What if a police officer tapping on your car window asking for your license and registration became a relic of the past?

Welcome to hell, everyone.

Today the US Patent & Trademark Office published a pair of patent applications from Apple that relates to wireless power transfers and a unique scheduling system. A user will be able to set up wireless power transfers in a particular order, such as setting up the system so that your iPhone gets power first followed by your Apple Watch and then iPad.

Empirical research reveals three big problems with how patents are vetted. By Timothy B. Lee.

Tracing the connection between a ubiquitous paper product and the women’s liberation moment

Apple has just been ordered to pay $439.7 million for infringing on four patented technologies supposedly used in the company’s FaceTime and other iOS apps. The case itself is now five years old, but Apple has no intention of backing down just yet. The firm holding the patents in question, VirnetX, first filed the suit in 2010, eventually being awarded $368 million two years later. The firm then sued a second time in 2012, for which the decision was just announced and Apple says it’s appealing against it. At the time, Apple lost the case and filed for a mistrial.

Owners of an infamous licensing campaign have now really tried everything.

It’s not exactly graceful, but if you’re a fan of the phono jack, there’s good news: Microsoft may still be one, too. After all, even when it abandoned mobile phones, it kept the 3.5mm jack on them for all that time. A patent has been published featuring multiple possible ways to fit a 3.5mm headphone jack into spaces on a device less than 3.5mm wide. It would involve aligning the receiver and transmitting pins on one side of the jack while keeping the jack snug with an expandable membrane that is rendered flush when not in use.

Microsoft might be working to integrate the fingerprint sensor into the keyboard keys itself.

A jury in Dallas, Texas today awarded $10 million to iLife after finding that Nintendo of America infringed on iLife's motion-sensing accelerometer technology which the company used in the its Wii Remote controllers. The jury began deliberating on the federal lawsuit at the end of the day yesterday and returned to deliberate this morning. The verdict came back about 11 a.m.

Some of the latest moves and actions (and auctions) which pose a danger to GNU/Linux in mobile devices in particular

Apple patents way to call 911 emergency with fingerprint without assailant knowing. The patent abstract is as follows: “A device has a touch processing module that processes touch screen input to determine if the manner in which the input was entered indicates that the user intends for execution of a particular command. In one embodiment, the module may acquire fingerprint data from the user’s input and analyze the data to determine if the input was entered with a particular finger or finger sequence.

If you were to choose the perfect getaway car (and if you actually think about this, shame on you!), your choice would probably be something very fast, quiet and low to the ground, with darkened windows and night-vision lights to make it somewhat invisible at night. But what about one for those broad daylight Ocean’s 11-style heists? That list of choices probably wouldn’t include a Toyota Corolla … yet. Toyota just filed a patent on a cloaking device that may someday help a slick salesperson change your mind … for a cut of the bounty, of course.

Apple’s latest patent spat with Nokia resulted in a $2 billion up-front payment from the iPhone maker, a colossal sum that seems to indicate Apple was eager to avoid a protracted and ugly dispute.

A judge has ordered Apple to pay $506 million to the research arm of the University of Wisconsin. Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF, sued Apple in 2014, accusing its A7, A8, and A8X chips of infringing US Patent No. 5,781,752, which claims a type of "table based data speculation circuit." The following year after a trial, a Wisconsin jury found (PDF) that Apple had infringed the '752 patent and that it should pay $234 million in damages.

Apple has patented a process that would allow users to secretly call 911 using only their fingerprint. In a patent published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday, the tech giant outlined a feature that would allow users to call emergency services "when a conventional method may not be practical."

Matthew Prince knew what was coming. The CEO of Cloudflare, an internet security company and content delivery network in San Francisco, was behind his desk..

Shipping and Transit has a habit of dismissing cases when defendants fight back.

Kaleidoscopes had kids walking into walls.

Amazon’s long been a go-to for people to online price compare while shopping at brick-and-mortars. Now, a new patent granted to the company could prevent people from doing just that inside Amazon’s own stores. The patent, titled “Physical Store Online Shopping Control,” details a mechanism where a retailer can intercept network requests like URLs and search terms that happen on its in-store Wi-Fi, then act upon them in various ways.