Tag Archive for: troops

Ukraine Crisis Becomes New Campaign Issue As Small-Town Troops Deploy To Europe

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As about 250 Iowans from National Guard companies in Mason City and Iowa City prepare to head to Poland, retired Admiral Mike Franken, a national security-minded candidate for Iowa’s U.S. Senate seat, took a break from the campaign trail to chat about Russia’s threat to Ukraine and explain why far-away Ukraine matters to small-town America. 

The spry veteran looked beyond the immediate Russian threat to Ukraine, saying, “I’m not so sure Russia’s primary objective has changed appreciably. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s perspective is that if America is diminished in the eyes of the world, then Russia is enhanced.” 

“Well, the U.S. isn’t diminished. The world knows our commitment to sound foreign policy objectives has never been stronger,” continued the lanky, wind-grizzled Iowan, “and we are leading with our best…those brave Iowans who are going to Europe are evidence that America is back, and our best days are ahead of us.”  

To Franken, Russia is in a quandary. “Look, Vladimir Putin opened with a weak hand by massing more than 180,000 troops around Ukraine,” said Franken. “That means he has about 90,000 troops available to assault a nation of 40 million. That’s big, but it is a paltry force compared to the Ukrainian defenders who have seen this played out before.” 

“He has a showy hand, playing before an international audience, but based on a dubious rationale in the first place” chuckled the former three-star admiral, “Putin has little more than bluster, and I’d expect his military commanders are telling him that. The logic behind an invasion is woefully faulty, even in Russian eyes. This won’t go well.” 

To Franken, Putin’s effort to suborn Ukraine is a final gasp of a spent society—an economy over-dependent upon resource extraction that is looking at demographic exhaustion within a decade. “The only way for Russia to look good right now is to try and make the U.S. look worse.”

Global Issues Matter in Iowa:

Franken is proud that Iowans in the 1133rd Transportation Company and the…

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Cloudflare rallies the troops to fight off another so-called patent troll – TechCrunch

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Nearly four years ago, we wrote about a battle between Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based internet security and performance company, and Blackbird Technologies, a firm that quickly amassed dozens of patents, then began using them to file dozens of patent infringement lawsuits against companies, including Cloudflare.

The suit was typical in every way, except how Cloudflare responded to it. Unlike many targets of similar lawsuits that opt to settle, Cloudflare fought back, asking very publicly for help in locating prior art that would not only invalidate the broad patent that Blackbird was using to sue Cloudflare, but to invalidate all of Blackbird’s patents. The public answered the call, and two years and 275 unique submissions later, the case against Cloudflare was dismissed and Blackbird’s operations were diminished.

One might surmise that given the stink that Cloudflare raised, other patent trolls might choose an easier target. Yet last month, Cloudflare was sued yet again, this time by Sable Networks, a “company that doesn’t appear to have operated a real business in nearly ten years — relying on patents that don’t come close to the nature of our business or the services we provide,” as says Doug Kramer, general counsel of CloudFlare.

Unsurprisingly, Cloudflare isn’t going to take this newest action lying down. This morning, after revealing the lawsuit publicly, it invited the engineering community to again “turn the tables” on patent trolls by inviting them to participate in a crowdsourced effort to find evidence of prior art to invalidate the “ancient, 20-year-old patents” that Cloudlflare says that Sable is is “trying to stretch . . . lightyears beyond what they were meant to cover.”

Cloudflare is also offering a $100,000 bounty to be split among entrants who provide the most useful prior-art references that can be used in challenging the validity of all of Sable’s patents, not just those being asserted against Cloudflare.

The idea is to deal a big enough blow to Sable that not only is its case against Cloudflare hobbled but also future cases against other entities.

“We feel fortunate that we didn’t run into one of these cases…

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