Month: September 2016

Enlarge (credit: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Acacia Research Corporation, the largest publicly traded patent-assertion entity, won a $22.1 million verdict against Apple last week.

A jury in the patent hotspot of East Texas found that Apple had infringed US Patent No. 8,055,820, owned by Acacia subsidiary Cellular Communications Equipment LLC. The patent describes a method of how cell phones can use "buffer status reporting" so that phone networks can optimize data usage. The patent originated at Nokia, which sold the patent to Acacia in 2013.

Acacia is in a controversial business that critics refer to as "patent trolling." The firm buys patents from others, uses those patents to bring litigation, and then splits the proceeds with the original patent owner. The business model has made the company incredibly litigious, as dozens of Acacia-owned LLC's have filed hundreds of lawsuits over the years.

Enlarge / Highway viewed from the motor vehicle. (credit: Getty Images | chombosan)

On Monday, the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency published its long-awaited Federal Automated Vehicles Policy. NHTSA is the part of the US government responsible for regulating the vehicles we drive, and it's broadly in favor of self-driving technology given the potential to reduce the death toll on the nation's roads. That toll, by the way, nudged above 35,000 in 2015 (up almost 8 percent on the previous year).

The new document includes both a performance guidance (as opposed to regulation) for automated vehicles as well as a model policy for individual states to follow. As is the case with new federal government policies, the document is open for public comment for the next 60 days.

What does the guidance say?

First at bat is NHTSA's decision to abandon its own scale of autonomous driving levels. Instead, the agency will use the SAE scale; this goes from Level 0 (where a human driver does everything) to level 5 (completely automated). Cars equipped with adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist, traffic jam assist, or Autopilot fall somewhere between SAE's Levels 2 and 3:

Security researchers at the Chinese Internet company Tencent's Keen Security Lab privately revealed a security bug in Tesla Model S cars that allowed an attacker to achieve remote access to a vehicle's Controller Area Network (CAN) and take over functions of the vehicle while parked or moving. The Keen researchers were able to remotely open the doors and trunk of an unmodified Model S, and they were also able to take control of its display. Perhaps most notably, the researchers remotely activated the brakes of a moving Model S wirelessly once the car had been breached by an attack on the car's built-in Web browser.

Tesla has already issued an over-the-air firmware patch to fix the situation.

Previous hacks of Tesla vehicles have required physical access to the car. The Keen attack exploited a bug in Tesla's Web browser, which required the vehicle to be connected to a malicious Wi-Fi hotspot. This allowed the attackers to stage a "man-in-the-middle" attack, according to researchers. In a statement on the vulnerability, a Tesla spokesman said, "our realistic estimate is that the risk to our customers was very low, but this did not stop us from responding quickly." After Keen brought the vulnerability to Bugcrowd, the company managing Tesla's bug bounty program, it took just 10 days for Tesla to generate a fix.

Enlarge / We're pretty sure this supposed "leak" of an NX design is fake, but it's still a good mock-up based on the rumors we have heard about the supposed console/portable hybrid. (credit: EGMNow)

With the NX just over six months away from launch (if Nintendo's "March 2017" launch roadmap is still to be believed), we're still stuck grasping at straws when it comes to official info about the system. The latest detail drip comes from The Pokemon Company (TPC) president Tsunekazu Ishihara, who seemingly confirmed the long-standing rumors about the system's console/hybrid design in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

"The NX is trying to change the concept of what it means to be a home console device or a hand-held device [emphasis added]," Ishihara said in the interview. "We will make games for the NX."

The wording of the quote leaves a little wiggle room for interpretation—perhaps Ishihara was guessing at the NX's existence as a console or a hand-held as an either-or proposition. It's also unclear if Ishihara has any specific, insider knowledge of the NX or its development process. The Pokemon Company is partly owned by Nintendo (in conjunction with game developers Creatures and Game Freak), so maybe there has been some hardware information sharing going on between the two companies. But TPC largely operates as its own entity, and Ishihara might have simply been speaking based on previous reports suggesting the system's hybrid design.

Enlarge / John Stumpf, chairman and CEO of the Wells Fargo & Company, testifies before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee September 20, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

“I am deeply sorry that we failed to fulfill our responsibility to our customers, to our team members, and to the American public,” Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. Stumpf was being taken to task by the committee over news earlier this month that employees of the bank had opened 2 million unauthorized bank accounts using customers’ names from 2011 onward.

The bank CEO stopped short of placing blame on any senior executives, however, claiming that there was “no orchestrated effort” to get employees to create phony accounts.

When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced its $100 million fine of the company on September 8, Wells Fargo said that it had fired 5,300 employees for misconduct and hired a third-party consulting firm to examine the extent of the problem at the recommendation of regulators. The CFPB said that employees opened 1.5 million debit accounts and more than 500,000 credit card accounts, fraudulently using customers' names in order to meet Wells Fargo’s aggressive cross-selling quotas. In some cases, employees temporarily moved money from a customer’s legitimate account to an illegitimate one, prompting overdraft and minimum balance fees. Wells Fargo said it would pay $2.6 million in refunds to affected customers.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)

On Wednesday, the United Nations will hold a historic meeting to take on the growing problem of antibiotic resistant microbes, which it called “one of the biggest threats to global health.” And according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they have their work cut out for them. It turns out that not even hospitals in the US are taking the threat seriously enough.

Looking through hospitals’ prescription records from 2006 to 2012, the CDC found that the overall amounts of antibiotic prescriptions have held steady. That finding bucks warnings from the CDC and other public health agencies’ that doctors (as well as meat producers) are overusing and misusing the drugs and need to cut back. The CDC estimates that at least a third of antibiotic prescriptions in the US are unnecessary. Needlessly exposing microbes to antibiotics gives germs more opportunity to develop resistance to the otherwise life-saving drugs. Already, antibiotic-resistant infections strike 2 million people each year in the US alone, killing at least 23,000. Doctors and veterinarians need to cut back and use the drugs more wisely, the CDC has warned—apparently to no avail.

Looking through the prescription data, the CDC noted that although doctors seemed to be ignoring their warnings, they couldn’t ignore the problem of resistance. Though overall-levels of antibiotics plateaued, doctors are increasingly skipping over antibiotics considered first-line defenses. Instead, they’re turning to second, third, and even some last-line drugs, which are more powerful but often come with more side effects. In the six-year study period, doctors upped their use of last-resort carbapenem antibiotics by 37 percent, according to the data published in JAMA Internal Medicine.