Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Earlier in January, Tesla began delivering the first Chinese-made Model 3 battery electric vehicles. (credit: Xinhua/Ding Ting via Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Tesla released its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2019. For the final three months of the year, Tesla brought in $6.4 billion in automotive revenues, a 1 percent increase on Q4 2018. Total revenues for the company during the quarter were $7.4 billion, a two percent rise from the same period the year before. Total revenues for the year were $24.6 billion, an increase of 14 percent compared to 2018. Once generally accepted accounting principles were applied, that translates to a quarterly profit of $105 million, a 25 percent decline from Q4 2018. (Regulatory credits brought in $133 million in Q4 2019.) Free cash flow increased by 11 percent compared to the same time period the year before to just over $1 billion.

The results come on the back of record deliveries of the Model 3 sedan. Between September and December of last year, the company built 86,958 Model 3s and delivered 92,620, a year-on-year increase of 42 percent and 46 percent, respectively. Tesla is also keeping less inventory on hand; globally, the company was at 11 days of sales for Q4 2019, a drop of 42 percent year on year.

However, Tesla noted in a letter to investors that gross profits "were essentially flat" as volume growth and manufacturing efficiency and cost reductions were offset by a decrease in average sales price and more leased cars. Deliveries of the Models S and X continue to decline year-on-year, falling by 29 percent.

Enlarge / The Facebook logo is displayed on a TV screen on September 9, 2019, in Paris, France. (credit: Chesnot | Getty Images)

After years of promising increased transparency, Facebook is getting granular and showing you how it picks up and mashes together data about you from other companies. Facebook's new tool is indeed illuminating when it comes to getting a glimpse at who tracks you (spoiler: everyone). Its promises to give you a measure of control over the process, however, fall short.

Facebook this week launched an Off-Facebook Activity portal to give users a different and more detailed perspective on the data it hoovers up from other firms. Off-Facebook Activity is exactly what it sounds like: interactions you have with other entities, such as an app on your phone or a retailer you shop at, that Facebook receives data about. Facebook attaches that data to the rest of the information it has about you and uses it for marketing purposes.

Here's how Facebook itself describes the process:

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving company, is getting into the package-delivery business, the company announced in a Wednesday blog post.

"Our self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans will shuttle packages from UPS Stores in the Metro Phoenix area to the UPS Tempe hub," Chief Operating Officer Tekedra Mawakana wrote. Initially, Waymo will have a safety driver behind the wheel of each vehicle carrying packages.

Importantly, Waymo is not going to start delivering UPS packages directly to customers—a job that would require a human delivery person to carry the package to a customer's front door.

Enlarge (credit: Omar Marques/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The Maze ransomware ring has taken extortion to new heights by publicly posting breached data on the Internet—and threatening full dumps of stolen data if the ring's "customers" don't pay for their files to be unencrypted. But the group appears to be making one exception: the City of Pensacola, which was hit by Maze ransomware in December.

On the group's website, the administrator of Maze's ransomware operations posted:

We are going to make a gift to City of Pensacola: we will not publish leaked private data, but we publish the list of leak data and hosts to proof [sic], that we did it, we really hacked City of Pensacola.

Just before Christmas, the Maze operators had posted 2GB of data from the city's systems, claiming it was only 10 percent of what had been stolen from systems before the attackers launched their ransomware attack. But the files were then removed, with only directory data, computer names, and IP addresses left on the site as proof of compromise. Based on the Maze site, 28 servers were hit by the attack.

Enlarge / If another game as big as Dota 2 emerges from a mod of a Blizzard title, Blizzard wants to be sure it owns the rights completely. (credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

As influential as Warcraft III was in the real-time strategy genre, the game's most enduring legacy might be as the basis for genre-defining, fan-made custom game spin-offs like Defense of the Ancients (aka Dota) and Auto Chess in its wake. Now, Blizzard is taking steps to ensure it retains complete ownership of any such custom games that originate from its titles in the future, including those that come out of Warcraft III's recently released Reforged update.

As noted by PC Gamer, a recent update to Blizzard's Acceptable Use Policy expands the legal rights that custom-game makers automatically assign to Blizzard (new language highlighted in bold; old language available on The Internet Archive).

Custom Games are and shall remain the sole and exclusive property of Blizzard. Without limiting the foregoing, you hereby assign to Blizzard all of your rights, title, and interest in and to all Custom Games, including but not limited to any copyrights in the content of any Custom Games.

Blizzard's claim on custom-game copyrights is important because, while it's hard to effectively copyright the basic concept of a game, you can copyright the original characters, art, and writing associated with the game itself. Blizzard learned this the hard way a decade ago, when Valve bought the Dota copyright from some of the modders who created it.