Techwatch

Don’t panic – this wasn’t deliberate sabotage. Rather it was the inadvertent result of Microsoft’s own security process.

For several years, Microsoft has bundled together system updates and patches for its Windows operating systems to be released to a schedule, rather than them being made available individually as soon as they are ready.

It’s a strategy that has grown out of requests by the IT departments of large businesses. They found it difficult to deal with patches coming out unpredictably and being installed by users, who then needed support. When patching runs to a known schedule, IT departments can switch resources to the relevant helpdesk on the day patches are released.

The downside to this, of course, is that patches need a reboot. Distributing them all at the same time means a high percentage of the world’s Windows-based computers will be rebooted on the same day.

When a Skype-enabled PC is rebooted, of course, it needs to reconnect to Skype in order to be ready to receive incoming calls.

Skype itself is generally quite robust, as it uses a peer-to-peer networking system to distribute the network load between its users. Unfortunately, in August, this fell apart badly. Skype’s own network suffered from the large number of simultaneous connection requests, and, as many users were in the process of rebooting, there were not enough distributed resources to help out. The whole system fell over and took a couple of days to recover.

Skype has made some changes internally to its network allocation algorithms to try and prevent this happening again. If nothing else, it makes you appreciate the robustness of the traditional telephone networks – a single supplier sending out a system patch would be unlikely to bring down a major global network.

More litigation for Qualcomm

Chip-maker Qualcomm is facing renewed legal troubles over patent licensing in the US.

Following a successful suit by chip-maker Broadcom for patent infringement in May, Qualcomm now faces a spat with Nokia over licensing payments.

Qualcomm is known in the mobile industry for being very aggressive over its licensing. It claims many CDMA technologies as its own, which has resulted in delays to 3G as European companies tried to find alternative ways of achieving the same results without being indebted to the US firm. Now Nokia is baulking at the reported £225 million a year in licensing that it pays to Qualcomm.

Nokia now has a stronger patent portfolio than it did when it signed its last agreement with Qualcomm. That expired in April, and now the company believes it should be paying significantly less as Qualcomm relies more heavily on Nokia’s patents to make commercially viable products.

Nokia makes friends

Unfortunately for the old school punks among us, Nokia’s new MOSH system doesn’t have anything to do with slamdancing or crowd surfing. It stands for MObilise and SHare, and is yet another user-generated publishing site.

It’s still in beta, which means you have to register to see anything other than the sign-in screen. Once in, MOSH is a combined blogging and content publishing system; you can upload video clips, pictures, games or just your thoughts, with a rating system that makes your uploads more visible depending on your site activity and ratings from other users.

It is supposedly handset agnostic. Nokia says it is happy for applications from other manufacturer’s phones to be uploaded – though clearly (at least while it sits within the Nokia.com domain) it will appeal predominantly to users of Nokia hardware.

Nokia is apparently using “safeharbour” rules for the site; by not actively monitoring the content itself, it can claim carrier status and so not be held responsible if and when users put up material in copyright – though it does provide links to report such content, and will remove it when it is publicised. Some commercial games have already been posted and removed, so the system appears to be working.

The main question, though, is what does this site offer that all of the other community content sites don’t? I’m finding it hard to answer that. Other than the Nokia branding and this being one of the first useful .mobi sites, there doesn’t appear to be much that you can’t find elsewhere.

Juniper Research claims that the revenues from social networking sites will rise from around £285 million this year to £2.85 billion in 2012, which would explain Nokia’s desire to grab a piece of the action, although it is traditionally difficult to actually make any money out of such social networking sites as advertising revenue barely covering the costs of bandwidth and servers for the video content.

Faking it

It’s common enough to see fake batteries and accessories over here in various dodgy local markets, but in China they are having trouble with entire handsets being counterfeited.

Brands such as SnogErisscon, SunyElicsson and NOKIAVERTU are being freely sold in Chinese phone shops. According to Chinese news site Sohu.com, 23.34 million counterfeit handsets (around 25 per cent of all sales) were sold in the first half of this year and the authorities are starting to take action.

That’s actually a pretty incredible figure. Counterfeiting items such as clothing, or adding a major manufacturer’s name to basic electrical goods such as radios, TVs and batteries is pretty simple. But mobile handsets remain very complex pieces of equipment costing serious money to develop. Even if you buy in a GSM module to which you attach a simple processor with display and keypad – as some of the smaller Chinese manufacturers do – there are thousands of man hours needed to write the user interface software and to try to make the phone look at least superficially like the one it is supposed to be copying.

Many of these counterfeits rely on looks alone, so the functionality is quite basic – which is perhaps why we don’t have the same problems with fake phones over here.