Notes from an FBI special agent investigating a bomb-threat extortion attempt against Steve Jobs in 1985. The government released Steve Jobs’ FBI file Thursday, including details of a background check done for a presidential appointment in 1991 and a bomb threat against him in 1985. The background check for an appointment to the president’s Export Council, under former President George H. W. Bush, included interviews with friends and colleagues to make sure there was nothing in Jobs’ background...  show all text

Depending on the lighting of your environment, a 3-D display could render differently. Image: Free Patents Online In a recent patent application, Apple shows how an immersive, adjustable 3-D user interface could be implemented in future mobile devices. The patent, titled “Three Dimensional User Interface Effects on a Display by Using Properties of Motion,” illustrates how eye-tracking and other sensor data could be used to display a 3-D user interface that automatically calibrates itself to a u...  show all text

Dave Raggett, speaking here at an internet conference in 2008, invented the embed tag and testified Wednesday against a patent on the web's interactivity. Credit: IOT2008/Flickr TYLER, Texas — The Eolas patent case, just submitted to a jury in the “rose capital” of Texas boils down to one question: “Who was first?” The answer to that question will determine whether the rich, interactive web as we know it is owned by the world or whether that core technology is actually owned by an obscure compa...  show all text

Google, Amazon and Adobe defeated a patent claiming ownership over online video, image rotation and search auto-complete. TYLER, Texas — After threatening web companies for more than a decade, Michael Doyle and his patent-holding company Eolas Technologies — named after the Irish word for knowledge — may be finished. An eight-member federal jury in East Texas deliberated Thursday for just a few hours before concluding that all of Eolas’ asserted claims of ownership to technology allowing access...  show all text

Powered by nothing more than puffs of air, robots molded from paper and silicone rubber can bend, twist, grip and even lift more than 100 times their weight. The pneumatic prototypes aren’t as advanced as their metallic brothers, and the “soft” robots contain no electronics yet. But their creators, funded by Darpa, imagine applications where a soft-bot might be the best tool. “If you want to go through a winding tube or rubble or some other tough environment that’s difficult to reach, you need ...  show all text

Here's a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement below becomes true. IV = III + III Did you get it? I

Photo: ISAF The huge wargame happening off the Atlantic coast this week isn’t just a test of the Navy and Marines’ ability to storm a beach from the sea. It’s the first big test for the Marines’ communications system of the future, one that enables commanders to send text, data, video and voice messages to jarheads ashore from way, way out in the open water. If it doesn’t work, the Navy and Marines might have to rewrite their plans to move their bases out to the sea. The Harris radios Marines c...  show all text

Writer William Gibson talks about his new book Distrust That Particular Flavor and other fascinating subjects in this episode of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Photo: Michael O'Shea Few things seem more pathetic than a science fiction writer who pines for the “good old days.” Just a whiff of that sort of crippling nostalgia sets off a red alert in the crackling mind of William Gibson, the novelist who coined the term “cyberspace” and is known for his piercing insights into what the fut...  show all text

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee addresses the media during the International World Wide Web conference in Hyderabad, India, Thursday, March 31, 2011. Photo: Mahesh Kumar A/AP The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, testified in a courtroom Tuesday for the first time in his life. The web pioneer flew down from Boston, near where he teaches at MIT, to an eastern Texas federal court to speak to a jury of two men and six women about the early days of the web. His trip is part of  show all text

The mother of all patent troll trials unfolds in Texas where Google, Amazon and Adobe are fighting a patent claiming ownership over online video, image rotation and search auto-complete. We explain and start a series. The city of Tyler, Texas is better known as the nation’s “rose capital” than as a hotspot of the technology industry. It’s a quiet, conservative city of about 100,000, full of wide streets and big trucks. This week, though, Tyler is the site of a remarkable battle over the history...  show all text