Month: April 2017

Enlarge / Plaintiff Tanya Gersh of Whitefish, Montana. (credit: Dan Chung)

Lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center have sued the owner of a white supremacist website, accusing him of unleashing a "troll storm" of harassment on a Jewish real estate agent.

The lawsuit (PDF) was filed Tuesday against Andrew Anglin, publisher of the Daily Stormer neo-Nazi website. It claims he unleashed a "coordinated, repulsive, threatening campaign of anti-Semitic harassment" on Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent living in Whitefish, Montana. The campaign allegedly resulted in more than 700 threatening phone calls, voicemails, and e-mails.

At issue is whether a prominent publisher of a far-right website can be held legally liable for online "trolling" tactics his articles inspired. Lawyers for Gersh say Anglin violated Montana's "Anti-Intimidation Act," and that he should be made to pay for Gersh's loss of privacy and emotional distress.

Enlarge / A totally-not-official rendering of what the Chrome Adblocker logo might look like. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The Wall Street Journal just dropped a shocker of a report: Google, the biggest web advertising company in the world, is planning to build an ad blocker into Google Chrome, the world's most popular web browser. The ad blocker will reportedly end up in the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome and would be switched on by default.

If true, this report suggests a major conflict of interest for Google. Today Chrome covers over 50 percent of the browsing market, according to Net Market Share, and Google would kill its income if it started blocking Google ads. Of course, Google won't block Google ads. Instead, according to the report, Chrome will target "unacceptable ads" as defined by the Coalition for Better Ads. The Coalition for Better Ads, which counts Google and Facebook among its members, has a page of "least preferred ad experiences" up on its website. This page calls out pop-ups, autoplaying video ads with sound, interstitial ads with countdowns, and large "sticky" ads as "below the threshold of consumer acceptability."

The Journal notes "in one possible application Google is considering" Google could block all ads on a site that doesn't comply with the rules, rather than just block offending ads. Presumably this would stop websites from using a mix of "acceptable" and "unacceptable" ads with the hope that the "unacceptable" ads are seen by non-Chrome users, since they risk losing out on all revenue from all Chrome users.

Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

NEW YORK—Belgian car designer Luc Donckerwolke has an interesting challenge on his hands. Donckerwolke spent much of his career within the Volkswagen group, working on the Audi A2 and Lamborghini's Murciélago and Gallardo, among other cars. Most recently director of design for Bentley, he moved to Genesis last year after Hyundai made the decision to establish the division as a luxury brand in its own right. Going from one of the oldest, most traditional car makers in the industry to a young upstart must have been an interesting transition. At Bentley, there were 98 years of heritage and expectation that had to be taken into account. But at Genesis, Donckerwolke got to start with a clean slate.

The first tangible result of that move is the GV80 concept you see here. The Genesis G80 and G90 sedans currently in production predate his arrival and can be thought of as an evolutionary dead-end for the marque. "It's a great challenge because you get to enjoy the fact that you're not designing a product that is trying to find its position between the old ones and the future elements. At the same time, I don't have the ballast of having a long tradition. So I have a big advantage, but at the same time I have a higher responsibility for the future," Donckerwolke told us.

(credit: James Mackler)

A Tennessee attorney with an expertise in drone and aviation law announced this week that he is running in 2018 for United States Senate. Earlier this month, James Mackler quit his job at Frost Brown Todd, a Midwest and East Coast law firm, to pursue his political campaign full time.

Mackler, who goes by @drone_attorney on Twitter, represented David Boggs, who recently lost a lawsuit he filed against a man named William Merideth. Merideth is a Kentucky man who shot down Boggs' drone when Boggs flew it over Merideth's property in 2015. Other attorneys from Frost Brown will continue to represent Boggs as he evaluates whether to appeal the decision.

Mackler, who is running as a Democrat, will face off next year against incumbent Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican, among other challengers. Tennessee hasn’t elected a non-incumbent Democratic senator since Al Gore, who served in the position from 1985 to 1993. Gore resigned the post to become vice president under President Bill Clinton.

Enlarge / Orion Hindawi, co-founder and chief technology officer of Tanium Inc.

Information security company Tanium is a relatively well-established "next-generation" cybersecurity vendor that was founded 10 years ago—far ahead of the wave of the venture capital-funded newcomers, like Cylance, who have changed the security software space. (Tanium has reached a market valuation of more than $3 billion, though there are no indications of when it will make an initial public offering.)

Starting in 2012, Tanium apparently had a secret weapon to help it compete with the wave of newcomers, which the company's executives used in sales demonstrations: a live customer network they could tap into for product demonstrations.There was just one problem: the customer didn't know that Tanium was using its network. And since the customer was a hospital, the Tanium demos—which numbered in the hundreds between 2012 and 2015, according to a Wall Street Journal report—exposed live, sensitive information about the hospital's IT systems. Until recently, some of that data was shown in publicly posted videos.

In 2010, Tanium's software was installed at Allscripts Healthcare Solutions' El Camino Hospital (which markets itself as "the hospital of Silicon Valley") in Santa Clara County, California. The hospital no longer has a relationship with Tanium. While Tanium did not have access to patient data, the demos showed desktop and server management details that were not anonymized.