Month: March 2017

Enlarge / Anthony Levandowski, VP of Engineering at Uber, speaking to reporters at the Uber Advanced Technologies Center on September 13, 2016 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (credit: ANGELO MERENDINO/AFP/Getty Images)

A former Google engineer, now working for Uber, used his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination this week. He did so to avoid turning over documents in the Waymo v. Uber trade-secret litigation.

Anthony Levandowski, the head of Uber's self-driving car project, took the extraordinary step during a closed court hearing on Wednesday. Levandowski's lawyer said his client won't be turning over any documents because there's a "potential for criminal action." The reports emerged because transcripts of the hearing were acquired by news organizations, including The New York Times, Reuters, and USA Today. 

Google has accused Levandowski of downloading 14,000 "highly confidential" files from Google while he worked there, 9.7 gigabytes in total. Six weeks after the alleged downloads, Levandowski resigned and later started his own self-driving truck startup. That company, Otto, was acquired by Uber for $680 million.

Enlarge (credit: materod on flickr)

You may have just upgraded your computer to use DDR4 recently or you may still be using DDR3, but in either case, nothing stays new forever. JEDEC, the organization in charge of defining new standards for computer memory, says that it will be demoing the next-generation DDR5 standard in June of this year and finalizing the standard sometime in 2018. DDR5 promises double the memory bandwidth and density of DDR4, and JEDEC says it will also be more power-efficient, though the organization didn't release any specific numbers or targets.

Like DDR4 back when it was announced, it will still be several years before any of us have DDR5 RAM in our systems. That's partly because the memory controllers in processors and SoCs need to be updated to support DDR5, and these chips normally take two or three years to design from start to finish. DDR4 RAM was finalized in 2012, but it didn't begin to go mainstream until 2015 when consumer processors from Intel and others added support for it.

DDR5 has no relation to GDDR5, a separate decade-old memory standard used for graphics cards and game consoles.

(credit: Comcast)

Comcast today said it has "no plans" to sell its customers' individual Web browsing histories, but Comcast can still deliver personalized ads based on its customers' browsing history. Comcast, the nation's largest home Internet provider, said it will continue to offer customers a way to opt out of targeted ads.

"We do not sell our broadband customers’ individual Web browsing history," Comcast Chief Privacy Officer Gerard Lewis wrote in a blog post today. "We did not do it before the FCC’s rules were adopted, and we have no plans to do so."

Comcast operates its own advertising network, so it doesn't need to share individuals' browsing history with third parties in order to serve targeted ads. Instead, Comcast can use its customers' browsing history to sell targeted ads. Businesses pay Comcast to have their advertising reach people who are more likely to buy their products, but only Comcast would know exactly who those customers are.

Enlarge (credit: Geri Lavrov / Getty Images)

I can’t put my hands on the thing right now, but I’m pretty sure that the Parenting Manual I was issued when my kids were born deemphasized the importance of keeping up with changes in the way they do things as they grow up. The worksheets and hand-written essays of their younger years have changed into collaborative work done online as they “matured” into high-schoolers.

Has it changed the work? Maybe less than it first appears. Technology may change human behavior, but it doesn’t really change human nature. Most kids don’t much like doing homework, and cloud services haven’t done a lot to change that. What’s interesting is that the kids, teachers, and administrators I talked to generally like the flexibility of using cloud-based classroom tools, but none of them think it has fundamentally changed classroom life.

Why can’t we see your homework?

My two boys are sophomores at the Institute of Collaborative Education, a public New York City middle/high school with about 80 kids in each of the six grades. ICE puts most of its educational emphasis on project work; the kids have a fairly major project to complete for each class in each quarter, many of them collaborating with either a small group or with their class as a whole within a cloud environment.