Month: December 2016

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Roberto Machado Noa )

The Justice Department charged former executives of a pharmaceutical firm with fixing generic drug prices, rigging bids, and conspiring to divvy up customers, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.

The charges, filed against two ex-Heritage Pharmaceuticals execs earlier this week in the US District Court of Eastern Pennsylvania, mark the first time the DOJ has ever gone after a generic drug maker. It likely won’t be the last.

The charges are the first fruits of an ongoing and sweeping investigation into generic drug price-fixing by the Department. Sources familiar with the matter tell Bloomberg that the investigation now involves about two dozen drugs and more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies, including Impax, Teva, and Mylan, the infamous maker of EpiPens. The DOJ’s announcement of the charges hinted that more may be coming, including yet-to-be-named co-conspirators of the former Heritage executives.

Someone had faster access to over a billion Yahoo accounts' data. (credit: Scott Schiller)

On December 14, Yahoo announced that after an investigation into data provided by law enforcement officials in November, the company and outside forensics experts have determined that there was in fact a previously undetected breach of data from over 1 billion user accounts. The breach took place in August 2013, and is apparently distinct from the previous mega-breach revealed this fall—one Yahoo claims was conducted by a "state-sponsored actor".

The information accessed from potentially exposed accounts "may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers," Yahoo's chief information security officer Bob Lord reported in the statement issued by the company. "The investigation indicates that the stolen information did not include passwords in clear text, payment card data, or bank account information. Payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system the company believes was affected."

It's not clear whether the data provided by law enforcement to Yahoo is connected to samples offered on an underground site this past August, particularly since Yahoo still remains unsure of how the user data was spirited out of its systems in the first place. But the breach news doesn't end there.

Enlarge / President-Elect Donald Trump and his team met with high-profile Silicon Valley execs in New York City today. Pictured are Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg alongside Trump and Vice-President-Elect Mike Pence. (credit: Getty Images | Drew Angerer)

President-elect Donald Trump held a much-publicized meeting with prominent Silicon Valley tech leaders today, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and others. Notably absent from that list is Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey or any other personnel from the social media company, despite the fact that Trump has used his Twitter account as one of his primary communication channels with the public throughout his campaign and in the weeks since the election.

The explanation, according to a source speaking to Politico, may be vindictive—the source alleges that the Trump team didn't invite Twitter because the social networking service refused to implement a custom "#CrookedHillary" emoji created by the campaign. Trump used this epithet to refer to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign, an approach he also took with Republican primary challengers like Senators Ted Cruz ("Lyin' Ted") and Marco Rubio ("Little Marco").

(credit: US Department of Transportation)

Nearly three years after it was first mooted, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Tuesday that will mandate vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication systems in all new cars and trucks. Once the rule is finalized, car makers will have two model years to begin including V2V systems, with some added leeway for product cycles. V2V-equipped cars will communicate with each other at short ranges to prevent the kinds of accidents where current advanced driver assistance systems, most of which depend on line of sight, aren't effective.

V2V, and the related vehicle to infrastructure (V2I), relies on the Dedicated Short-range Radio Communication (DSRC) wireless protocol to communicate between devices at ranges of up to 984 feet (300m). Vehicles will be able to send out standardized "basic safety messages" that trigger driver alerts or even emergency avoidance actions to prevent crashes. (For a more detailed explanation of how V2V works, check out this piece from Ars' Sean Gallagher.)

Recognizing the immense implications of an insecure protocol, the notice asks industry and the public for input on the proposed security specifications and proposes that "vehicles contain “firewalls” between V2V modules and other vehicle modules connected to the data bus to help isolate V2V modules being used as a potential conduit into other vehicle systems." Privacy is also given due attention, and the proposed rule would prevent cars from sending out identifiable data like a vehicle's VIN or a driver's name or address.

(credit: Stockmonkeys.com)

President-elect Donald Trump is meeting today with some of Silicon Valley's top business leaders. Ahead of that meeting, content companies sent letters letting Trump know that they're hoping to see some changes to copyright laws in the near future—changes that technology companies, large and small, are likely to object to.

Yesterday, the RIAA and other stakeholders in the music industry sent a letter (PDF) to the president-elect, asking him for "strong action to enforce intellectual property rights against infringers."

"As you meet tomorrow with some of the world’s major corporate technology executives, we wanted to highlight some points that are assuring the continued dynamism of music as one of America’s national treasures," states the letter, which is also signed by the Recording Academy, the Songwriters Guild, the National Music Publishers Association, licensing groups BMI and ASCAP, and other music groups.