Month: September 2016

(credit: Yelp Inc.)

California's top court is agreeing to hear a case in which a lower court has ordered Yelp to remove a bad review. The California Supreme Court did not say when it would hear the case that tests the Communications Decency Act, which San Francisco-based Yelp maintains protects it from having to remove content on its site posted by third parties.

The case concerns a June decision by a state appeals court that requires Yelp to remove a defamatory review about a law firm written by an unhappy client. A lower court issued a default judgement for over $500,000 against the reviewer, Ava Bird, for a review that the law firm claimed was defamatory. Bird was sued for defamation, but was a no-show in court.

Eric Goldman, a Santa Clara University legal scholar, summed up the lower court's decision. "Of course any removal order injures Yelp by usurping Yelp’s editorial policies about its content database. But because of the default judgment on defamation, the court can neatly sidestep that First Amendment injury by claiming that we know this content is beyond First Amendment protection," Goldman wrote.

Enlarge / Based on the new data, nearly every out-of-Africa map available on the web is wrong in some way. This is perhaps the least wrong. (credit: NIH)

By now, the big picture of humanity's origins is pretty clear. Modern humans evolved in Africa over 100,000 years ago, but they took tens of thousands of years to leave the continent. Once they did, they rapidly spread across Asia and Australia, mating with some of the pre-modern (read: archaic) humans along the way.

But that big picture, often called "Out of Africa," has a number of details missing. For one, our understanding of the genetic diversity within Africa is startlingly bad—so bad that we missed an entirely distinct African Y chromosome lineage for decades. And there have been numerous debates about the number of times humanity has left Africa. Was it a single big migration, or did we depart in waves?

A new series of papers has narrowed the scope of the controversy considerably. While there may have been more than one push out of Africa, there's only one that really ended up mattering.

In the security weeds? Yahoo won't yet comment. (credit: Neon Tommy)

In August, a dealer in stolen data who goes by the online moniker "Peace"—the person or persons who previously sold data from the accounts of MySpace and LinkedIn users—announced that the results of another "megabreach" was for sale. This time, it's the account information of 200 million Yahoo users. According to a report by Recode's Kara Swisher, Yahoo is preparing to confirm the four-year old breach, potentially creating problems for the company's planned $4.8 billion acquisition by Verizon.

A previous examination of a sample of the data obtained by Motherboard was inconclusive. There have been a number of other claimed breaches of Yahoo's account data, including a claim of 40 million Yahoo accounts among a total of 272 million alleged stolen credentials reported in May/ But that data that may have just as easily been stolen from other sources.

According to a spokesperson at LeakedSource, however, a small sample file of legitimate Yahoo user data exists. But it's not clear whether it's representative of the rest of the data "Peace" has, because no one has been able to look at the full dump yet—"Peace" has offered to sell it for 3 Bitcoin (about $1,860).

Enlarge / A Cisco modem that's certified to work with Charter Internet service. (credit: Cisco)

Charter is trying to convince the Federal Communications Commission to backtrack on a plan that would force cable providers to charge a separate fee for cable modems.

Charter is unusual compared to other cable companies in that it doesn’t tack on a cable modem rental fee when offering Internet service. But FCC officials don’t think that’s good for consumers, because the price of Charter Internet service is the same whether a customer uses a Charter modem or buys their own.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s latest proposal for new cable box rules would require companies to list fees for equipment used to access video. The FCC is clearly hoping that Charter will create a separate fee for cable modems and lower the base price of Internet service by a corresponding amount, thus letting customers save money in the long run by purchasing their own modems. (Separately from modems, Charter already charges monthly fees for the use of its TV set-top boxes.)

Enlarge / Burt Reynolds as JJ McLure, and Dom DeLuise as Victor Prinzim in The Cannonball Run. Alex Roy is neither of these two characters. But it did give our office a chance to reminisce over how much we all loved the movie. (credit: 20th Century Fox)

It must be the season for electric vehicles and speed records. Jonny Smith turned a long-forgotten 1970s electric city car into the world's fastest street legal EV. Venturi and The Ohio State University just set a new EV land speed record. And to that list we can now add Alex Roy, Warren Ahner, and Franz Aliquo's cross-country "Cannonball Run," the trio having set a new fastest time for a coast-to-coast dash in a Tesla 90D.

An affable chap prone to automotive adventures, Roy first came to notoriety in petrol-fueled Cannonball and Gumball rallies. These days, as editor-at-large for The Drive, he's a big proponent of both electrification and autonomous driving, particularly when the two meet as they do under the shapely metal-and-plastic form of a Tesla.

On August 24, Roy, Ahner, and Aliquo settled into the cabin of one such machine—a 90D, note, rather than the ludicrously fast P90D model—in Redondo Beach. Just 55 hours later the trio pulled into the Red Bull Garage in New York City having covered 2,877 miles (4,630km), besting the previous fastest transcontinental EV crossing by two hours and 48 minutes.