Month: February 2021

Enlarge / Anthony Levandowski in 2019. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Famed self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski was forced to declare bankruptcy last year after he lost a legal battle with Google over claims that he stole trade secrets on behalf of Uber. Now Uber is objecting to the proposed terms of his bankruptcy, arguing that he used legally dubious techniques to shelter his wealth from creditors.

Levandowski faces a skeptical bankruptcy judge. "I continue to view many of the transactions in which Mr. Levandowski engaged immediately prior to the filing of this bankruptcy case with an incredibly jaundiced eye," said Judge Hannah Blumenstiel during a phone conference last week.

Levandowski received tens of millions of dollars in compensation from Google in 2015 and 2016 for his work on self-driving technology. In October 2016, Google initiated an arbitration process to claw the money back, arguing that Levandowski had stolen trade secrets from Google on his way out the door. Uber alleges that Levandowski then took a number of steps to make it difficult for Google, Uber, or other creditors to get their money back.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Paul Taylor)

House Republicans have unveiled their plan for "boosting" broadband connectivity and competition, and one of the key planks is prohibiting states and cities from building their own networks. The proposal to ban new public networks was included in the "Boosting Broadband Connectivity Agenda" announced Tuesday by Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Bob Latta (R-Ohio), the top Republicans on the House Commerce Committee and Subcommittee for Communications and Technology, respectively.

Republicans call it the CONNECT Act, for "Communities Overregulating Networks Need Economic Competition Today." The bill "would promote competition by limiting government-run broadband networks throughout the country and encouraging private investment," the Commerce Committee Republicans said in their announcement, without explaining how limiting the number of broadband networks would increase competition. Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) is the lead sponsor.

The bill itself says that "a State or political subdivision thereof may not provide or offer for sale to the public, a telecommunications provider, or to a commercial provider of broadband Internet access service, retail or wholesale broadband Internet access service."

Enlarge / This green circle (we added the background) is the Android 12 logo, I guess.

Google is launching the first developer preview of Android 12 on Thursday. This is the beginning of a seven-month beta process that should end with a final release sometime around September. System images will be out today for the Pixel line (if these links are broken, check back later). Support is being cut for the Pixel 2 this year; for phones, the preview will only work for the Pixel 3/3a and up. There's also an "Android 12 preview for Android TV" available for the ADT-3 Developer Kit, which is interesting because commercial Android TV devices, like the "Google Chromecast with Google TV," still run Android 10.

So what's new? It's hard to take a full audit now since we're only working from a blog post with zero pictures and no documentation to read yet, but Google outlines a few interesting features. First, Google says it is "refreshing notification designs to make them more modern, easier to use, and more functional," which probably applies to the earlier leaks that already hit the Internet. The company also says it is "optimizing transitions and animations across the system to make them more smooth," which is something we'll investigate once we get some actual code.

On the performance side of things, ART, the Android RunTime engine that powers all the non-game apps on Android, is now officially updatable via the Play Store, whereas it previously needed a whole system update to be changed. ART is now a Project Mainline module, Google's new system for shipping core system code through the Play Store. Google has been taking baby steps toward making ART a Mainline module in previous years—ART has been packaged as a Mainline module on Pixel phones since Android 10 but has never been updated. For Android 12, Google says it will be shipping ART updates that can "improve runtime performance and correctness, manage memory more efficiently, and make Kotlin operations faster—all without requiring a full system update." Android's Binder IPC (InterProcess Communication) calls are getting an optimization pass, too, which Google says should reduce "system variability" and "has yielded roughly a 2x performance increase on Binder calls overall."

Enlarge / News is still very much happening both around the world and in Australia... but you wouldn't know it if you're one of the tens of millions of Australian Facebook users. (credit: Brent Lewin | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

A long-simmering battle between tech firms and the government of Australia became explosive yesterday when Facebook announced that it would block all linking of news publications inside the country. Not only has this change affected Australian and international news publishers, but Facebook's wide net has also caught up governments, nonprofits, and basically anyone else in Australia who posts non-news content to the platform.

Australian lawmakers have been considering a bill that would require Internet platforms such as Google and Facebook ("digital platform corporations") to negotiate in good faith with news outlets ("registered news business corporations") to link to their content. If the outlets and the platforms can't reach a deal on their own, they would have to go to baseball-style arbitration, where a neutral third-party arbitrator would decide whose offer is the better one.

The bill would at first apply to only two companies: Google and Facebook. Both, as you might expect, have expressed consistent opposition to the bill. (Microsoft, operator of remote second-place search engine Bing—which captures between 2 and 3 percent of the market—does not oppose the rules that would apply to its largest competitor.)