Month: April 2020

Enlarge / Anthony Levandowski leaves court in September 2019. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Uber says it shouldn't be on the hook for a massive $179 million judgment owed to Google by Uber's former star engineer, Anthony Levandowski. Uber made that argument in a legal filing last week to a federal bankruptcy court in California. Uber's brief portrays the situation differently than Levandowski, who told the court last month that Uber was legally obligated to pay the award.

Levandowski joined Uber in 2016 after almost a decade at Google, where he had been a leading self-driving engineer. Uber bought Levandowski's months-old self-driving startup Otto for hundreds of millions of dollars, intending to make Levandowski and his team the core of Uber's fledgling self-driving car project.

But things went sour fast. Google sued Uber, alleging that Levandowski had downloaded thousands of confidential documents before his departure and had taken them to his new job. Fearing criminal prosecution for trade secret theft—fears that proved justified—Levandowski invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify during the civil trial between Google and Uber.

Enlarge / Barricades stand outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday, March 14, 2020. As the novel coronavirus has spread in the US, the CDC is under increasing heat to defend a shaky rollout of crucial testing kits. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed.

The contamination made the tests uninterpretable, and—because testing is crucial for containment efforts—it lost the country invaluable time to get ahead of the advancing pandemic.

The CDC had been vague about what went wrong with the tests, initially only saying that “a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents” had led to the failure. Subsequent reporting suggested that the problem was with a negative control—that is, a part of the test meant to be free of any trace of the coronavirus as a critical reference for confirming that the test was working properly overall.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of hackers lining up for these new bug bounties.

Last week, we took a look at the new Vanguard anti-cheat system being used in Riot's Valorant and the potential security risks of the kernel-level driver it utilizes. Now, in an effort to allow "players to continue to play our games with peace of mind," Riot says it is "putting our money where our mouth is" with an expanded bug bounty program, offering more money for the discovery of Vanguard vulnerabilities.

Bug bounties aren't new to the gaming industry or even to Riot Games, which says it has paid out nearly $2 million in such rewards since launching its bounty program in 2016. But Riot is now offering "even higher bounties" of up to $100,000 specifically for the discovery of "high quality reports that demonstrate practical exploits leveraging the Vanguard kernel driver."

The largest bounties in Riot's newly expanded program are available to attacks that are able to exploit the Vanguard driver to run unauthorized code at the kernel level—something of a nightmare scenario that could give an attacker full, low-level access to a machine—but exploits that merely provide "unauthorized access to sensitive data" will also be rewarded. The bounties apply to network-based attacks that need no user interaction, vulnerabilities that require user action (like clicking on a malicious link), and exploits that require "guest user" access to the system itself, in declining order of potential reward.

• 

  BMW started IMSA's 2020 season with a win at Daytona, and it has kept winning as racing has moved online. [credit: BMW Motorsport ]

The year got off to a pretty good start for BMW Motorsport. It scored a win at Daytona in January, the second year in a row its big M8 GTE came home best-in-class at the high-profile 24-hour race that really starts off the international racing season. Next up was supposed to be the 12 Hours of Sebring in March. But that visit to the bumpy concrete track that used to be a WWII bomber base in Florida bumped into the hard reality of SARS-CoV-2. The (hopefully temporary) end of public gatherings has driven real-world racers to compete on virtual race tracks for our entertainment as each professional racing series in turn spins up its own take on esports. And despite the shift, BMW Motorsport keeps racking up the wins.

IMSA has unlocked car setup

Most of the esports racing events, whether in iRacing, rFactor 2, or something else, have used standardized cars and locked-down setups as a way to level playing fields. But IMSA's sports car series has taken a different tack, allowing competitors to set their cars up to their liking. And right from the start, BMW Motorsport took full advantage, locking out the podium at a virtual Sebring with a 1-2-3 finish for the iRacing version of its M8 GTE race car. That's because it has been treating sim racing like any other discipline in motorsport for a while now, says Rudolf Dittrich, general manager for BMW Motorsport's vehicle development.

"Obviously the situation right now is a bit special with coronavirus, but even before that you could see that the interest in participants and but also in viewers and spectators has been growing a lot, so therefore it was obvious for us to investigate a bit more," Dittrich told Ars. "And we thought it's worthwhile to expand our activities and also try to really have a very structured backbone, like we would have in any other motor racing discipline; to really be able to work on this stuff the way we're used to do in other programs."