Yeah, we hate patent trolls as much as anyone, but the Wall Street Journal says that a group of major tech companies have created a patent shield organization to fend off trolls that sounds to us like it'll eventually just be an even worse troll. The foundation, called the Allied Security Trust, will take $250,000 in buy-in money and $5M in escrow from member companies -- Verizon, Google, Ericsson, HP, and Cisco are apparently the founding corporations -- and use it to buy up patents to prevent future litigation. After a member company buys a patent, it will grant itself a non-exclusive license and sell it to AST, which will then license it to the other members. Of course, that means that AST will eventually own a large number of patents on common technology, which means it could very well become a aggressive patent litigant itself. Not to worry, says AST CEO Brian Hinman: the group will "never be an enforcement vehicle," and it isn't anyone's intention to "make money on the transactions." Sure, sure -- but any time players this big start putting this much potential cash on the line, we're not going to take random promises at face value. See you in Marshall, boys.

It's over before it even began. Gigabyte has agreed to publicly apologize to ASUS over that little Energy Processing Unit spat they've been having. As part of the reported agreement, Gigabyte will tone down its "defamatory" comments while maintaining a more subdued supposition that its own DES technology is superior to ASUS' EPU. See, no need to take the matter to court, no need to distract senior execs from executing the business plan. All it took was a little public humiliation (and soap) to make them pals again.