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[Commentary] Technology companies may have backed the President’s executive actions to curb patent trolling. But my first thought when reading about the move was that Obama was merely paying lip service to the technology community over an issue that cuts to the heart of innovation and job creation.

Obama had failed, I thought, to go far enough. And watching White House press secretary Jay Carney hold up a picture of a crossed-out toy troll in a superhero outfit under the slogan “innovation, not litigation” didn’t help lead me to believe otherwise. Granted, I say this as someone who believes software patents should be abolished given that technology often becomes obsolete in the time it takes to be granted a patent. Nevertheless, I was convinced that others in the Valley would agree with me. This wasn’t enough, they’d tell me. The administration had to — and could — do more. I started with someone who doesn’t have proverbial skin in the patent game: my colleague at Stanford Law School, Mark Lemley. He’s among those at the forefront of the patent reform debate, and he fully disagreed with me. In an e-mail exchange, he told me the administration’s move was far more than lip service. Then he went on, praising the White House and writing that it had “done a good job of targeting real problems without attacking the patent system as a whole.” It’s little wonder a cheer is going up from the Valley for Obama’s proposals. So, let’s hope that Congress does as the President asked. If he won’t get rid of patents entirely in this fast-paced world of innovation, the least he can do is put the patent trolls out of business.

Landover Wireless, a New York-based wireless broadband company, is buying 45 low-power television stations and construction permits for seven others from Mako Communications and related companies for $46.5 million. Landover is developing a national 4G mobile broadband network.

The Canadian privacy commissioner and 36 other data protection authorities raised privacy concerns about Google Glass in an open letter to CEO Larry Page. Jennifer Stoddart, Canada's privacy commissioner, signed the letter. Co-signers include Europe's privacy watchdog the Article 29 Working Party and as well as the privacy commissioners of New Zealand and Australia and their counterparts in Mexico, Israel, and Switzerland, among others.

"We are writing to you as data protection authorities to raise questions from a privacy perspective about the development of Google Glass," the authorities wrote. One of their main concerns with Google Glass is that people can use the frames to film and record others, the letter said. "Fears of ubiquitous surveillance of individuals by other individuals, whether through such recordings or through other applications currently being developed, have been raised. Questions about Google's collection of such data and what it means in terms of Google's revamped privacy policy have also started to appear," they wrote.

Whenever discussion starts about how to hide from the tracking code that follows users around the Web to serve them targeted ads, recommendations soon pile up for a browser add-on called Ghostery.

It blocks tracking code, noticeably speeds up how quickly pages load as a result, and has roughly 19 million users. Yet few of those who advocate Ghostery as a way to escape the clutches of the online ad industry realize that the company behind it, Evidon, is in fact part of that selfsame industry. Evidon helps companies that want to improve their use of tracking code by selling them data collected from the eight million Ghostery users that have enabled a data-sharing feature in the tool. That makes Evidon, which bought Ghostery in 2010, something of an anomaly in the complex world of online advertising. Whether in Congress or at the Web standards body W3C, debates over online privacy typically end up with the ad industry and privacy advocates facing off along clearly demarcated lines. Evidon straddles both sides of that debate.