Month: April 2016

Apple has agreed to pay $24.9 million to a "patent troll" to end a lawsuit over its Siri voice system, according to documents filed yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Publicly traded Marathon Patent Group, whose business is focused on patent licensing and lawsuits, will split the settlement cash with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), the New York technical university that provided the patents.

It's a big payment. Patent trolls, also called non-practicing entities or patent assertion entities, have lost power in recent years, due to changes in case law and new ways to challenge patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office. This recent settlement is a reminder that the era of that patent troll is far from over. And it's a reminder that the lure of big money from patent lawsuits continues to be a tempting draw for universities.

The two asserted claims of US Patent No. 7,177,798 describe a "method for processing natural language input," and was invented by Drs. Cheng Hsu and Veera Boonjing. At the time of invention, in 2000, Hsu was a Professor of Decision Sciences and Engineering at RPI, while Boonjing was a doctoral candidate at the institution. The patent's first claim describes processing language queries by using databases filled with "case information, keywords, information models, and database values." The inventors assigned it to the university, which is common, since many universities have rules requiring that faculty assign patents and dictate splits of any licensing revenues.

A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled Wednesday in favor of a man accused of accessing child pornography through Tor, finding that the warrant issued by a Virginia-based judge was invalid. The evidence of child pornography the government claims it found on the man's computers is suppressed, which likely makes continuing prosecution of this case significantly more difficult.

That warrant, which was issued in early 2015, allowed federal investigators to use a "network investigative technique" (NIT), government-speak for a piece of malware typically used to penetrate the digital security of Tor users. That malware then led authorities to the computer of defendant Alex Levin, of Norwood, Massachusetts, and they criminally charged him with possession of child pornography.

Earlier this year, Levin’s lawyers challenged the judicial authorization to deploy the NIT.

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that two anonymous sources briefed on the matter agreed that Volkswagen Group would buy back nearly 500,000 2.0L engine diesel vehicles equipped with illegal defeat devices as part of an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A third person briefed on the matter added that VW Group would set up a compensation fund for people who had purchased the Volkswagen and Audi diesels, although that source did not specify how much each diesel purchaser would get from the fund. Reuters reports that the compensation fund represents more than $1 billion.

The diesels were discovered in September to be equipped with illegal defeat devices, sending the German automaker’s stock in a tailspin and setting off a ripple effect of scandal throughout the company. The EPA discovered that the 500,000 US diesels were cheating its emissions tests, using software to keep the car within permissible emissions ranges during laboratory tests, but then switching off that emissions control system when the car was being driven in real-world conditions.

The EPA estimated that VW Group’s 2.0L engines were emitting up to 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) as was allowable by federal regulations.

For a long time, the cost of a fast, high-end smartphone with the latest technology seemed definite. You were paying $600 or $700 no matter whether you did it up front or spread out over the course of a two-year carrier contract. This doesn't have to be the case today, however. There's an exciting new category of phone on the block—the "cheap flagship," a phone that has flagship or very-close-to-flagship specs but only costs around $400.

We're talking about devices like the $305 Xiaomi Mi 5, the $380 LG Nexus 5X, the $400 Nextbit Robin, the $400 Moto X, and the $329 OnePlus 2. These phones all shipped with the best (or close to the best) SoC at the time, beautiful screens, and the usual set of features. If you didn't have a sheet of spec tables in front of you, you'd likely have a hard time pointing out the differences between these devices and a $700 flagship. Cheap flagships might not be at the absolute bleeding edge of capabilities, but they all aim for "good enough."

Typical specs (beyond price)

Consider the current state of the big $700 flagships from companies like Samsung and LG. These super flagships are bloated with tons of occasionally nice to have but mostly unnecessary extras. They are the very best they can be, because in the fight to entice customers to upgrade every year, these companies throw in every bell and whistle under the sun. Samsung is the king of this—the Galaxy S7 Edge has a curved AMOLED display, a heart rate sensor, waterproofing, a magnetic field generator (for Samsung Pay), and an outrageously high 500+ PPI display. It even doubles as the heart of a virtual reality gaming system. The LG G5 has a laundry list of extras, too. There are two rear-facing cameras, a color spectrum sensor, another overkill 1440P display, and a modular accessory system.

Coral reefs are about as colorful as the ocean gets—except when they bleach. Overly warm water can cause corals to spit out the colorful, photosynthetic, single-celled symbiotes that live inside them and produce most of their food. If the heat passes before the corals starve to death, their symbiotes can return, bringing color and health back to the coral.

As the globe warms, widespread bleaching events are occurring with disturbing frequency. These tend to occur during times of El Niño conditions in the Pacific, which add a temporary boost to the warming water at some reefs. The current record-strength El Niño is sadly no exception.

Researchers contributing to Australia’s National Coral Bleaching Taskforce recently completed a survey of the state of the iconic Great Barrier Reef. The results show that it is currently experiencing the worst bleaching event we’ve ever seen there. Overall, 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef has bleached to some degree. The northern half of the reef has been hit the hardest, with about 80 percent categorized as severely bleached. The far southern portion has escaped the warmest water, and the area of severe damage there drops to around 1 percent.

For decades now, the only real way to enjoy the many fan-modified versions of classic console games floating around was through the legally questionable method of downloading altered ROM files and running them through a computer emulator (legal cartridge-ripping hardware notwithstanding). Now, Sega is finally lending some official support to what has until now been a very unofficial activity, adding the ability to modify and redistribute certain classic PC-emulated Genesis titles through Valve's Steamworks platform.

The newly announced Sega Mega Drive Classics Hub will serve as a 3D front end for emulated Sega ROMs you already own on Steam, simulating the kind of bedroom a diehard Sega fan may have had in the mid-'90s. The hub comes complete with a virtual CRT TV, graphic enhancement filters, a virtual shelf of cartridge boxes, and a day/night cycle to show you just how much time you're wasting in front of decades-old games.

More than these cosmetic changes, though, "every single Mega Drive [read: the Japanese/European name for the Genesis] game will now feature Steam Workshop support, allowing you to share your modified versions of your favorite retro Sega titles," as an official announcement video puts it.

When we last met up with Venturi, it was in the Buckeye state. We'd gone to meet VBB-3, the electric land speed record car it's built with the Ohio State University. Meanwhile, back at the company's Monegasque HQ, work has been underway on next season's Formula E electric race car. Since we were in that neck of the woods, we popped over to the company's home base to find out what it has in store.

These days it's better to think of Venturi as an engineering and design firm for electric powertrains, rather than a low volume sportscar producer. It will still make you a road-going (or maybe even off-road) EV sports car, but you'd have to ask nicely and you may have to wait a few months to take delivery. The company is now focused on ever-better electric powertrains, and it does this by testing them in some of the most extreme ways possible.

There's the Antarctica, an eight-wheel EV for transporting French scientists around the South Pole. At the opposite end of the temperature and speed dials is VBB-3, designed to eclipse the internal combustion engine's top speed on sun-baked salt flats. And then there's Formula E. The organizers want the sport to be directly relevant for road-going EV development, says Venturi's Thierry Apparu. "It's why the races are on the streets." The lessons learned in all these environments funnel back into know-how that can be applied to EV powertrains that people will drive in the future.

There's a lot of attention on Tesla Motors now that it has attracted almost 400,000 preorders for its forthcoming Model 3 electric vehicle. Delivering those cars is going to be quite a feat for the company, and the vast majority of those 400,000 customers may have to wait a while to accept delivery. But that might not be such a bad thing if Tesla's continuing troubles with the Model X SUV are any predictor of future performance.

The Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports both published reports on Tuesday featuring early Model X customers experiencing a litany of QC problems. In addition to the recall Tesla issued recently for the EV's rear seats, owners have been plagued with problems relating to those signature Falcon wing doors.

Sometimes they don't open properly. Other times the sensors that are meant to detect obstructions malfunction, allowing the doors to bang into things. But it's not just the doors. Consumer Reports' article reports that one particularly affected owner is not happy with the car's heating system, autopilot, or panoramic windscreen. And Tesla forums are ripe with stories of interior QC issues, paint quality problems, and other concerns.

Crows, ravens, and other corvids are sometimes called feathered apes. Like primates, these birds form social groups, use tools, solve puzzles, recognize faces, and enjoy a good joke (especially if it's at the expense of cats). Now a group of researchers has shown in a series of tests that corvids exhibit the same levels of self-control that chimps do when faced with a task that requires them to forgo a quick reward in favor of a bigger one that comes later.

The researchers published a fascinating description of their work in Royal Society Open Science, and their paper challenges a long-held belief that absolute brain volume correlates with intelligence. No longer will humans and our ape cohorts be able to claim that we're smart just because our brains are big. Instead, say the researchers, it's more likely that intelligence stems from neural complexity, whether that's numbers of neurons or connections between them.

To measure corvid intelligence, the researchers used a common test of self-control called the "cylinder task." It's been used on many animals, including humans, and it's one of the most basic ways to assess higher reason. As the researchers write, the test "requires deciding among options of differing values in relation to a temporal dimension." In other words, it requires the animal to make decisions based on an understanding of time.