Category: Uncategorised

A Nest video screen grab of a November 22 burglary led to one teen's arrest—and the online hunt for others. (credit: @BaconisFruit)

On November 22, 2015, a group of teenagers broke into the house of a Baltimore man, stealing his bicycle and finding a spare key to his Jeep Renegade. They then took off, stealing the Jeep and taking it for a multiday joyride before abandoning it with an empty gas tank and some minor damage.

In Baltimore (as I can sadly say from personal experience), the story would usually end there with an insurance claim and a shrug. But the group of young men involved in the burglary and theft were all captured on a Nest camera as they rifled through drawers. And some of them left more potential digital evidence when they paired their phones over Bluetooth with the Jeep's UConnect system.

One of the thieves was identified from a head shot from the camera footage a few weeks later by a school police officer, and has already pleaded guilty in juvenile court. But the apprehended youth wouldn't give police the identities of the others involved in the theft. Because he's a juvenile, he'll likely be released soon in any case.

(credit: Netflix)

Netflix has been moving huge portions of its streaming operation to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for years now, and it says it has finally completed its giant shift to the cloud. “We are happy to report that in early January of 2016, after seven years of diligent effort, we have finally completed our cloud migration and shut down the last remaining data center bits used by our streaming service,” Netflix said in a blog post that it plans to publish at noon Eastern today. (The blog should go up at this link.)

Netflix operates “many tens of thousands of servers and many tens of petabytes of storage” in the Amazon cloud, Netflix VP of cloud and platform engineering Yury Izrailevsky told Ars in an interview.

Netflix had earlier planned to complete the shift by the end of last summer.

This is the beginning of LIGO's beam tube. (credit: Eric Berger)

LIVINGSTON, Louisiana—In a large, joint press event today, the scientists behind the LIGO experiment announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space generated by strong gravitational interactions. The news, following weeks of rumors, confirms a major prediction of general relativity, comes a century after Einstein first formulated the theory.

The waves, produced in the final moments of a black hole merger, arrived precisely at 5:51 in the morning (US Eastern), and were picked up by both LIGO detectors—one in Louisiana, one in Washington. Since the Louisiana detector picked up the signal a few milliseconds sooner, the event that produced the gravitational waves occurred in the Southern Hemisphere.

"The description of this observation is beautifully described in the Einstein theory of general relativity formulated 100 years ago," said MIT professor Rainer Weiss, part of the team that first proposed LIGO. He said it "comprises the first test of the theory in strong gravitation."

The Uber driver app on the windshield of UberX driver. (credit: The Washington Post / Getty Images)

Back in September 2015, a federal judge certified a class-action lawsuit against Uber—if the plaintiffs are successful, former and current California drivers would be declared as employees rather than contractors. If Uber loses, it would represent a sea change for the company and for the entire so-called "sharing economy."

Uber’s newfound employees would be entitled to a number of benefits under federal law. Those perks would include, among others, unemployment benefits, workers’ compensation, the right to unionize, and most importantly, the right to seek reimbursement for mileage and tips. Those added expenses would certainly factor into Uber’s estimated valuation of $63 billion.

Since the case, O’Connor v. Uber, was certified, the startup has been hit with an additional 13 federal proposed class-action lawsuits nationwide—most of which have been filed by one New York-based firm. One case in Philadelphia was filed as recently as this month. These cases appear to be interested in riding the coattails of one successful suit, which could mean big bucks for attorneys and expanded benefits for Uber drivers.