Insights For Success

Strategy, Innovation, Leadership and Security

Intellectual Property

Blackberry sues Ryan Seacrest's company

technologyEdward Kiledjian
Image by bigpresh under creative commons license

Image by bigpresh under creative commons license

You may not know this but Ryan Seacrest is the founder of an iPhone accessory company called Typo. Typo designed and sells an add-on iPhone physical keyboard which Blackberry claims is a copy of its own proprietary design.

Here is a picture of the Typo keyboard installed on an iPhone 5s

Here is a picture of the Typo keyboard installed on an iPhone 5s

A report by CIO magazine says Blackberry has submitted a request to the US District Court in Northern California to block Typo from "making, using, offering to sell, or selling within the United States, or importing into the United States, the Typo Keyboard.”

Blackberry has said it will "vigorously" defend its unique keyboards intellectual property and of course Typo has said ”BlackBerry’s claims against [us] lack merit and we intend to defend the case vigorously.”

The first shipment of Typo keyboards is already sold out and new orders are expected to be delivered in March (each kit costs $99). If you own an iPhone 5s, be aware that you lose the fingerprint capabilities when this case is installed. You can order one directly from Typo keyboard if interested (link).

Employees leaking information to competitors

InfoSecEdward Kiledjian

As an infosec leader working for a large multinational, a lot of risks keep me up at night. Most execs still believe (mistakenly) that the biggest risks come from the outside. Imagine my interest when I learned that AMD is suing 6 former employees because it believes they leaked over 100,000 documents ("trade secret materials relating to developing technology") to NVIDIA.

The complaint says these employees took the info with them when they switched employers. AMD claims to have uncovered evidence of their claim using “forensically revealed data”. As expected, the company intends to aggressively protect its Intellectual Property using litigation and the court system.

 

SilentCircle protects you from espionage or government monitoring

SecurityEdward Kiledjian

I not only work in Information Security, I love it. In the era of “everything digital”, nothing else is as important. Well imagine my excitement when I learned of a newly formed company, called SilentCircle, which was promising a very secure yet easy to use communication product.

The company

The company says that it was started by 2 former Nacy Seals and the world-renown creator of PGP, Phil Zimmermann. It wanted to create a military grade encryption product for securing phone calls (VOIP), text messages, emails and video. It’s goal was to create a secure product, with the ease of use of an iPhone app (all for $20 per subscriber per month).

Services include:

 

  • Encrypted voice
  • Encrypted text
  • Encrypted Video
  • Encrypted email
  • Ability to call anyone (non subscriber). Your session is encrypted until the SilentCircle servers

 

The need

Anyone with a public profile has a need for secure communication. Secure from whom? Secure from competitors, government agencies and foreign nations.

How

The design of the solution has been well thought out and all encryption is performed on the end device. Once a communication stream is completed, the keys used to encrypt that communication are securely deleted making future decoding more difficult. They store only minimal system logs (required to maintain the service) and these logs are stored in Canada and Switzerland (who have stricter privacy laws).

They offer a service called Burn Notice which automatically destroys the sent information (photo, message, email, etc) after a pre-determine timeframe.

Resistance

Current US wiretapping laws do not apply to VOIP but some officials are pushing to have these older laws amended to include VOIP. It is conceivable that future laws may make this type of service illegal or highly regulated but [for now] you can rest assured that your discussing with nana about her top secret apple pie recipe will stay confidential.

Verdict

Since I haven’t tested the service, I can’t vouch for how it will actually work but it looks great on paper. If you are concerned about eavesdropping or espionage, take a look at this new tool.

Samsung accuses LG employees of theft

SecurityEdward Kiledjian
The Associated Press is reporting that 11 people have been charged with Intellectual Property theft from Samsung related to its advanced OLED TV technology from  Samsung. 6 of those people have been identified as LG employees.
LG has officially denied these claims but Samsung is sticking to its guns and claiming “systematically stole its display technology and poached Samsung employees.”
A good reminder to business managers to evaluate their Intellectual Property protection systems and risk management frameworks.