Month: August 2017

(credit: Geoff S. / Flickr)

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google has abruptly canceled a company-wide meeting, scheduled for Thursday afternoon, that was intended to address employee questions about the company's diversity policies.

Questions submitted by employees on the company's internal network "appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in an email announcing the cancellation. "Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be 'outed' publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall."

It's the latest PR headache for a company that has been caught in a no-win situation since a controversial internal memo written by mid-level Google engineer James Damore surfaced over the weekend.

Enlarge / Travis Kalanick, one of Uber's co-founders, seen here in 2013. (credit: Fortune Live Media / Flickr)

Travis Kalanick, the recently removed CEO of Uber, has been sued by a group of investors that has accused him of "gross mismanagement and misconduct" during his tenure.

Benchmark Capital Partners, which currently holds 13 percent of the company’s stock and about 20 percent of its voting power on the board of directors, filed the lawsuit against Kalanick and Uber on Thursday. (The case was first reported by Axios.)

The complaint (which was filed in Delaware Court of Chancery as it involves two companies incorporated in the state) outlines in one fell swoop the myriad complaints that have befallen Uber during Kalanick's time as CEO. These include reports on sexual harassment, Greyball, the questionable acquisition of Otto (and the resulting in the still ongoing lawsuit from Waymo that followed), and other widely reported missteps.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai listens during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on June 20, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

A prisoners' rights group has accused Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai of having a conflict of interest because he used to represent a prison phone company as a lawyer.

Under Pai's direction, the FCC dropped its court defense of rules capping the intrastate phone rates charged to prisoners. The decision helped prison phone companies—including Pai's former client, Securus Technologies—continue to charge high prices.

Pai "represented Securus as its attorney while employed as a partner with the law firm of Jenner & Block, LLP, immediately preceding his confirmation as FCC Commissioner in May 2012," Human Rights Defense Center Executive Director Paul Wright wrote in a filing with the commission yesterday.

Enlarge (credit: John Loo)

In 2015, 4,700 people lost a finger or other body part to table-saw incidents. Most of those injuries didn't have to happen, thanks to technology invented in 1999 by entrepreneur Stephen Gass. By giving his blade a slight electric charge, his saw is able to detect contact with a human hand and stop spinning in a few milliseconds. A widely circulated video shows a test on a hot dog that leaves the wiener unscathed.

Now federal regulators are considering whether to make Gass' technology mandatory in the table-saw industry. The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced plans for a new rule in May, and the rules could take effect in the coming months.

But established makers of power tools vehemently object. They say the mandate could double the cost of entry-level table saws and destroy jobs in the power-tool industry. They also point out that Gass holds dozens of patents on the technology. If the CPSC makes the technology mandatory for table saws, that could give Gass a legal monopoly over the table-saw industry until at least 2021, when his oldest patents expire.

Enlarge (credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

Immediately after the Big Bang, the Universe's matter was incredibly dense and rippled with random fluctuations. Is it possible that some portions of it reached densities high enough to collapse into black holes?

The idea of primordial black holes has been kicking around in theoretical circles for a while, in part because they could provide much of the dark matter that seems to dominate the Universe's large-scale structures. But testing for their existence requires some sort of consequence that we could detect, and the theorists have largely come up short there. But now, a team of three physicists writing in Physical Review Letters has come up with a rather intriguing consequence: these black holes could swallow a neutron star that, under the right conditions, would spit out heavy elements.

Truth or consequences

Two things could distinguish primordial black holes from those formed in the collapse of a massive star. One is that they could be nearly any mass, from less than the mass of a star up to thousands of times heavier than anything formed during a supernova. The heavier end of the spectrum is appealing, since it could explain how supermassive black holes appeared so quickly (in astronomical terms) after the Universe's birth.

Enlarge / Meatpistol was supposed to be released at DEFCON. But Salesforce pulled the plug—and fired two security employees for presenting about it. (credit: DEFCON/Schwartz and Cramb)

At Defcon in Las Vegas last month, word rapidly spread that two speakers—members of Salesforce's internal "red team"—had been fired by a senior executive from Salesforce "as they left the stage." Those two speakers, who presented under their Twitter handles, were Josh "FuzzyNop" Schwartz, Salesforce's director of offensive security, and John Cramb, a senior offensive security engineer.

Schwartz and Cramb were presenting the details of their tool, called Meatpistol. It's a "modular malware implant framework" similar in intent to the Metasploit toolkit used by many penetration testers, except that Meatpistol is not a library of common exploits, and it is not intended for penetration testing. The tool was anticipated to be released as open source at the time of the presentation, but Salesforce has held back the code.

"Meatpistol is a framework for red teams to create better implants," and an "offensive infrastructure automation tool," Schwartz and Cramb explained in their presentation. It is intended to automate the grunt work of deploying new malware attacks for multiple types of targets. Rather than testing for common vulnerabilities as penetration testers often do, the internal red team Schwartz led until last month had the job of constantly probing and attacking Salesforce's systems. It even stole data like real adversaries, operating with nearly unrestricted rules of engagement internally.