Month: August 2016

(credit: Gary Dordick)

The family of the late Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin filed a wrongful death lawsuit Tuesday against Fiat Chrysler (FCA), alleging that because of a "defective design and/or manufacture" on his 2015 Jeep, the 27-year-old was killed.

According to the lawsuit, Yelchin’s 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee had a defective monostable gear selector. Last month, Yelchin parked his Jeep at the top of his steep driveway at his home in Studio City, California, believing he had put it properly into park. However, the car seems to have rolled down the driveway quickly, pinning him to the gate, trapping him there, and eventually killing him.

The civil complaint, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, says that not only was Yelchin’s 2015 Jeep affected, but as family lawyer Gary Dordick noted:

(credit: Mike Mozart)

The Washington state attorney general's $100 million lawsuit against Comcast, filed yesterday, uses a sales script and transcripts of chats with customers to make the case that Comcast deceived subscribers when marketing what the state calls "near-worthless" service plans.

Since January 2011, Comcast made $73 million selling Service Protection Plans (SPP) for up to $5 a month to 500,000 customers in Washington. But the service plans were sold to customers under false pretenses, with Comcast describing the plans as being far more comprehensive and useful than they were, Attorney General Bob Ferguson alleged.

Comcast's service plan revenue was mostly profit. Between January 2013 and July 2015, Washington customers paid Comcast $41.6 million for service plans that helped them avoid only about $5 million in service call charges. That's a $36.6 million profit gained largely because of deceptive advertising, the lawsuit said.

(credit: Google Street View)

The Oregon Supreme Court has ruled that while a convenience store clerk was guilty of stealing lottery tickets through the store’s computer system, she did not violate the state’s anti-hacking law while doing so.

In the case, known as State v. Nascimento, Oregon’s highest court ruled late last month that a hacking conviction against the defendant should be overturned, and the court sent the case back down to the lower court for reconsideration. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which appeared on Caryn Nascimento’s behalf during the case as an amicus curae (friend of the court), announced the narrow victory on Tuesday.

According to the Supreme Court’s decision, the case dates back to 2007, when Nascimento began working at Tiger Mart, a small convenience store in Madras, Oregon, about 120 miles southeast of Portland. In late 2008 and early 2009, a company vice president began investigating what appeared to be cash shortages at that store, sometimes about $1,000 per day. After reviewing video recordings that correlated with Nascimento’s work schedule, this executive began to suspect that she was buying lottery tickets but not paying for them.

NEW YORK CITY—Samsung is back with its second flagship for 2016, the Galaxy Note 7. It's basically a bigger Galaxy S7 with a stylus, but this year Samsung is adding an Iris scanner and finally upgrading to USB Type C.

Like Microsoft before it, Samsung's marketing department has had a bit of trouble counting this year. After the Galaxy Note 5 in 2015, the company has totally skipped the Galaxy Note 6 and advanced to the Galaxy Note 7. The idea is that the Galaxy Note line will now line up with the Galaxy S line—this year we're getting the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy Note 7. (A word of warning for next year: don't confuse the Galaxy Note 8 with the Galaxy Note 8.0, a Samsung tablet from 2013.)

This doubles as likely the best way to think of the Galaxy Note 7: it's a Galaxy S7, but a bit bigger. The design and materials are very close to the S7—the Note 7 is a glass-backed device with a metal frame, sporting the typical Samsung look. The specs are about the same, too, with a Snapdragon 820 (not the new 821), 4GB of RAM, and a 5.7-inch 2560x1440 AMOLED display. The Snapdragon is for the US market. Internationally, Samsung is again using an Exynos chip.

The bugged courthouse. Redwood City, California. (credit: Jimmy Emerson)

The FBI violated the Fourth Amendment by recording more than 200 hours of conversation at the entrance to a county courthouse in the Bay Area, a federal judge has ruled.

Federal agents planted the concealed microphones around the San Mateo County Courthouse in 2009 and 2010 as part of an investigation into alleged bid-rigging at public auctions for foreclosed homes. In November, lawyers representing five defendants filed a motion arguing that the tactic was unconstitutional, since the Fourth Amendment bans unreasonable searches.

"[T]he government utterly failed to justify a warrantless electronic surveillance that recorded private conversations spoken in hushed tones by judges, attorneys, and court staff entering and exiting a courthouse," US District Judge Charles Breyer wrote in an order (PDF) published yesterday. "Even putting aside the sensitive nature of the location here, Defendants have established that they believed their conversations were private and they took reasonable steps to thwart eavesdroppers."

(credit: AACC)

Late Monday afternoon, a few thousand clinical chemists packed into a cavernous convention hall in Philadelphia to hear a presentation by Elizabeth Holmes, the embattled CEO and founder of blood testing company Theranos. Her presentation, given in a controversial session of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry’s annual conference, was expected by many to be an opportunity for Holmes to finally reveal data that could back up the company’s lofty claims about its blood testing technology—technology now mired in scandal.

Last month, federal regulators revoked the company’s license to perform those blood tests, saying it posed “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.” The company now faces lawsuits from ex-patients and a criminal probe for allegedly misleading investors on claims about its technology's performance. Federal regulators have banned Holmes from owning or operating a lab.

Yesterday’s presentation could have been the data-driven turning point Holmes has been promising. And the conference attendees—experts in clinical testing—gathered anxiously to hear the results.