Month: January 2017

Founder and CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, at TEDMED 2014. (credit: TEDMED)

On Thursday, Theranos announced that it would cut 155 jobs, or 41 percent of its workforce. For those of you at home keeping score, that leaves 220 employees.

In a brief statement published on its website Friday, the blood-testing startup that was once the darling of Silicon Valley wrote:

These are always the most difficult decisions; however, this move allows Theranos to marshal its resources most efficiently and effectively.

The restructuring follows a period of significant change at the company that has included the building out of its executive team with substantial additional regulatory, compliance and operational expertise.

The embattled biotech firm has been collapsing over the last year—within the last two months alone Walgreens sued and family members were pitted against each other.

(credit: Erik B)

Nearly a year and a half has passed since the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) publicly announced that Volkswagen had cheated on its federally-required emissions tests for 2.0L diesel vehicles produced between 2009 and 2015. And, just today, the EPA and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) announced the first fix that could make street-legal the 475,474 diesels that were caught up in the scandal.

Unfortunately, the fix only pertains to 70,000 “Generation 3” diesels from VW Group, all of which were made in 2015. The rest of the 405,000-or-so customers with older 2.0L diesels will have to keep waiting for a fix, unless they want to sell their cars back to Volkswagen.

The news of the fix comes months after the approval of a $15 billion settlement between VW Group and the Justice Department. That settlement set aside approximately $10 billion to buy back 2.0L diesels at the price the cars were worth before the scandal was made public, as well as compensate each purchaser with somewhere between $5,100 and $10,000, depending on the make and model of the car.

Enlarge / A screen grab from a Chilean Navy video showing an odd signature in the infrared. (credit: CEFAA/YouTube)

The Ars Files casts a skeptical eye on developments in the UFO community. Is the truth out there? Maybe. Maybe not. But we try to find it here.

Early on the afternoon of November 14, 2014, a Chilean Navy pilot and a technician were flying their helicopter along the coast when they saw something strange. They were going north at an altitude of 1.4km in a twin-engine Airbus Cougar when something appeared in the sky and matched their velocity of 130 knots.

As part of the flight, which took place west of Santiago, the helicopter's technician was testing the thermal imaging properties of an infrared FLIR high-definition camera. Naturally, he turned the camera on the unidentified object. After several minutes the pilot and technician observed the object make two distinct discharges of some type of liquid, or gas, which produced a very hot signal captured by the infrared imager. The technician captured nearly 10 minutes of video, which shows both visible and infrared camera views.

Enlarge / A solar thermal plant.

Yesterday, the US Energy Information Administration released its energy outlook for 2017. These annual reports provide projections of current energy trends out to 2040, and they provide policymakers with a sense of where the country could be decades from now, should things continue as they have been.

Anyone who's up on current trends wouldn't be surprised by many of the EIA's results. With coal's continued decline, natural gas becomes the dominant source of energy in the US, followed by renewable generation. Most of the scenarios the report considers see the continued growth in US energy production far outstripping a sluggish growth in demand. This pattern will transform the country into a net exporter of energy by the 2030s.

But EIA reports are notoriously conservative in their projections, and this can lead to completely unrealistic results. In the past, for example, the EIA's projections didn't foresee the radical drop in photovoltaic prices, and so the organization had solar playing little role in US energy markets. This year's version is no exception, as it suggests installation of wind power in the US will essentially stop once tax incentives run out in the early 2020s.

Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images News)

OAKLAND, Calif.—A local privacy committee has sent a proposed surveillance oversight ordinance to the city council. This is a rare example of a major American city set to impose stricter controls on the acquisition, use, and evaluation of spy gear.

The “Surveillance and Community Safety Ordinance” unanimously passed out of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission on Thursday night, formally moving it to the Oakland City Council. Passage of the ordinance was roundly applauded by local civil liberties advocates and legal scholars, some of whom spoke at the meeting.

“You are ahead of most of your peers across the country, and you are paving the way for them,” Nuala O’Connor, the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group based in Washington, DC, told the assembled commission. (O’Connor was also the first chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security.)

More than 10,000 website databases have been taken hostage in recent days by attackers who are demanding hefty ransoms for the data to be restored, a security researcher said Friday.

The affected data is created and stored by the open source MongoDB database application, according to researchers who have been tracking the ongoing attacks all week. On Monday, Victor Gevers, co-founder of the GDI Foundation, reported finding 200 such databases that had been deleted. By Tuesday, John Matherly, founder of the Shodan search engine increased the estimate to 2,000 databases, and by Friday, fellow researcher Niall Merrigan updated the count to 10,500.

Misconfigured MongoDB databases have long exposed user password data and other sensitive information, with the 2015 breach of scareware provider MacKeeper that exposed data for 13 million users being just one example. With the surge in ransomware-style attacks—which threaten to permanently delete or encrypt data unless owners pay a fee—hacks targeting MongoDB are seeing a resurgence. Many poorly secured MongoDB databases can be pinpointed using Shodan, which currently shows 99,000 vulnerable instances.

(credit: Dennis Yang)

Techdirt founder Mike Masnick often takes no prisoners when it comes to his writings about intellectual property, net neutrality, the law, and everything in between. But now Masnick finds himself the target of the same lawyer who brought down Gawker on behalf of Hulk Hogan.

That lawyer, Charles Harder of Beverly Hills, is representing Shiva Ayyadurai, the man who claims to have invented e-mail. Ayyadurai is seeking $15 million in a federal libel suit (PDF) against Masnick and Techdirt parent company Floor64. The suit is over blog posts that labeled Ayyadurai a "fraud" and a "liar" because he claims to have invented e-mail in 1978 as a teenager in New Jersey.

Ayyadurai also sued Gawker for ridiculing him with headlines that said Ayyadurai has "pretended to invent Email" and "The Inventor of Email did Not Invent Email." After losing the Hulk Hogan case, Gawker went bankrupt, disappeared those Ayyadurai stories from the site, and agreed to pay $750,000 to Ayyadurai to settle his libel lawsuit.