Samsung and Apple Ready for Mediation

Mass media revealed that the companies have agreed to attend a mediation session in February before meeting in court in March. Apple and Samsung CEOs have agreed to attend the session with in-house attorneys only, after their legal teams had met in the beginning of January to discuss settlement options. The companies didn’t reveal the details of the meeting, but it looks like they really want to end the silly court actions started by Steve Jobs.

Apple was going to patent troll Samsung out of the market by any means, being insulted that Samsung had stolen Apple’s idea which the latter stole from Nokia for a touch screen smartphone. This battle involved many court actions all over the world that has ultimately failed to stop either Apple or Samsung producing their devices. The funniest part is that Apple’s only real win owed to a patent of inventing the rounded rectangle, something that is being appealed. Within the last 2 years, the parties have gone to trial twice, and US juries have awarded Apple a total of about $930 million, but European courts didn’t favor Apple.

The industry experts admit that although two high profile leaders meeting does bode well, they don’t believe the companies will come to an arrangement. The situation has reached a point where they have been fighting so long that they might have already forgotten why. Apparently, the only winners in this war are corporate legal teams, who have no reason to stop it.

French & Arabs Upset with US Security Obsession

An oncoming deal between the United Arab Emirates to purchase a couple of intelligence satellites from France worth $930 million seems to be in trouble after the National Security Agency tried to put backdoors into the technology. Two military observation satellites contained a couple of specific US-supplied components providing backdoors to the highly secure information transmitted to the ground station.

The Arabs have asked the French to come up with some components that won’t leak their plans to the US, saying that they would rather prefer Russian or Chinese firms to take over the project. Actually, only the US believes that Chinese and Russians are spying on people.

So, the United Arab Emirates is ready to scrap the whole deal. Apparently, the country is hugely miffed that it bought French and found itself spied on by the US. In reality, the French only won the deal because the American State Department had been such an arse about how the system could be used.

In the meantime, the UAE likes Russian technology a lot - for example, it used the GLONASS space-based navigation system fitted as a redundancy feature on a Western European weapon system. As for France, defence experts can’t find out why the French were using the American technology in the first place.

Media reports say that France operates the Pleiades spy satellite in a kind of a critical piece of the country's sovereignty. Taking into account that core competence, it seemed weird that France would use American technology, though there’s an agreement between Paris and Washington over transfer of capabilities.

Finally, the deal is also problematic because Israel may want to limit the ability of the system to work. The matter is that the French satellites sold to the Arabs, a very high optical resolution and encrypted code may be used to guide a cruise missile to a target in Iran.