Month: August 2016

Enlarge / Google Fiber's tentative expansion plans. (credit: Google Fiber)

Google Fiber has reportedly fallen "well short" of its goal of signing up 5 million subscribers and may be on the verge of making significant staff cuts.

"Last month, Alphabet CEO Larry Page ordered Google Fiber’s chief, Craig Barratt, to halve the size of the Google Fiber team to 500 people," according to a paywalled report from The Information that quotes people "close to Alphabet."

The report does not say whether any staff cuts have already occurred.

(credit: Kevin Krejci)

On Thursday, federal antitrust regulators from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved electric vehicle maker Tesla’s bid to buy solar panel company SolarCity for $2.6 billion in an all-stock deal. The deal was expected to be approved, and Reuters reported that regulators fast-tracked the merger, along with a number of other, lower-profile mergers in which the two companies seeking to merge did little overlapping business.

Tesla announced the merger in June, and on August 1 it proposed terms for the takeover of the solar panel company—owners of SolarCity shares will get 0.11 shares of Tesla stock for every share of SolarCity stock they own. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who also serves on the SolarCity board, said he wanted to purchase the solar panel company to create an integrated solar platform in which houses could generate their own electricity (perhaps even with an entire Tesla-branded solar roof), store that energy in a Tesla Powerwall, and charge their electric vehicle. Servicing and installation would ideally become more consumer-friendly as well, as it would all come from the same company.

Tesla has also said that its growing experience in manufacturing at its Fremont, California, and Sparks, Nevada, locations could help SolarCity more effectively realize its own massive solar panel manufacturing project in Buffalo, New York.

Enlarge / iPhone Spyware known as Pegasus intercepts confidential data. (credit: Lookout)

Apple has patched three high-severity iOS vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited to infect iPhones so attackers can steal confidential messages from a large number of apps, including Gmail, Facebook, and WhatsApp, security researchers said Thursday.

The spyware has been dubbed Pegasus by researchers from mobile security provider Lookout; they believe it has been circulating in the wild for a significant amount of time. Working with researchers from University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab, they have determined that the spyware targeted a political dissident located in the United Arab Emirates and was launched by an US-owned company specializing in computer-based exploits. Based on the price of the attack kit—about $8 million for 300 licenses—the researchers believe it's being actively used against other iPhone users throughout the world.

"Pegasus is the most sophisticated attack we’ve seen on any endpoint because it takes advantage of how integrated mobile devices are in our lives and the combination of features only available on mobile—always connected (WiFi, 3G/4G), voice communications, camera, email, messaging, GPS, passwords, and contact lists," Lookout and Citizen Lab researchers wrote in a blog post. "It is modular to allow for customization and uses strong encryption to evade detection."

(credit: Gilbert Mercier)

The battle between the US Senate and Backpage.com heated up again this week. Backpage demanded Wednesday that a federal appeals court continue blocking the online classified ad portal from having to comply with a Senate investigation and subpoena into how Backpage conducts its business, including providing the government with documents about the ins and outs of its editorial business model. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations contends that the site is littered with ads that amount to offering sex services by women and children forced into prostitution, and it wants to know what steps the website is taking, if any, to screen ads posted to its site by third parties.

"...this case is about nothing but editorial judgement," attorneys for the site's chief executive officer, Carl Ferrer, told (PDF) the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Wednesday.

The tug of war clearly implicates the site's First Amendment rights, Backpage said. Backpage said the committee's subpoena intrudes on its editorial judgement and that the government's probe is "a limitless fishing expedition." The government said it has a legitimate interest in cracking down on human exploitation, and it argued that the law provides the committee with subpoena power to investigate matters of public concern.

Enlarge / Donna (Kerry Bishé) and Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) are the founders of Mutiny, an online community startup that is about to morph into a 1980s version of eBay. (credit: AMC)

Halt and Catch Fire is a fascinating AMC series about the 1980s computer industry, and its intense characters and nostalgic evocations of classic startups have made it a cult favorite over the past two years. Each season explores one aspect of the nascent tech scene—first in Austin, then San Francisco—by re-imagining key moments in the early days of personal computing. Season 1 brought us the drama of creating the first PC clones, season 2 was a tale of early online gaming and chatroom community at startup Mutiny, and season 3 started this week with a look at online services like eBay as well as antivirus software (evil marketing genius Joe has morphed into John McAfee). It's off to a great start, providing a nuanced look at online privacy and startup culture.

You might say that Halt and Catch Fire is an alternate history of the techie 1980s, re-imagining the origins of today's online world through the lives of our struggling, flawed geek heroes. Maybe "alternate history" sounds like a strong term for a show that offers a fairly realistic snapshot of the '80s tech world, right down to the bleepy music and New Wave design of the credits. Many details, like the marketing of PC clones and online communities like CompuServe, are fairly accurate. But often, events that happened in the 1990s and 2000s are injected into the story. This season, for example, Mutiny founders Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) and Donna (Kerry Bishé) are basically inventing eBay. But they do it by navigating a very 2000s-era tech issue: digital privacy.

Cameron and Donna come up with their eBay idea by spying on their users' private chats to figure out what people do when they chat one on one. The two gradually realize that people are either hooking up (aka meeting offline), or trading old game controllers and comics. This leads Donna and Cameron to their eureka moment: why not create a "swap" functionality for users on Mutiny's forums? It's basically the birth of eBay, roughly ten years early. The writing here is particularly savvy, as we are never allowed to forget that this discovery is only possible because Mutiny has no respect for its users' privacy. Even though one of their engineers is pushing Cameron and Donna to create private, encrypted chat, the two are not concerned.

Enlarge (credit: portal_gda)

US prosecutors have now named a total of three men said to be operators of the defunct file-sharing site KickassTorrents (KAT). The new allegations are in a formal indictment filed Tuesday, which contains the most detailed charges against the site yet.

Last month, alleged site operator 30-year-old Artem Vaulin of Ukraine was arrested in Poland. The new indictment (PDF) also names Ievgen (Eugene) Kutsenko aka "chill" and Oleksander (Alex) Radostin aka "pioneer," also of Ukraine. Bench warrants have been issued for the arrest of all three men, although authorities have confirmed the arrest of only Vaulin. The indictment was reported earlier today by TorrentFreak.

Prosecutors say the three men developed and maintained the site together and used it to "generate millions of dollars from the unlawful distribution of copyright-protected media, including movies... television shows, music, video games, computer software, and electronic books." They gave out "Reputation" and "User Achievement" awards to users who uploaded the most popular files, including a special award for users who had uploaded more than 1,000 torrents.