Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Travis Kalanick, seen here in 2013, served as the CEO of Uber from December 2010 until June 2017. (credit: Fortune Live Media)

The intrigue deepens surrounding the early 2016 discussions between Uber’s acquisition of a self-driving trucking company, Otto, according to newly-released court documents. Otto was founded by two then-high-level Google engineers.

Waymo now says that Uber is dragging its feet about providing evidence that may shed light on how, exactly, the company went about trying to sign a deal with the nascent Otto last year. In addition, excerpts of released transcripts from a recent deposition of an Uber executive show that the company was willing to act as a legal shield for its two soon-to-be employees—known as "indemnification"—if Google came after Uber following the deal to acquire Otto.

The filings come less than two weeks after a hearing in the ongoing Waymo v. Uber lawsuit. The suit involves the Google subsidiary sued Uber, alleging that one of its former employees, Anthony Levandowski, stole 14,000 proprietary files and took them to his new startup. However, Uber says it never received the files, and so it couldn’t have, and didn’t, implement them into its own products, services, or prototypes.

Enlarge / The STAR detector, with a bunch of physicists thrown in for scale. (credit: Brookhaven National Lab)

Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory's RHIC particle accelerator have determined that an exotic form of matter produced in their collisions is the most rapidly spinning material ever detected. The material is called a quark-gluon plasma, and it provides us an opportunity to study the state that all matter was in immediately after the Big Bang.

The fact that the quark-gluon plasma spins provides us with an opportunity to study some theoretical ideas about the behavior of the strong force, one of the fundamental forces of nature that's responsible for holding together the matter that we see around us.

The force is strong in these collisions

Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and CERN's Large Hadron Collider are the only facilities that can reach energies high enough to produce a quark-gluon plasma. Quarks are the building blocks of the heavier components of atoms; both protons and neutrons consist of three quarks bundled together. Gluons are the particles that hold them together in that bundle. Their interactions are governed by the strong force, and the rules of those interactions are described by a theory called quantum chromodynamics (often simply called QCD).

Enlarge (credit: zodman)

A 32-year-old Seattle man is behind bars while awaiting a federal hacking trial for launching a DDoS attack. He is being held without bail on allegations that he attacked a US-based legal services website to force it to remove a link to a case citation about his past criminal conduct. The authorities also say the suspect launched distributed denial of service attacks on various overseas media outlets for not removing stories about his credit-card scam and other crimes.

The FBI says that the day after a DDoS attack in January, 2015, the suspect sent an e-mail to Leagle.com pretending to be the hacking group Anonymous. The e-mail explained that the DDoS attack was launched because the defendant, Kamyar Jahanrakhshan, "is being unjustly victimised by you" for not abiding by his numerous requests to remove the link and even pay $100 in cash to get the job done.

"If you do not remove it immediately, more severe attacks will hit your website in the coming days and weeks, and your users will be deprived of your service," the e-mail to the Dallas-based legal services site said, according to an FBI affidavit. (PDF)

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Enlarge (credit: Blu)

Amazon said it's suspending sales of Android phones made by Blu following a presentation last week that said that three of the manufacturer's models sent sensitive personal information to third parties in China.

Last week's presentation at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas by security firm Kryptowire came eight months after the same company first warned about Android devices sold by Blu. That earlier report said the low-cost phones sent massive amounts of personal data about the phones and their users’ activities to servers that were owned by AdUps Technologies, a China-based firmware update provider.

The data sent to AdUps servers at the time included the full body of text messages, contact lists, call histories with full telephone numbers, unique device identifiers including the International Mobile Subscriber Identity and the International Mobile Equipment Identity. AdUps officials responded by saying the data collection was a mistake and was being curbed. At Black Hat, however, Kryptowire researcher Ryan Johnson said that three models of Blu phones continued to collect a more limited set of users' personal information. Earlier this week, Amazon officials responded by saying that the online store will stop selling the manufacturer's devices until the issues are fixed.