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(credit: Eric Norris)

A federal judge in Tacoma, Washington has put himself in a Catch 22: ruling a man charged with possessing child pornography has the right to review malware source code while also acknowledging that the government has a right to keep it secret.

"The resolution of Defendant’s Third Motion to Compel Discovery places this matter in an unusual position: the defendant has the right to review the full NIT code, but the government does not have to produce it," US District Judge Robert Bryan wrote on Wednesday. "Thus, we reach the question of sanctions: What should be done about it when, under these facts, the defense has a justifiable need for information in the hands of the government, but the government has a justifiable right not to turn the information over to the defense?"

In this case, the defense wants prosecutors to disclose the full source code of the NIT, or network investigative technique—a piece of government-created malware that compromised Tor and exposed users of a Tor-only child porn site. The Department of Justice did so in a related case in Nebraska, United States v. Cottom, but a DOJ spokesman now says this case, United States v. Michaud, and Cottom are entirely different cases and have no bearing on one another.

The interface of the main screen. That center portion is basically the Android Auto interface.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, California—Google has a full car infotainment operating system on display at I/O. We've long heard rumors of such a project and have spotted references to "Android Automotive" in Google's compatibility documents, but a car-focused version of Android is now quietly sitting in the back corner of Google I/O.

Previous forms of Google automotive computing came in the form of Android Auto, which was a casted interface that was beamed from a phone to a car screen. The car still ran some kind of host operating system, but that OS would move out of the way and let the Android phone use the built-in display like an external monitor. In contrast, this is a full operating system that runs directly on the car hardware. The car version of Android doesn't really have a launch date, or even a special name—"cars" are now just a supported form factor in Android N.

Google is demoing the OS in a Maserati Quattroporte, which it says it loaded up with Android without involvement from the car manufacturer. Inside, the Maserati runs a Snapdragon 820 with a 4K display in the center console. There is also a gauge cluster display that Android can control.

To outsiders, the Star Ocean series can be impenetrable, even downright adverse. Without digging into optional content, Star Ocean can easily take 100 hours to complete, while its many cut scenes—sometimes as much as 10 hours in a single game—are as confusing as they are long. Fans love it. But for Shuichi Kobayashi, producer of the upcoming Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness (known simply as Star Ocean 5), wildly sprawling narratives and content for content's sake just won't cut it any more.

Star Ocean 5 is on a different path, one where even RPG newcomers can give it a try—and Kobayashi, visiting London on his first trip outside of his native Japan, knows just how to make it happen.

"The audience for games these days is made up with a lot of people that don't have that kind of time to spend with a single game," Kobayashi explains, "and they are put off by a game that asks them to put in 100 hours to get to the end and see everything. Because of that we deliberately made the pacing a lot faster than Star Ocean has seen in the past and that can make the game seem shorter, but maybe that is not what some of the core fans wanted."

Theranos CEO and founder, Elizabeth Holmes (credit: NBC Today)

After federal regulators threatened to revoke Theranos’ license to perform blood tests and ban its CEO and COO from the industry altogether, the company reportedly issued tens of thousands of corrections to blood tests it performed. Theranos has also voided all of the 2014 and 2015 results reported from its once-famed Edison blood testing machines, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Edison machines, which were said to be able to perform more than 200 medical tests with just a few drops of blood, were key to the young biotech company earning a whopping $9 billion valuation in 2014. Yet, in the wake of reports that the machines were inaccurate and unreliable and that employees were unqualified and failing to follow proper protocols and fix problems, the company acknowledged that it had completely stopped using the devices in June 2015. Instead, the company performed its blood tests—890,000 blood tests a year, according to records—on standard lab equipment.

The corrections and voided results mean that clinics and doctor’s offices are receiving stacks of notifications. One such doctor’s office, a family practitioner in a suburb of Phoenix, told the WSJ that it received 20 corrected reports a few weeks ago. One of those corrected reports was for a patient who the doctor had sent straight to the emergency room upon receiving her Theranos results in late 2014. The corrected report shows the patient had normal results.

(credit: Joi Ito)

If you've ever wondered how Google defines the term "backrub," then look no further than its search engine for the answer, where we're told that it's "a brief massage of a person's back and shoulders." For many of the complainants in the long-running European Commission competition case against Google's alleged Web search monopoly abuse, that pithy definition goes a long way to explaining their experience of the multinational's vast online estate.

For those among you who don't know your Google history, the search engine started out with the curious name of BackRub at Stanford 20 years ago, until, that is, its servers greedily gobbled their way through the university's bandwidth, and it was time for the cofounders to shift up a gear. A year earlier, in 1995, the planets had aligned when Larry met Sergey at the famous Californian university for the first time.

The two men eventually created an algorithm—dubbed PageRank after Larry Page—that recognised links from important sources, while penalising links that were less relevant. Their BackRub search tool sorted results by relevance, and only looked for words in page titles. The end result was a search engine that appeared to be far superior to the competition of the time, such as Alta Vista.