Month: February 2016

(credit: Marvel)

Mova is not a name that many might have heard of, but the facial animation technology has been used extensively in many blockbuster movies, most recently the record-breaking Deadpool. And according to The New York Times, Mova is now sitting in the middle of a legal battle.

Californian technology incubator Rearden has countersued Shenzhenshi Haitiecheng Science and Technology Company, after the Chinese company sued Rearden the February before. Both entities are claiming ownership over Mova, which has been used in movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and even Gravity.

The New York Times goes into some detail about the convoluted history of the technology. Steve Perlman, who founded Rearden, had also founded a gaming start-up called OnLive, which he merged with Mova. After leaving OnLive in 2012, he attempted to acquire Mova from the company’s controlling investor. Here is where it gets complicated. As Perlman explained in the legal suit, he asked an employee named Greg LaSalle to manage the process, only to have the latter sell the assets to Digital Domain, which is in turn associated with Shenzhenshi.

(credit: ColorPencilFun)

German police are now permitted to infect a suspect's computers, and mobile devices with special trojan software to monitor communications made with the systems, the country's interior ministry has confirmed.

The malware can only be deployed when lives are at risk, or the state is threatened, and will require a court order to allow police officers to infect the machines of alleged criminals.

However, the government-developed malware must not be used to monitor other activities on the system, or to change data or programs. It follows a decision by Germany's Constitutional Court in 2008, which ruled that the an individual's private life should have absolute protection, and that eavesdropping must be limited to a person's communications with the outside world.

(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns @ Flickr)

Want another reason to be skeptical about the idea of connected cars? Here's one: when Nissan put together the companion app for its Leaf electric vehicle—the app will turn the climate control on or off—it decided not to bother requiring any kind of authentication. When a Leaf owner connects to their car via a smartphone, the only information that Nissan's APIs use to target the car is its VIN—the requests are all anonymous. Those are the findings of Troy Hunt and Scott Helme, who published their findings on Wednesday. Thursday, Nissan took the service offline.

Hunt started poking into NissanConnect after running a workshop in Norway in January. Norway is overflowing with EVs, and one of them belonged to an attendee. "What the workshop attendee ultimately discovered was that not only could he connect to his LEAF over the internet and control features independently of how Nissan had designed the app, he could control other people’s LEAFs." Upon discovering that his friend Helme also owned a Leaf, the pair began to investigate just how insecure NissanConnect was.

In a lengthy post describing the details of the security flaw, Hunt also lays out a timeline as well as the ethical justification for doing so. He first contacted Nissan to alert it to the problem on January 23rd, describing the company as "receptive" and their behavior as "exemplary" during the process. But it didn't move with sufficient speed for Hunt, as he received an e-mail from a Canadian Leaf owner last week about the issue last week. He let Nissan know he was planning on going public, doing so on Wednesday.