Month: February 2018

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

SAN FRANCISCO—In a packed courtroom on the first day of the blockbuster Waymo v. Uber trade secrets trial, both sides presented their opening arguments. Charles Verhoeven, Waymo's top lawyer, said that Travis Kalanick, Uber's CEO from 2010 until mid-2017, was not playing fair in his company's efforts to catch up with Waymo.

"The evidence is going to show that Mr. Kalanick, the CEO at the time, made a decision that winning was more important than obeying the law," he said. "He made a decision to cheat. Because for him, winning at all costs, no matter what, was his culture and was what he was going to do. The evidence is going to do that he targeted and hired away one of its key engineers that had been with Chauffeur—that’s the name of the program—since its inception."

Waymo v. Uber began back in February 2017, when Waymo sued Uber and accused one of its own star engineers of stealing 14,000 files shortly before he left Waymo.

Enlarge (credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

If there were any lingering doubts about whether the Bitcoin bubble was over, those should be gone now. After falling below $9,000 last Thursday for the first time since November, Bitcoin has fallen south of $7,500 as of this writing. Bitcoin was trading at right around $8,250 at the start of Monday, so it's down nearly 9 percent so far today.

Bitcoin had rallied a bit over the weekend, peaking at nearly $9,500 on Saturday, but Monday's news that Lloyds Bank has prohibited its credit card customers from using their cards for cryptocurrency sent prices reeling.

“Across Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland, Halifax and MBNA, we do not accept credit card transactions involving the purchase of cryptocurrencies,” a Lloyds Banking Group spokesperson told MarketWatch. “It’s a case of protecting our credit card customers from the risks associated with the price volatility of cryptocurrencies."

For over two years now, dedicated Metal Gear Solid V (MGSV) players have been trying in vain to remove every nuclear weapon created by players on the game's online servers as part of an official, Konami-supported metagame. Both unofficial trackers and occasional, official updates from Konami show how difficult that effort has been, though, with hundreds or thousands of virtual weapons still sticking around into 2018 (depending on the platform and region).

So it came as no small surprise for PC MGSV players when they logged in to their Forward Operating Bases on Friday to see a cutscene announcing, "The last nuke's been decommissioned. It's over, Boss. I thought this day would never come."

The contents of the cutscene itself have been well-known since hackers discovered it lurking in the game's code back in 2015. But the sudden "official" unlocking on the PC servers was quite unexpected, especially since the last official count showed a significant 7,500 nukes still on the PC servers as of January 25 (though that number had been plummeting for weeks at the time).

Enlarge / Lee Jae-yong, vice chairman of Samsung, seen here leaving a court hearing in January 2017. (credit: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

Samsung Group's de facto leader and vice chairman, Lee Jae-yong  (aka, Jay Y. Lee), was sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of bribery, embezzlement, capital flight, and perjury charges. Today, only six months after his sentencing, Lee is out of prison.

In a hearing monday, a South Korean appeals court cut Lee's original sentence in half, to two-and-a-half years. It also suspended the charges against Lee for bribery and embezzlement, which allows Lee to walk free. For now, Lee is looking at four years of probation, though he said he plans to appeal the remaining guilty verdicts.

Lee Jae-yong's conviction was part of a scandal that saw the head of Samsung bribe the then-President of South Korea, Park Geun-hye, to approve a merger of two Samsung Group affiliates. The fallout led to Park's impeachment, making her South Korea's first elected leader to be forced from office early.