially, are often ”perfectly situated sitting ducks for lawsuits,” Schoenbaum said. However, he added, “[Rotatable] probably shouldn’t have started with us.”

Going on the offensive against trolls

This isn’t the first time a large company has decided to stick to a patent troll in the name of justice rather than settle, though. Last week, Rackspace decided to sue a troll called Parallel Iron that claimed Rackspace committed patent infringement by using the Hadoop Distributed File System. As part of its lawsuit against Parallel Iron, Rackspace is seeking a declaratory judgment that the patents involved don’t actually relate to Hadoop — a decision that could come in handy for other Parallel Iron defendants such as Facebook, Amazon and Oracle. (IP Nav, an alleged troll associated with Parallel Iron, gives its account of the situation here.)

In 2012, Cisco, Netgear and Motorola joined forces (albeit unsuccessfully in the end) to file a federal racketeering complaint against a patent troll demanding payments from hotels and restaurants for using WiFi.

And, of course, there are some more-defensive attempts to tackle the problem of patent trolls, such as Google’s decision to pledge non-assertion for a number of patents related to its MapReduce technology. That decision essentially freed up anyone to use the processing components (but, obviously, not the storage component) of the Hadoop platform without fear of infringement claims from anybody.

Covering the Rackspace-Parallel Iron news, I suggested more large companies serious about fighting the alleged scourge of patent trolling do exactly what Rackspace is doing with Rotatable — and it’s possible that might happen. Rackspace is attacking Rotatable thanks to a provision of recent patent reform legislation that lets third parties (like Rackspace in this case, because it’s not claiming any patent ownership) to challenge the validity of a patent based solely on the existence of prior art. Prior art that would refute the novelty of a patent has historically been difficult to track down, but new tools such as Google Patent Search are making it an easier process.

In this case, Schoenbaum told me, the amount of prior art available made it a perfect opportunity to take advantage of the new law.

However, he noted, just because the recent patent reform legislation was a step forward, that doesn’t mean the system is perfect. Patent examiners are still overloaded with applications, and in difficult-to-parse software and business-process patents there’s probably a bias to grant rather than deny. He’d also like to (and is optimistic he will) see Congress take up patent reform once again to give end-users (like mobile developers in this case, or WiFi users in the Cisco case) immunity against patent infringement suits.

Whatever happens in Washington, though, it appears Rackspace will keep on taking the fight to patent trolls. Just like Red Hat before it, new open source champion Rackspace wants to do what it can to defend the open source community, Schoenbaum said. “We want to start a movement.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Denys Prykhodov.

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Say, do you use WordPress? Button down the hatches and check your patches. A new brute-force attack is underway across the Internet. We know from first-hand experience. BetaNews took some heavy fire earlier today. Hackers use a botnet to hit blogs with fast-fire log-in attempts, seeking to snag passwords. The initial objective is to add more numbers to the botnet.

Brute-force attempts aren’t all that uncommon, but this one is generating a fair bit of attention, with some reports that the core botnet is 90,000 computers and growing and an escalating number of attempted logins, too. It’s all a guessing game really. Attempt enough logins and some will succeed, revealing passwords.

Daniel Cid, Sucuri CTO, took a look at his company’s server logs to assess if reports of increased brute-force attacks might be true. He explains:

We were seeing 30 to 40 thousand attacks per day the last few months. In April 2013, it increased to 77,000 per day on average, reaching more than 100,000 attempts per day in the last few days. That means that the number of brute force attempts more than tripled. This sharp increase would lead us to believe that there is some reality to these reports.

Sucuri secures and also cleans up websites, including those running WordPress.

CloudFlare CEO Matthew Price observes: “One of the concerns of an attack like this is that the attacker is using a relatively weak botnet of home PCs in order to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack. These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic”.

CloudFlare offers services for improving a website’s performance, reach and security, and like Sucuri, is in a unique front-line position to observe the brute-force attacks.

Hostgator’s Sean Valant says that 90,000 PCs make up the botnet attacking WordPress sites. “Symptoms of this attack are a very slow backend on your WordPress site, or an inability to login. In some instances your site could even intermittently go down for short periods”.

Default account “Admin” is the target, and Valant rightly advises to “change the password to something that meets the security requirements specified on the WordPress website“.

The Webhost for my personal domains has posted no support docs about the log-in attempts. But we have first-hand experience here at BetaNews.

Eric Steil, BetaNews server administrator, describes what happened today:

Around 5:30 AM (ET) this morning, I got the nagios alert that one of the servers wasn’t responding to HTTP.  I logged in to the server and saw that although the load was really high, there wasn’t actually much odd about the open connections or database (as usually is the case when something stops responding to HTTP).

I checked out the access logs and saw a large number of POST requests to wp-login.php from numerous IPs, without a corresponding GET requests (you normally GET the form the POST it when it submits).  On a hunch, I blocked access to the file and system load went down and Apache started responding again, so I went back to sleep.

This morning I did some searches and saw it was a widespread problem, not just localized to our servers. We still have it blocked, and the bots still poke it occasionally to see if it’s back.

The attempts failed here. You might not be so lucky. At the least, change your passwords.

Now.

Photo Credit: Gunnar Assmy/Shutterstock

This week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we talk about the launch of Facebook Fone and my own horrible attempts at becoming a bitcoin billionaire.

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