Month: June 2018

It's final: the Rockstar patent case will be heard in a court near Google's headquarters in Northern California. (credit: bubbletea1)

A strict new real-time disclosure law has forced Google to suspend political advertising in the Evergreen State. "Ads related to ballot measures and state and local elections in the state of Washington, U.S.A., will not be accepted," a new Google policy says.

As Geekwire explains, the new rules were enacted by Washington state's Public Disclosure Commission to implement provisions of new campaign finance legislation that was passed in March. The rules require ad brokers like Google to provide information to the public about who is funding political ads and how those ads are being targeted. The rules also require this information to be made available as soon as ads start to run.

Google says that it intends to comply with the law, but it doesn't yet have the infrastructure to provide the required information so quickly.

Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly asked witnesses in the ongoing investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to hand in their phones to "inspect their encrypted messaging programs and potentially view conversations between associates linked to President Donald Trump."

On Monday, Mueller’s office formally accused Paul Manafort of felony witness tampering by using Telegram and WhatsApp, two well-known secure messaging apps. Manafort, who previously served as Trump’s campaign manager during the 2016 presidential race, pleaded not guilty to money laundering, among other charges. Authorities were able to obtain these messages by getting a warrant for Manafort’s iCloud account and also by getting unencrypted messages themselves from the recipients of some of those messages.

According to CNBC, since April, the Office of the Special Counsel has been looking at witnesses’ phones for evidence of the use of not only those two apps, but also Confide, Signal, and Dust, which operate in a similar fashion.

Jeff Dunn

Amazon on Thursday announced the Fire TV Cube, the latest device in the tech giant’s family of Fire TV media streamers and the latest to employ its Alexa digital assistant.

The new media streamer first leaked after a report from AFTVNews last September. Amazon later confirmed that it was working on a device called the Fire TV Cube, but didn’t reveal any details aside from that.

Enlarge / Russia's plans to develop a newer Soyuz rocket may have hit a funding snag. (credit: NASA)

The Russian space program's budget process is not particularly transparent to outsiders, but it does appear likely that Roscosmos will face cuts in the coming years. According to Sputnik, a Russian government-controlled news agency, the Roscosmos state corporation will likely to suffer funding shortages amounting to 150 billion rubles (more than $2 billion) in the next three years, from 2019 to 2021.

The consequences of these cuts could be severe for Russia's much-vaunted launch industry. In particular, the reduced budget could forestall a rocket development project intended to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and a new super-heavy lift booster.

Unnecessary rockets

One expert observer of the Russian space program, Ivan Moiseev, the scientific leader of the Russian Space Policy Institute, says this is the case. Cuts in the Roscosmos budget will make it impossible to develop the new Soyuz-5 medium-lift booster, the Falcon 9 competitor, as well as imperil further development of a heavy-lift variant of the Russian Angara rocket.