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Apple has agreed to pay $24.9 million to a "patent troll" to end a lawsuit over its Siri voice system, according to documents filed yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Publicly traded Marathon Patent Group, whose business is focused on patent licensing and lawsuits, will split the settlement cash with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), the New York technical university that provided the patents.

It's a big payment. Patent trolls, also called non-practicing entities or patent assertion entities, have lost power in recent years, due to changes in case law and new ways to challenge patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office. This recent settlement is a reminder that the era of that patent troll is far from over. And it's a reminder that the lure of big money from patent lawsuits continues to be a tempting draw for universities.

The two asserted claims of US Patent No. 7,177,798 describe a "method for processing natural language input," and was invented by Drs. Cheng Hsu and Veera Boonjing. At the time of invention, in 2000, Hsu was a Professor of Decision Sciences and Engineering at RPI, while Boonjing was a doctoral candidate at the institution. The patent's first claim describes processing language queries by using databases filled with "case information, keywords, information models, and database values." The inventors assigned it to the university, which is common, since many universities have rules requiring that faculty assign patents and dictate splits of any licensing revenues.

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A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled Wednesday in favor of a man accused of accessing child pornography through Tor, finding that the warrant issued by a Virginia-based judge was invalid. The evidence of child pornography the government claims it found on the man's computers is suppressed, which likely makes continuing prosecution of this case significantly more difficult.

That warrant, which was issued in early 2015, allowed federal investigators to use a "network investigative technique" (NIT), government-speak for a piece of malware typically used to penetrate the digital security of Tor users. That malware then led authorities to the computer of defendant Alex Levin, of Norwood, Massachusetts, and they criminally charged him with possession of child pornography.

Earlier this year, Levin’s lawyers challenged the judicial authorization to deploy the NIT.

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On Wednesday, Reuters reported that two anonymous sources briefed on the matter agreed that Volkswagen Group would buy back nearly 500,000 2.0L engine diesel vehicles equipped with illegal defeat devices as part of an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A third person briefed on the matter added that VW Group would set up a compensation fund for people who had purchased the Volkswagen and Audi diesels, although that source did not specify how much each diesel purchaser would get from the fund. Reuters reports that the compensation fund represents more than $1 billion.

The diesels were discovered in September to be equipped with illegal defeat devices, sending the German automaker’s stock in a tailspin and setting off a ripple effect of scandal throughout the company. The EPA discovered that the 500,000 US diesels were cheating its emissions tests, using software to keep the car within permissible emissions ranges during laboratory tests, but then switching off that emissions control system when the car was being driven in real-world conditions.

The EPA estimated that VW Group’s 2.0L engines were emitting up to 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) as was allowable by federal regulations.

For a long time, the cost of a fast, high-end smartphone with the latest technology seemed definite. You were paying $600 or $700 no matter whether you did it up front or spread out over the course of a two-year carrier contract. This doesn't have to be the case today, however. There's an exciting new category of phone on the block—the "cheap flagship," a phone that has flagship or very-close-to-flagship specs but only costs around $400.

We're talking about devices like the $305 Xiaomi Mi 5, the $380 LG Nexus 5X, the $400 Nextbit Robin, the $400 Moto X, and the $329 OnePlus 2. These phones all shipped with the best (or close to the best) SoC at the time, beautiful screens, and the usual set of features. If you didn't have a sheet of spec tables in front of you, you'd likely have a hard time pointing out the differences between these devices and a $700 flagship. Cheap flagships might not be at the absolute bleeding edge of capabilities, but they all aim for "good enough."

Typical specs (beyond price)

Consider the current state of the big $700 flagships from companies like Samsung and LG. These super flagships are bloated with tons of occasionally nice to have but mostly unnecessary extras. They are the very best they can be, because in the fight to entice customers to upgrade every year, these companies throw in every bell and whistle under the sun. Samsung is the king of this—the Galaxy S7 Edge has a curved AMOLED display, a heart rate sensor, waterproofing, a magnetic field generator (for Samsung Pay), and an outrageously high 500+ PPI display. It even doubles as the heart of a virtual reality gaming system. The LG G5 has a laundry list of extras, too. There are two rear-facing cameras, a color spectrum sensor, another overkill 1440P display, and a modular accessory system.