Month: September 2017

Enlarge / A new startup aims to make lidars like the two shown here obsolete. (credit: Wired)

Silicon Valley is crawling with startups looking for a piece of the emerging self-driving car business. One of those startups, Aeva, just came out of stealth mode with a big write-up in the New York Times. Its breakthrough: building a single sensor that can determine both the position and velocity of surrounding objects.

Most experts say that the best self-driving cars need a trifecta of sensors: cameras, lidar, and radar. They need all three sensor types because each performs a different function. Cameras can tell you what objects look like, but not how far away they are or how fast they're moving. Lidar measures distance, while radar provides a precise estimate of velocity.

According to the Times, Aeva's sensor provides information about both position and velocity:

Enlarge / San Diego Comic-Con prepares for IP "genericide" warfare. (credit: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)

The future survival of the trademarked term "Comic-Con" is at stake.

The trademark is facing its potential doom because of the legal fallout from the producers of the San Diego Comic-Con flexing their IP muscles. They sued a competing "Comic-Con" convention for using the unhyphenated form of their trademarked term "Comic-Con" without paying licensing fees. But their suit has raised questions about the legitimacy of the trademark—in particular whether the trademark has become too generic and, hence, a victim to its own pop-culture popularity.

The San Diego Comic Convention, the producers of the San Diego Comic-Con event, launched a legal battle against the producers of Salt Lake Comic Con. Both conventions are drool-worthy for fans of comic books and other areas of geek culture. The lawsuit claims the Salt Lake venue is capitalizing on the goodwill of the Comic-Con brand to mislead and confuse consumers into believing that the Utah venue is tied to the original Comic-Con venture.

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk. (credit: Yuriko Nakao/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Tesla is working on custom silicon for its self-driving software in partnership with AMD, CNBC reported Wednesday. "The carmaker has received back samples of the first implementation of its processor and is now running tests on it," a source told CNBC. Shares of AMD soared more than six percent on Wednesday after news of the partnership leaked.

Tesla has been working to beef up its in-house hardware capabilities over the last year after going through a nasty divorce with Mobileye, a leading supplier of self-driving hardware and software, a year ago. Mobileye had supplied the hardware for Tesla's first-generation Autopilot technology, but the two companies went their separate ways after a Tesla customer died in a crash that occurred while Autopilot was active.

Since the split, Tesla has built a new Autopilot technology stack using non-Mobileye hardware, including Nvidia graphics processors. Developing chips in-house will make Tesla less reliant on Nvidia in the future, according to CNBC, and Nvidia stock fell almost 4 percent on Wednesday evening after the news broke.

Enlarge (credit: Daniel Arauz)

Last month, a federal judge in Oakland, California, ruled that police must generally have a warrant before they use a cell-site simulator to locate a criminal suspect. However, the same judge also ruled that, in this particular case, a warrant was not needed, and so the evidence obtained from it could stand.

That ruling in United States v. Ellis effectively ended the case of the three remaining men charged with racketeering and the attempted murder of an Oakland police officer in 2013. A fourth defendant, Damien McDaniel, who had previously pleaded guilty in April 2017, was sentenced to 33 years in prison on Wednesday.

According to prosecutors, McDaniel and two other co-defendants, Deante Kincaid (aka “Tay Tay”) and Joseph Pennymon (aka “Junkie”) also took similar plea deals last month. That leaves Purvis Ellis as the sole defendant left in the case—he is expected to plead guilty at a Thursday hearing.