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Oracle Corp. headquarters in Redwood City, California. (credit: Michael Short/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle's copyright lawsuit is all about one "very simple rule," the company's attorney told a jury today.

"You don’t take people’s property without permission and use it for your own benefit," said Oracle lawyer Peter Bicks. "Google took a shortcut, and they took a shortcut at Oracle’s expense."

The closing argument Bicks delivered today was his final chance to convince a jury that Google should be held liable for copyright infringement for using 37 Java APIs, which Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems. An appeals court has ruled that the APIs can be copyrighted. Now, Google's only hope of avoiding a payment to Oracle—which could potentially be in the billions of dollars—is a finding that it was "fair use" to harness the Java APIs.

To get Oculus Dreamdeck running on the HTC Vive, LibreVR is willing to break Oculus' DRM entirely, opening the platform up to potential piracy.

On Friday, an Oculus Runtime update blocked a fan-made workaround that had let HTC Vive owners play previously Rift-exclusive software. At the time, Oculus said the update wasn't targeted at the workaround, and was instead trying "to curb piracy and protect games and apps that developers have worked so hard to make." Now, though, Oculus' move has encouraged the patch's developer to break Oculus' digital rights managements entirely, potentially opening VR software up to piracy as well as hardware freedom.

On Saturday, just one day after Oculus' latest Runtime update, Revive developer LibreVR released Revive version 0.5.2. That update gets around Oculus new hardware checks by completely bypassing the DRM for Oculus Dreamdeck and, in theory, any other Unreal Engine game designed for the Rift (a similar workaround for Unity engine games is being worked on). This circumvents the "entitlement check" that confirms a Rift headset is plugged in, but also gets around the ownership check that confirms the software was legitimately purhased through Oculus' Home platform.

Breaking the DRM entirely is now the now the only way to break Oculus' hardware check, LibreVR writes on Reddit. "The problem is that Oculus added the check for the Rift being attached to your PC to the actual DRM. They now use the same function to check that you own the game and that you have the headset," he said. "I can't disable one check without disabling the other one too. Previously these checks were separate and the DRM would only check whether you owned the game."

The best-ever image of the far side of the Moon. (credit: NASA)

On Tuesday, budget writers in the US House will make changes to a bill that funds federal commerce, justice, and science agencies—which includes NASA—for the coming fiscal year. But a draft of the full bill released Monday contains a blockbuster for the space agency: the House calls for a pivot away from NASA’s direct-to-Mars vision toward a pathway that includes lunar landings first.

Since a space policy speech in 2010 by President Obama, the space agency has been following a loosely defined plan to first send astronauts to visit a fragment of an asteroid near the Moon and then conduct other operations in the vicinity of the Moon before striking off for Mars some time in the 2030s. However a number of independent reports, such as the National Research Council’s Pathways to Exploration, have questioned the viability and sustainability of a direct-to-Mars plan. That panel called for NASA and the White House to reconsider the Moon as an interim destination.

In the new House budget, which provides funding for fiscal year 2017, the committee recognizes there are some useful components of the asteroid mission. These include propulsion research and asteroid deflection, but committee members found that “neither a robotic nor a crewed mission to an asteroid appreciably contribute to the overarching mission to Mars.” The costs of such a mission are also unknown, the committee wrote.

Andrew Cunningham

HP's Elite x2 tablet, its keyboard cover, and its pen.

12 more images in gallery

Just as high-end, thin-and-light PCs from the last five or six years have mostly been cast in the mold of Apple’s MacBook Air, convertible PCs from the last year or two have been redefined by Microsoft’s Surface. After a few less-than-satisfying versions of the idea, Microsoft found an acceptable balance between tablet and laptop with the Surface Pro 3, and it carried that design forward into the Surface 3 and Surface Pro 4 with few fundamental changes. Since then, the Surface division has consistently been a small, but bright, spot in Microsoft’s earnings reports, helping to offset the near-complete collapse of Windows Phone (or Windows Mobile or whatever we’re calling it this year).

As a result of the Surface success story, most of the PC OEMs have delivered some riff on the tablet in the last year or so. Dell has the XPS 12 and the Latitude 12 7000. HP has the Spectre x2, and Samsung has the Galaxy TabPro S. Apple’s iPad was around for years before the Surface, but the iPad Pro is clearly following Microsoft’s lead. Even Lenovo, whose Yoga lineup is also widely imitated, has hopped aboard the Surface train with its ThinkPad X1 tablet.

Most of these devices are attempting to fill gaps and address needs that the Surface lineup doesn’t, which brings us to the HP Elite x2. This is a business-focused Surface clone that can’t match the Surface Pro 4 spec-to-spec, but it does offer users something that the Surface doesn’t: you can actually open it up and repair or replace parts without much effort as long as you have the right tools. It makes other tradeoffs, of course, but if you’ve been waiting for a Surface that you can actually upgrade and fix, this might be the tablet for you.

Google Inc.'s Android logo at company headquarters in Mountain View, California. (credit: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—Google attorney Robert Van Nest made his closing argument to a panel of jurors here today, asking them to clear Android of copyright infringement allegations as a matter of "fairness and fair use."

"This is a very important case, not only for Google but for innovation and technology in general," Van Nest told the jury. "What Google engineers did was nothing out of that mainstream. They built Android from scratch, using new Google technology, and adapted technology from open sources. Android was a remarkable thing, a brand-new platform for innovation."

Van Nest's 90-minute closing argument was Google's final fusillade before this six-year-old lawsuit goes to the jury. Oracle has argued that Google's use of 37 Java APIs in Android infringes copyrights that Oracle acquired when it purchased Sun Microsystems. An appeals court has already found that APIs can indeed be copyrighted. Unless the ten-person jury empaneled in San Francisco finds that Google's use of APIs was "fair use," Oracle will win damages, and the company is hoping to ask for as much as $9 billion.