Month: April 2016

Enlarge (credit: GHETTO UBER DRIVER)

Late Thursday, the lawyer representing a class-action of Uber drivers e-mailed members of the press to say that two pivotal labor cases have been settled.

"We are very pleased to announce that Uber has agreed to a historic settlement of the claims we have brought in California and Massachusetts for misclassifying its drivers as independent contractors," Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney representing the drivers, e-mailed Ars in a statement.

"Under this agreement, Uber has agreed to pay up to $100 million to resolve these claims and will implement a number of significant policy changes."

(credit: Wikimedia)

New York Presbyterian Hospital has agreed to a $2.2 million settlement with the federal government over the “egregious disclosure” of patients’ health information, the Department of Health & Human Services announced Thursday. The violations occurred after the hospital gave the ABC reality TV show, “NY Med,” starring Dr. Mehmet Oz, “unfettered access to its healthcare facility.”

“This case sends an important message that OCR [the HHS Office for Civil Rights] will not permit covered entities to compromise their patients’ privacy by allowing news or television crews to film the patients without their authorization,” Jocelyn Samuels, OCR’s Director, said in a statement.

In addition to the hefty settlement, HHS added that it will monitor the hospital for two years to ensure that it is protecting its patients' privacy appropriately.

Microsoft posted revenue of $20.5 billion in the third quarter of its 2016 financial year, down 6 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Operating income was $5.3 billion, a 20 percent drop, net income was $3.8 billion, down 25 percent, and earnings per share were $0.47, a 23 percent decline.

Over the past few quarters, Microsoft and other tech companies have reported significant impact from the high value of the US dollar, and have offered equivalent financial figures that show what their numbers would have been had the value of foreign earnings not been eroded by this conversion. This currency impact was estimated as reducing revenue by about $0.8 billion. The company also reports that there was a $1.5 billion impact from a combination of revenue deferrals due to Windows 10 upgrades and restructuring charges. Excluding this impact, and assuming constant currency values, the company says that its revenue was $22.1 billion (up 5 percent), operating income was $6.8 billion (up 10 percent), and net income was $5.0 billion (up 6 percent).

The commercial cloud annualized revenue run rate—the forecast number that former Steve Ballmer dismissed as "bullshit"—crept up to $10.0 billion; three months ago, it was estimated at $9.4 billion.

AMD CEO Lisa Su confirmed that this announcement slide speaks to three semi-custom wins in all. We know Sony is getting at least one of those thanks to PlayStation Neo news leaks. Who nabbed the other two? (credit: AMD)

During AMD's Q1 2016 earnings call on Thursday, executives from AMD estimated a 15 percent revenue increase in Q2 2016, plus or minus 3 points, and they cited three semi-custom system-on-chip (SOC) "wins" as the "larger driver" for that revenue. AMD estimates that these SOCs will bring in $1.5 billion in revenue "over the next three or four years." At least one of those three SOC deliveries will begin "ramping" in the second half of this year, with all of those SOCs launching by 2017.

The reason that news is interesting is because AMD's SOC products have mostly been the core components in small-form-factor games consoles in recent years, and major news leaks have connected one of those upcoming AMD SOCs to the "Neo" refresh of the PlayStation 4, which could launch as soon as October of this year.

AMD's CEO Lisa Su made it clear during the earnings call that these semi-custom wins were related to the gaming sector, describing "semi-custom business and gaming" as the "larger driver" of Q2's revenue growth. "If you think about the semi-custom business in the past few years, the third quarter is always the peak," Su told reporters. "It will be the peak this year, as well, but we're starting some of the ramping in the second quarter as we build to the stronger third quarter."

Google I/O is only a month away. Today, Google posted a big chunk of the schedule for the event, which contains a few hints about what to expect. The main takeaway: lots and lots of virtual reality talks.

"VR" is an entire content track at Google I/O this year, with seven sessions dedicated to virtual or augmented reality. The most ominous session is titled "Google's Vision for VR." The session description is a single sentence, promising to cover "what we have built, what we have learned, and where we are headed." Google I/O session descriptions are usually a full paragraph, so the ones with really vague, short session descriptions suggest that Google is trying to avoid spoilers. Clay Bavor, the head of Google's new "Virtual Reality" division, will lead the talk.

Google is slowly building up a large presence in VR. The company already makes a VR painting app called "Tilt Brush," which our own Sam Machkovech called a "killer app" for the HTC Vive. It supports "VR Videos" on YouTube with 3D, 360-degree video formats. Google Cardboard is the company dipping its toes into the VR space with the cheapest possible platform—a smartphone in a cardboard box. It acquired Thrive Audio, a positional 3D audio company, and has integrated some VR features into the latest version of Android N. Inside the company, some of the most important employees have moved to the VR team, like the former lead designer of Google Search, Jon Wiley, and Alex Faaborg, the former lead designer for Firefox, Google Now, and Android Wear. And supposedly this is just the tip of the iceberg. Google is rumored to be building a VR interface for Android, a standalone VR headset, a Gear VR competitor, and custom SoCs aimed at VR and AR.

(credit: EFF)

A judge who in 2013 declared that National Security Letters (NSLs) were unconstitutional has now changed her mind in an unsealed ruling made public Thursday.

Federal investigators issue tens of thousands of NSLs each year to banks, ISPs, car dealers, insurance companies, doctors, and others. The letters, which demand personal information, don't need a judge's signature and come with a gag to the recipient that forbids the disclosure of the NSL to the public or the target.

Enlarge (credit: Xylitol)

Two men who built and sold a banking trojan that infected more than 50 million computers around the world and caused almost $1 billion in losses have been sentenced to a combined 24 years in prison.

Aleksandr Andreevich Panin, the chief developer and distributor of SpyEye, received a sentence of nine years and six months in federal prison, according to a statement issued by the US Department of Justice. In underground forums where the trojan was sold, the 27-year-old Russian national went by the hacker aliases “Gribodemon” and “Harderman.” In 2010, prosecutors said, he received the source code to a crimeware platform dubbed ZeuS. From 2009 to 2011, he conspired with others to develop SpyEye, which is believed to have borrowed liberally from ZeuS.

Prosecutors said Panin conspired with Hamza Bendelladj, aka Bx1, an Algerian man who received a 15-year prison term during the same Wednesday sentencing in federal court in Atlanta. Prosecutors said Bendelladj transmitted more than one million spam e-mails containing SpyEye and related malware to computers in the United States. The feat infected hundreds of thousands of computers. Bendelladj also developed SpyEye add ons that automated the theft of funds from victim bank accounts and further spread malware, including SpyEye and Zeus. Authorities said he stole personal information from almost 500,000 people and caused millions of dollars in losses to individuals and financial institutions around the world.