Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Kim Dotcom speaks to the media following a bail hearing at Auckland District Court on December 1, 2014 in Auckland, New Zealand. (credit: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)

The High Court of New Zealand, the country’s intermediate appellate court, has ruled that the entire government spying operation conducted against two of Kim Dotcom’s closest colleagues was not authorized under local law in 2011.

According to a court filing newly released on Friday afternoon, Auckland time (late Thursday evening, Eastern Time), the Government Communications Security Bureau conducted an "unlawful" and "unreasonable search" of Bram van der Kolk and Mathias Ortmann, two Megaupload executives. The GCSB is the New Zealand equivalent of the National Security Agency in the United States.

At the time, van der Kolk (like Dotcom himself) was a permanent resident of New Zealand, which meant that he should have been exempted from being spied upon by the GCSB, which apparently failed to adequately verify their immigration status.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images News)

SAN FRANCISCO—Next month, a federal judge is set to answer a basic question at trial: should a "gig economy" worker be properly classified as an employee? If so, should his work-related expenses be reimbursed, such as mileage?

"This is the first case in California as to how the gig economy works," US Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Corley said during the Thursday hearing, likely the last hearing before the September 5 bench trial, which is expected to last about a week. Most of the hearing was taken up establishing procedural ground rules and wrapping up loose threads about witness availability, among other items.

This lawsuit just might provide an answer. If Grubhub must treat its drivers as employees, the employees would be entitled to all kinds of benefits, including unemployment, insurance, and reimbursement for various expenses, like gas and employee phone bills. In short, treating workers as employees could cost companies like Grubhub millions of dollars.

A video-on-demand streaming service that enables the filtering of objectionable content to make it family friendly is breaking US copyright law, a federal appeals court ruled.

The service, VidAngel, buys movie discs and decrypts and rips them. It then streams versions that allow customers to filter out nudity, profanity, and violence. In doing so, it breached the performance rights of Disney, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Brothers, the court ruled. VidAngel purchased a disc for every stream it sold, some 2,500 titles in all.

"Star Wars is still Star Wars, even without Princess Leia's bikini scene," the opinion said. Just because objectionable content is removed, that doesn't necessarily transform the content enough to allow this type of behavior under a fair use analysis, the court wrote Thursday.

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple is reportedly debuting much more than new iPhones later this year. According to a Bloomberg report, the company will reveal an updated 4K TV box alongside the new iPhones at its rumored September event. The new Apple TV will stream 4K content and highlight "live television," including news and sports.

The ability to stream 4K content would be the biggest update that the Apple TV has seen in a while, at least in terms of hardware. Back in 2015, the Apple TV was updated with a new remote control, app store, and Siri support. The report claims the new device will have a faster processor capable of streaming 4K and HDR content. But as with any 4K set-top box, users will have to connect it to a display that's also capable of playing 4K content to reap any benefits.

To accompany the new set-top box, Apple is also reportedly testing out a new version of the TV app. This was introduced last year as an app that aggregates streaming video content from various sources, making it easier for users to watch all their favorite content in one place.

Enlarge / When the yarn is stretched, the LED lights up. (credit: AAAS/Science)

Spare energy is all around us, from the pressure exerted by every footfall to the heat given off by heavy machinery. In some cases, like regenerative braking in cars, it's easy to harvest, and the equipment needed to do so is simple and economic. In many others, however, we're not there yet.

It's not that we don't have the materials to do so. Piezoelectric generators can harvest stresses and strains, while triboelectric generators can harvest friction, to give two examples. The problem is that their efficiency is low and the cost of the materials is currently high, making them bad fits for any applications.

But a study in today's issue of Science describes a "yarn" made of carbon nanotubes that can produce electricity when stretched. Its developers go on to demonstrate its use in everything from wearable fabrics to ocean-based wave power generators. Given that the raw material for carbon nanotubes is cheap and there are lots of people trying to bring their price down, this seems to have the potential to find some economic applications.

Enlarge / CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA—A woman leaves a note on the ground as people gather at a memorial for Heather Heyer after her funeral service on Wednesday. Heyer was killed after a car rammed into a group of people during a planned Unite the Right rally on August 12. The Daily Stormer's celebration of the death sparked a backlash. (credit: The Washington Post, Getty Images)

The infamous neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer is back online again, but maybe not for very long.

The saga of The Daily Stormer is well into its second week. Earlier this month, a white supremacist allegedly rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protestors in Charlottesville, killing protestor Heather Heyer. Stormer editor Andrew Anglin responded with a vulgar post attacking Heyer. Then anti-racism activists started lobbying technology companies to stop doing business with the site in an effort to drive the Stormer off the Internet.

The campaign worked. Over the last week, the site has cycled through a sequence of domains—dailystormer.com, dailystormer.wang, dailystormer.ru, and then dailystormer.lol—as one domain registrar after another succumbed to activist pressure to take the site down. On Wednesday, the site appeared online again at punishedstormer.com.