Month: September 2019

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  VW has shown us plenty of ID concept cars, but this is the first production version, the ID.3. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

FRANKFURT, Germany—On Monday night, on the eve of this year's Frankfurt Motor Show, Volkswagen debuted the ID.3, its new battery electric vehicle. It's the first BEV to use the company's new modular electric architecture (called MEB), which will underpin new BEVs from VW as well as sister brands Skoda and Seat. It's about the size of a VW Golf, and the base model will sell for around €30,000. But unfortunately for us, there are no plans to sell this particular BEV in the North American market.

In the wake of the diesel emissions scandal, VW has gone all-in on electrification, as it's the only way the automaker will be able to meet stringent new European Union CO₂ targets. To that end, the company has developed a flexible new platform for EVs, which in the past few years it's shown off in a number of concept vehicles, including the groovy ID Buzz microbus and that wacky ID Buggy we drove last month.

But the ID.3 is the first production vehicle to use the new technology. At launch, the ID.3—which uses a single rear-mounted 150kW (201hp), 310Nm (228lb-ft) electric motor-generator unit—will feature a 58kWh lithium-ion battery pack that provides up to 260 miles (420km) of range under the European WLTP testing scheme. In time, there will also be a smaller-battery 45kWh, 205-mile (330km) variant and a 341-mile (550km) 77kWh version.

Enlarge / LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Scraping a public website without the approval of the website's owner isn't a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an appeals court ruled on Monday. The ruling comes in a legal battle that pits Microsoft-owned LinkedIn against a small data-analytics company called hiQ Labs.

HiQ scrapes data from the public profiles of LinkedIn users, then uses the data to help companies better understand their own workforces. After tolerating hiQ's scraping activities for several years, LinkedIn sent the company a cease-and-desist letter in 2017 demanding that hiQ stop harvesting data from LinkedIn profiles. Among other things, LinkedIn argued that hiQ was violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America's main anti-hacking law.

This posed an existential threat to hiQ because the LinkedIn website is hiQ's main source of data about clients' employees. So hiQ sued LinkedIn, seeking not only a declaration that its scraping activities were not hacking but also an order banning LinkedIn from interfering.

Enlarge / District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine (L) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speak during the launch of an antitrust investigation into large tech companies, outside of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on September 9, 2019. (credit: Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images)

A coalition of attorneys general representing 50 US states and territories today announced a long-awaited joint probe into antitrust complaints against one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Google.

The office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is spearheading the bipartisan investigation, which is beginning with the search and digital advertising markets. Google "dominates all aspects of advertising on the Internet and searching on the Internet," Paxton told reporters during a press conference.

The group includes attorneys general from 48 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. (Alabama and California are the two states not participating.) The states' action is independent of several different federal actions, participating attorneys general stressed.

Enlarge / A Foxconn facility. (credit: Ken Marshall / Flickr)

Apple and Foxconn violated a Chinese labor rule by using too many temporary staff at a major factory that makes iPhones. As reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the two companies confirmed the allegation.

Chinese labor law allows facilities like Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant to operate with no more than 10% of the staff being temporary workers in August 2019, according to non-profit watchdog China Labor Watch, which released the initial report to which Apple and Foxconn responded.

According to that report, 50% of the workforce were temporary staff. However, many were students who have now returned to school, bringing the number down to 30%.

Enlarge / Visitors check out new Huawei smartphones at the 2019 IFA home electronics and appliances trade fair Berlin. (credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

A Chinese computer science professor named Bo Mao is facing wire fraud charges after he was arrested last month by US authorities.

The document formally charging Mao in Brooklyn federal court charges that he conspired to "defraud a company headquartered in the Northern District of California." Other court filings, including a criminal complaint filed in a Texas federal court last month, help fill in the details. As Reuters first reported, Mao is accused of stealing trade secrets from a startup called CNEX Labs on behalf of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

The prosecution is the latest effort by the Trump administration to punish Huawei for alleged industrial espionage. In January, the US government indicted Huawei after employees attempted to steal proprietary information about a T-Mobile robot used to test mobile phones.

Fans of the 1980 film The Shining will be going back to the Overlook Hotel with a grown Danny Torrance in Doctor Sleep, the big-screen adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling novel. It's written and directed by Mike Flanagan, who also wrote and directed last year's stunning adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, so I have high hopes for what he's done with Doctor Sleep.

Doctor Sleep explores what happened to young Danny Torrance as he grew into adulthood after the horrifying events of The Shining. King published The Shining in 1977, and it became his first hardback bestseller. In the 2013 follow-up novel, a grown-up Danny struggles to recover from the psychological trauma he experienced at the Overlook Hotel. He has learned to contain the ghosts in a mental "lockbox" but still spends years as an alcoholic, just like his father—the drinking suppresses the shining—wandering from town to town.

Now in his 40s, Dan finally gets sober and settles in a New Hampshire town called Frazier. He gets a job at a hospice, where he uses his psychic gift to comfort dying patients, earning him the moniker Doctor Sleep. Dan also forms a psychic connection with a young girl, Abra Stone, whose psychic powers are even stronger than his own. When she witnesses the murder of a boy by members of a cult of psychic vampires called the True Knot, she turns to Dan for help. The True Knot members feed off "steam," a psychic essence that comes from people with the shining who die in pain—a lot of pain, and the longer the torture lasts, the better the steam. The True Knot targets Abra, believing they can torture her indefinitely to give them a steady supply. It's up to Dan to protect her.