Month: February 2021

Nikola admits to making “inaccurate” statements under disgraced founder

Under new leadership, Nikola is trying to become a viable truck maker.

A prototype of the Nikola Tre battery electric truck.

Enlarge / A prototype of the Nikola Tre battery electric truck. (credit: Nikola)

Aspiring electric truck maker Nikola has admitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission that nine statements made by founder Trevor Milton were "inaccurate." Milton was forced to resign from Nikola in September, shortly after the falsehoods first came to light.

Between 2016 and 2020, Milton told a series of whoppers about his fledgling truck maker. At a 2016 press event, Milton took to the stage to unveil a prototype of the company's first truck, dubbed the Nikola One. During the event, Milton claimed that the truck "fully functions." In reality, Nikola never got the truck to move under its own power.

Nikola's most infamous flimflam came in 2018, when the company released a video of the Nikola One "in motion." In reality, Nikola had towed the inoperative truck to the top of a long, shallow incline and rolled it down, angling the camera so that it looked like it was driving on level ground.

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Perseverance’s eyes see a different Mars

The Red Planet’s red looks different to a robot with hyperspectral cameras for eyes.

Perseverance's two Mastcam-Z imagers (in the gray boxes) are part of the rover's remote sensing mast.

Enlarge / Perseverance's two Mastcam-Z imagers (in the gray boxes) are part of the rover's remote sensing mast. (credit: NASA)

The seven minutes of terror are over. The parachute deployed; the skycrane rockets fired. Robot truck goes ping! Perseverance, a rover built by humans to do science 128 million miles away, is wheels-down on Mars. Phew.

Percy has now opened its many eyes and taken a look around.

The rover is studded with a couple dozen cameras—25, if you count the two on the drone helicopter. Most of them help the vehicle drive safely. A few peer closely and intensely at ancient Martian rocks and sands, hunting for signs that something once lived there. Some of the cameras see colors and textures almost exactly the way the people who built them do. But they also see more. And less. The rover’s cameras imagine colors beyond the ones that human eyes and brains can come up with. And yet human brains still have to make sense of the pictures they send home.

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Woman Celebrates After Court Kicks Out Another Baseless Copyright Troll Lawsuit

In 2019, Danish citizen Anni Pape took to Facebook, pleading for help after being accused of downloading and sharing a pornographic film using BitTorrent. Two years later she has cause to celebrate after a court in Denmark threw out the case because the plaintiffs had no right to sue. The defendant believes the victory undermines the plaintiff’s entire business model.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

copyright trollIn 2019, Danish citizen Anni Pape posted a cry for help on Facebook.

Like thousands of other Danes, she had received a demand for cash settlement on the basis she had downloaded and shared pornographic content online using BitTorrent.

“HELP! Are there others who are being sued for having illegally downloaded and shared pornographic films and have to pay 7,500 (US$1,226) to the law firm Njord? And maybe 15,500 (US$2,535) in legal costs!” she wrote.

Pape explained that she had been summoned to appear at the court in Lyngby because the law firm claimed that her IP address had been observed sharing the movie “Big Tits Only”. Making matters worse, she said that her daughter, who lives somewhere else, had also received a similar demand, alongside claims that she had downloaded “Amazing Girls Orgasm” and must also pay the same amount.

“We do not download illegally – and not porn movies at all,” Pape wrote, horrified at the explicit nature of these movie titles.

NJORD Law and Cyprus-Based MIRCOM Strike Again

That these two companies are involved in yet another copyright troll lawsuit in Scandinavia is no surprise. Thousands of similar demands have been delivered through the mail to Internet bill payers right across the region but after a relatively trouble-free run, the authorities are now deeply involved.

As recently reported, NJORD Law and partner lawyer Jeppe Brogaard Clausen are now facing charges of serious fraud related to their work with both MIRCOM and Copyright Management Services (CMS), two copyright-troll middle-man companies that have targeted Internet users around Europe in similar schemes.

The prosecution of Clausen and his company is being carried out by the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime (SØIK), which says that the entities fraudulently extracted 7.5 million kroner (US$1.22 million) from their targets. NJORD denies the claims but as the case against Pape shows, the campaign against Danish internet users is fundamentally flawed.

Case Thrown Out By The Court

As reported by Berlingske (paywall), the court in Lyngby has now thrown out the case filed against Pape. In common with earlier rejected cases, the court found that yet again, NJORD’s client does not have the right to prosecute these cases on behalf of rightsholders.

In an EU opinion published last December, MIRCOM was described as a classic copyright-troll outfit, with a recommendation that entities like it should not gain access to Internet subscriber information.

The problem, according to the opinion, is that while MIRCOM claims to have obtained licenses to communicate certain copyright works on P2P networks, MIRCOM does not exploit those licenses in a way that a regular rightsholder usually does. Indeed, MIRCOM is not a copyright holder at all so this type of behavior falls under the definition of an abuse of rights, something prohibited under EU law.

Case Backfires, Pape’s Lawyer Contacts SØIK

The above points were also highlighted by Anni Pape’s lawyer, Henrik Hein, who has reported the decision to throw out the case against his client to SØIK. In comments to Berlingske, he also mentions another interesting finding. The piracy allegedly carried out by Pape took place on the very same day that “Big Tits Only” was published and in advance of being registered for copyright purposes in the United States.

Also of interest is that while other MIRCOM cases were withdrawn by NJORD, the case against Pape was not. According to Pape, this was done in an “act of revenge” for making the case public.

“I think it was a sheer punishment because I made the case play out in public. The punishment for that was they then got a sentence that was worse than anything they could have expected. Their entire business model is buried and declared illegal. I see it as a double victory,” she told the publication.

Finally, comments from lawyer Henrik Hein indicate that the authorities are on the right track by taking an interest in the business model underpinning these cases. He has dealt with around 90 of these cases and according to him, several of his clients were nursing home residents “who have never had computers and where the IP address was only used to connect the TV.”

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Hackers tied to Russia’s GRU targeted the US grid for years

Sandworm-aligned group has breached US critical infrastructure a handful of times

Hackers tied to Russia’s GRU targeted the US grid for years

Enlarge (credit: Yuri Smityuk | Getty Images)

For all the nation-state hacker groups that have targeted the United States power grid—and even successfully breached American electric utilities—only the Russian military intelligence group known as Sandworm has been brazen enough to trigger actual blackouts, shutting the lights off in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016. Now one grid-focused security firm is warning that a group with ties to Sandworm’s uniquely dangerous hackers has also been actively targeting the US energy system for years.

On Wednesday, industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos published its annual report on the state of industrial control systems security, which names four new foreign hacker groups focused on those critical infrastructure systems. Three of those newly named groups have targeted industrial control systems in the US, according to Dragos. But most noteworthy, perhaps, is a group that Dragos calls Kamacite, which the security firm describes as having worked in cooperation with the GRU's Sandworm. Kamacite has in the past served as Sandworm's "access" team, the Dragos researchers write, focused on gaining a foothold in a target network before handing off that access to a different group of Sandworm hackers, who have then sometimes carried out disruptive effects. Dragos says Kamacite has repeatedly targeted US electric utilities, oil and gas, and other industrial firms since as early as 2017.

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