Month: April 2017

Anthony Levandowski giving a presentation in Japan in 2011, when he worked for Google. (credit: shinnygogo)

New legal filings in the Waymo v. Uber litigation lay out more of Google's allegations against ex-Googler Anthony Levandowski, who now heads up Uber's self-driving car unit.

According to a Google document filed in court yesterday, Levandowski created "competing side businesses" as early as 2012 while he was still working for Google. That's when Levandowski is said to have incorporated a company called Odin Wave LLC, with a physical address at a building he owned in Berkeley, California.

Odin Wave submitted an order to a hardware maker asking for a "customer-fabricated part" similar to what Google used in its self-driving cars. Google employees investigated Odin Wave, noted the connections to Levandowski, and questioned the engineer about it, but Levandowski denied having any ownership, according to Google lawyers.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | KrulUA)

Although the move to eliminate Web browsing privacy rules was pushed through Congress by Republican lawmakers over the objections of Democrats, a new poll found that equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats approve of the rules and wanted them to be preserved.

President Donald Trump yesterday signed the repeal of online privacy rules that would have limited the ability of ISPs to share or sell customers' browsing history for advertising purposes, confirming action taken by the Senate and House. This was very much a partisan issue among elected officials. In a 50-48 vote, every Republican senator voted to kill privacy rules and every Democratic senator voted to preserve them. The House vote was 215-205, with 15 Republicans breaking ranks in order to support the privacy rules.

But ordinary Americans aren't split on the issue, according to a Huffington Post/YouGov survey that found 72 percent of Republicans and 72 percent of Democrats opposed the rollback.

Enlarge / Game discoverability... not an easy problem to tackle, as Steam knows all too well. (credit: Aurich / Getty / gopipgo)

A decade ago, Steam was a carefully curated PC game marketplace where you could be confident that the relative handful of titles that showed up for sale were at least worth considering. Today, Steam is a vast and bloated superstore cluttered with thousands of new titles every year ranging from AAA blockbusters to the worst of the worst shovelware.

Valve has taken a number of steps to limit the prevalence and reach of the laziest cash-in games on the service, most recently requiring developers to provide tax paperwork and an application fee through Steam Direct. Now, the company is collaborating with some of its harshest critics on YouTube to make further changes to fix what is widely called the service's "discoverability" problem—the issue of finding the good games among the thousands of bad ones.

Jim Sterling and John "TotalBiscuit" Bain were both invited to Valve's Seattle headquarters recently to discuss these upcoming changes, and both YouTube stars posted lengthy videos laying out what they heard. For those who don't want to watch the videos, Kotaku has a pretty good summary of the changes Valve relayed to the two YouTubers.

Enlarge / Samsung's Smart TV interface, which seems to be running on Tizen. (credit: Samsung)

Tizen, the open source operating system that Samsung uses on a range of Internet-of-Things devices and positions as a sometime competitor to Android, is chock full of egregious security flaws, according to Israeli researcher Amihai Neiderman.

Samsung has been developing the operating system for many years. The project started as an Intel and Nokia project, and Samsung merged its Bada operating system into the code in 2013. Like Android, it's built on a Linux kernel, with a large chunk of open source software running on top. App development on Tizen uses C++ and HTML5.

Presenting at Kaspersky Lab's Security Analyst Summit and speaking to Motherboard, Neiderman had little positive to say about the state of Tizen's code. "It may be the worst code I've ever seen," Neiderman said. "Everything you can do wrong there, they do it."

The game-hardware analysts at Eurogamer subsidiary Digital Foundry appear to have gotten their hands on another major piece of upcoming gaming kit. This time, they're set to announce "exclusive" info about Microsoft's upcoming "Project Scorpio" revision to the Xbox One, but in a curious move, the outlet has pinned an exact date and time: Thursday, April 7, at 9am ET.

As much as "upcoming news: news is coming" reports can be a little mealy-mouthed, this one is interesting because Digital Foundry's past few years of reporting have not been in Microsoft's favor. A locked-down date and time suggests that the Xbox team is handing Digital Foundry a timed exclusive, which is akin to McDonald's asking the ABC News crew behind the notorious "pink slime" report series to spend a few weeks at a beef-processing plant.

Digital Foundry has gone a long way toward confirming exactly how inferior the Xbox One has been to the stock PlayStation 4 in terms of sheer game performance. The systems' clock speeds, RAM bandwidths, and other variables have been reported on for some time, but Digital Foundry's system-comparison tests make clear exactly how Xbox One games have generally suffered as a result. These two-systems-at-once tests typically include elaborate staging, complete with cloned controller inputs on two systems and analysis of visual elements such as anti-aliasing and frame-pacing.

(credit: USPTO)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hoping that the saga of US Patent No. 8,473,532 will serve as a reminder that many universities aren't doing what they can to make the patent system work better. The '532 patent, "Method and apparatus for automatic organization for computer files," describes little more than a system of sorting files into folders. That alone would be enough to make it the Electronic Frontier Foundation's pick for "Stupid Patent of the Month." 

In September, Louisiana Tech went on to strike a deal with an entity called Micoba LLC to enforce the patent, which resulted in a series of 11 lawsuits filed later in the year, all in the Eastern District of Texas. Defendants in those lawsuits include seven defendants that already appear to have settled the claims, since the federal court records show their cases are closed: Syncplicity, iDrive, Dropbox, SpiderOak, Workshare Technology, Egnite, and Carbonite. Four other companies—Asustek, Box, Citrix, and SugarSync—have ongoing litigation.

The lawsuits accuse the companies of having products that automatically sort files into folders based on the names of the files and the folders. The allegedly infringed claim is number 13, which reads:

Enlarge (credit: william87 / Getty Images Plus)

On Monday, a former county prosecutor based in Brooklyn, New York, formally pleaded guilty to orchestrating an extensive illegal wiretapping scheme.

By her own admission, while she still served as deputy chief of the Brooklyn District Attorney's Violent Criminal Enterprises Bureau, Tara Lenich forged a judge’s signatures to fraudulently authorize wiretaps on the phone of a police detective that she was having an affair with, as well as one of her own co-workers.

"Between approximately 2015 and 2016, while I was working at the Kings County District Attorney’s office here in Brooklyn, I intentionally forged court orders that allowed me to wiretap cellphones for two different people," Lenich said, according to The New York Times. Between "muffled sobs," Lenich said she knew that this was illegal, and she apologized.