that Eolas expected to pay a substantial dividend as a result; the exact amount and terms of the settlement were not disclosed. In October 2009, Eolas sued a number of large corporations for infringement of the same patent. The 22 sued corporations include Adobe, Amazon.com, Apple, Argosy Publishing, Blockbuster, CDW Corp., Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, The Go Daddy Group, Google, J.C. Penney Co. Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., New Frontier Media Inc., Office Depot Inc., Perot Systems Corp., Playboy Enterprises International Inc., Rent-A-Center Inc., Staples Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., Yahoo! Inc., and YouTube LLC. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing in Computerworld's opinion section, called Eolas a patent troll after these lawsuits were initiated. As of June 2011, a number of these companies, including Texas Instruments, Oracle and JPMorgan Chase have signed licensing deals with Eolas, while others are still litigating. In February 2012, a Texas jury found that some of the claims in two of Eolas' patents were invalid after testimony from several defendants including Tim Berners-Lee and Pei-Yuan Wei, credited as creator of the Viola browser. The testimony professed that the Viola browser included Eolas' claimed plugin invention before their conception date (September 7, 1993). There is "substantial evidence that Viola was publicly known and used" before the plaintiffs' alleged conception date, it added. The ruling effectively ended a pending lawsuit against Yahoo, Google, Amazon and JC Penney. On July 23, 2013, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has nationwide jurisdiction, affirmed a Texas federal court which had ruled in July 2012 that several claims relating to the two patents in the suit were invalid, a ruling which Eolas had appealed. After the US Patent Office considered the evidence asserted at the 2012 trial, including Viola, it granted Eolas a new patent in November 2015 with claims which generally cover cloud computing on the Web. Eolas then filed a new lawsuit against Google, Amazon and Walmart, which is currently underway in the Northern District of California. Effects on other browsers In February 2006, Microsoft modified its Internet Explorer web browser to attempt to side-step the Eolas patent. The change, first discussed in 2003, requires users to click once on an ActiveX control to "activate" it before they could use its interface. The specific message is "Click to activate this control", shown as a tooltip when the cursor is held over the embedded object. However,