Author: David Kravets

An Uber driver accused of killing six and wounding two others during a February 20 carnage spree is said to have told Michigan investigators that the Uber app on his phone made him do it. The app, he said, controlled his "mind and body" and told him where to go and when to kill the day he is accused of carrying out the Kalamazoo County murders.

The Detroit Free Press, citing police records it obtained, said the 45-year-old suspect, Jason Dalton, told the authorities that a symbol resembling the devil's head popped up on the ride-sharing app when he opened it last month on the night of the murders.

"Dalton described the devil figure as a horned cow head or something like that and then it would give you an assignment and it would literally take over your whole body," according to police reports released Monday to the Free Press by the Kalamazoo City Attorney’s Office.

Twitter says US law forbids it from being legally liable for what others write on the micro-blogging service, so it is citing the Communications Decency Act in a bid to stamp out a lawsuit accusing the platform of being a "tool for spreading extremist propaganda" that allegedly led to the murder of a US citizen working in Jordan last year. Twitter said:

In enacting Section 230, Congress unequivocally resolved (PDF) the question whether computer service providers may be held liable for harms arising from content created by third parties. Announcing the policy of the United States to preserve the “free market that presently exists for the Internet... unfettered by Federal or State regulation,” 47 U.S.C. § 230(b)(2), Congress broadly immunized entities like Twitter against lawsuits that seek to hold them liable for harmful or unlawful third-party content, including suits alleging that such entities failed to block, remove, or alter such content, id. § 230(c)(1).

The suit concerns a Louisiana woman whose husband, Lloyd "Carl" Fields Jr., was murdered in Jordan last year where he was working as a private contractor. Tamara Fields claims Twitter's platform was a vehicle for terrorists to spew their hatred and plot jihad.

A video posted online is responsible for charges being leveled Wednesday against two Baltimore school cops, one of whom is seen in the brief clip smacking a student in the face and then kicking him in the back.

The video, recorded March 1 by a fellow student at REACH Partnership School, shows an officer yelling at the 16-year-old student to "go the fuck home" and "get the fuck out of here."

Anthony Spence, 44, is accused of second-degree assault and misconduct in office. Another cop, Saverna Bias, 53, is charged with second-degree child abuse. The video shows a second cop, allegedly Bias, standing idly by during the brief beating. The pair have been placed on leave and were released on $50,000 bond Wednesday. Spence's attorney said his client was under the impression that the boy was trespassing before the altercation occurred. The boy, however, was a student at the school in the Clifton Park neighborhood.

Undercover officers have arrested a 63-year-old Chicago man on accusations that he used a handheld jamming device to disrupt mobile phone service on the subway.

The lawyer for the financial analyst at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System said his client just wanted peace and quiet on his commute. "He's disturbed by people talking around him," Chicago attorney Charles Lauer said of defendant Dennis Nicholl. "He might have been selfish in thinking about himself, but he didn't have any malicious intent."

The Chicago Tribune also said that a local judge, when setting $10,000 bail after the Tuesday arrest, dubbed the defendant "the cellphone police." Lauer did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment.

The US Supreme Court is letting stand a lower court ruling that the Batmobile is protected by copyright. The high court's move is a blow to Gotham Garage, the maker of Batmobile replica modification kits, and it means car tinkerers must get a license from DC Comics to sell vehicles that look like the one driven by Batman and Robin.

The court did not comment when rejecting (PDF) Gotham Garage's petition (PDF) for the court to hear its case. In September, a federal appeals court sided with DC Comics' suit against Gotham Garage.

"As Batman so sagely told Robin, 'In our well-ordered society, protection of private property is essential,'" the San Francisco-based 9th US Court of Appeals concluded (PDF). That wasn't the first time a Hollywood car was assigned copyright. The vehicle "Eleanor" from Gone in 60 Seconds prevailed in an IP court battle.

It was just days ago when the federal judge presiding over the upcoming Oracle v. Google API copyright trial said he was concerned that the tech giants were already preparing for a mistrial—despite the fact that the San Francisco jury hasn't even been picked yet. US District Judge William Alsup said he was suspicious that, during the trial, the two might perform intensive Internet searches on the chosen jurors in hopes of finding some "lie" or "omission" that could be used in a mistrial bid.

To placate the judge's fears, Google said (PDF) it won't do Internet research on jurors after a panel is picked for the closely watched trial, set to begin on May 9.

"The Court stated that it is considering imposing on both sides a ban on any and all Internet research on the jury members prior to verdict. Provided the ban applies equally to both parties, Google has no objection to imposition of such a ban in this case," Google attorney Robert Van Nest wrote to the judge in a Tuesday filing.

One day after the San Bernardino County district attorney said that an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters might contain a "lying-dormant cyber pathogen," the county's top prosecutor went on the offense again. DA Michael Ramos said Apple must assist the FBI in unlocking the phone because an alleged security threat might have been "introduced by its product and concealed by its operating system."

Ramos, however, has been tight-lipped on exactly what security threat may be on the passcode-protected phone of Syed Farook, a county worker who was one of two shooters in the Dec. 2 massacre that killed 14 and wounded scores of others. The prosecutor suggested in a court filing yesterday that the iPhone—a county phone used by Farook and recovered after the shooting—might be some type of trigger to release a "lying-dormant cyber pathogen" into the county's computer infrastructure. On Friday, the district attorney again demanded that a federal magistrate presiding over the dispute command Apple to help decrypt the phone.

Apple has not advanced a single argument to indicating [sic] why the identification and prosecution of any outstanding coconspirators, or to detect and eliminate cyber security threats to San Bernardino County's infrastructure introduced by its product and concealed by its operating system, and Apple's refusal to assist in acquiring that information, is not a compelling governmental interest.

To the extent that Apple states in its brief at page 33 that there is no compelling state interest because the government "has produced nothing more than speculation that this iPhone might contain potentially relevant information," Apple completely forgets that a United States Magistrate has issued a search warrant based on a finding of probable cause that the iPhone does contain evidence of criminal activity. The reason we search is to find out if the device contains evidence or is an instrumentality of the crime. Such authority is granted by the United States Constitution.

But what exactly is a "lying-dormant cyber pathogen?" As the chatter on Twitter and elsewhere could attest, security and forensics experts have never heard of this type of threat. Online commenters called it everything from a "magical unicorn" to a make-believe plot that we might see on the broadcast TV show CSI: Cyber. 

The San Bernardino District Attorney told a federal judge late Thursday that Apple must assist the authorities in unlocking the iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the two San Bernardino shooters that killed 14 people in a killing rampage in December. The phone, which was a county work phone issued to Farook as part of his Health Department duties, may have been the trigger to unleash a "cyber pathogen," county prosecutors said in a brief court filing.

"The iPhone is a county owned telephone that may have connected to the San Bernardino County computer network. The seized iPhone may contain evidence that can only be found on the seized phone that it was used as a weapon to introduce a lying dormant cyber pathogen that endangers San Bernardino's infrastructure," according to a court filing (PDF) by Michael Ramos, the San Bernardino County District Attorney.

The county declined to directly comment. A spokesman, David Wert, told Ars in an e-mail that "The county didn't have anything to do with this brief. It was filed by the district attorney." The DA's office, which did not immediately respond for comment, followed up with a statement to Ars, saying that there is a "compelling governmental interest in acquiring any evidence of criminal conduct, additional perpetrators, potential damage to the infrastructure of San Bernardino County, and in protecting the California Constitutionally guaranteed due process rights of the victims, deceased and living, arising from state crimes committed on December 2, 2015."

One of the tech sector's biggest upcoming trials—Oracle v. Google—careened Tuesday away from the hot-button topic of copyrighting application programming interfaces (APIs) and instead focused on the presiding judge's concern that the tech giants are setting up jurors to fail. US District Judge William Alsup believes it's all so the loser could challenge the verdict of the second upcoming trial set for May.

Judge Alsup said Tuesday that the tech giants jointly submitted a proposed questionnaire (PDF) for prospective panelists containing "so many vague questions" that "the loser on our eventual verdict will seek, if history is any guide, to impeach the verdict by investigating the jury to find some 'lie' or omission during voir dire."

Voir dire is the part of the case in which lawyers question potential jurors about their backgrounds and biases. And the case is being closely watched by the tech sector and developer community given the high stakes. Oracle is seeking $1 billion in damages after successfully suing the search giant for infringing Oracle's Java APIs that were once used in the Android operating system. A federal appeals court has ruled (PDF) that the "declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization of the API packages are entitled to copyright protection." The decision reversed the outcome of the first San Francisco federal trial heard before Alsup in 2012.

US transportation officials announced Wednesday that vaping on commercial flights is officially banned, just as is smoking the old-fashioned way.

The US Department of Transportation's decision to officially ban the use of electronic cigarettes on flights going to and from the United States ends any confusion as to whether vaping in the air is lawful.

"This final rule is important because it protects airline passengers from unwanted exposure to aerosol fumes that occur when electronic cigarettes are used onboard airplanes,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said. "The Department took a practical approach to eliminate any confusion between tobacco cigarettes and e-cigarettes by applying the same restrictions to both."