portfolio-cond – Page 26

Bizarre Yelp lawsuit over alleged fake reviews to finally move ahead

A judge in San Diego, California, ruled Tuesday against a local bankruptcy lawyer who had attempted to put a stop to Yelp’s lawsuit against him. Specifically, Julian McMillan asked the court more than six months ago to issue an anti-SLAPP ruling. A ” SLAPP ,” or strategic lawsuit against public participation, is a type of lawsuit meant to stifle speech—one where one party employs tactics against a smaller target by drawing out the suit in terms of time and money and intimidating the defendant. Yelp sued McMillan in August 2013. The lawsuit , filed in San Francisco, alleges breach of contract, intentional interference with contract, unfair competition, and false advertising. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bizarre Yelp lawsuit over alleged fake reviews to finally move ahead

A silk casing enables long-lasting, implantable Wi-Fi medical devices

Not the silk casing discussed. Flickr user: CameliaTWU For a variety of medical reasons, it’s useful to implant devices inside the body. These devices may be needed to help regulate the cardiovascular system, or they can release drugs inside the body. Unfortunately, they’re also problematic. Once such a device has served its function, it must be removed, which necessitates another surgery. Plus, the presence can lead to complications such as infection, inflammation, and pain. To address some of these problems, scientists have developed new kinds of circuitry that can safely dissolve in the body. While these water-soluble devices don’t need to be removed, they come with a new problem—they dissolve too quickly for many purposes. So a group of researchers have now reported that they’ve developed a new way to control how long the devices last. The researchers propose that dissolving devices could be encased in a material made from silk protein and magnesium. The advantage of this approach comes from a property of the silk: its crystallinity. Different preparations of silk dissolve in water at different rates depending on their crystallinities. Altering this property allows researchers to choose among a range of dissolution times from only a few minutes up to a few weeks. This gives more control over the duration of the device, which is important, since different medical situations require devices that can last vastly different times. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A silk casing enables long-lasting, implantable Wi-Fi medical devices

Microsoft makes a nod to subscriptions for Windows 10

Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner Microsoft Even as it has cut the price of Windows— offering it for free on phones and small screen tablets, plus there’s a Bing edition for everything else—Microsoft is still working on ways to monetize its platform. Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner was speaking to investors last week, and GeekWire reported that profits are still the goal. Asked if the plan was to make Windows a loss leader to draw people into the Microsoft ecosystem, Turner said that the company had “not had any conversations” on this. He reiterated this when asked if the company was going to start losing money on Windows, saying “that’s not any conversations that we’ve had… we’ve got to monetize it differently.” What form might that different monetization take? Turner says that “there are services involved. There are additional opportunities for us to bring additional services to the product and do it in a creative way.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Linux Mint 17.1 review—less change is good change

The Linux Mint team recently released Linux Mint 17.1—a somewhat minor but still welcome upgrade to the Ubuntu-based ecosystem. And while Linux Mint 17.1 arrives as it usually does (a few weeks after the release of a new version of Ubuntu), version 17.1 is not based on Ubuntu’s latest effort, 14.10. Instead, this edition of Mint remains tied to the last Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 14.04 . This marks the first time Linux Mint has not used the newest version of Ubuntu for a release. But if you paid attention to the curious approach of Linux Mint 17.0, you’ll know that was the plan all along. These days, Mint will not be changing its Ubuntu base again until the next LTS release—Ubuntu 16.04—arrives in 2016. And at first glance, it might seem like a bad thing. After all, Mint is missing out on whatever new stuff is in Ubuntu 14.10 (in this case it’s not much, but 15.04 will have plenty of changes). However, Mint 17.1 is in fact a very good sign for fans of the distro’s own tools, like its homegrown Cinnamon desktop. By relying on a consistent LTS release, Mint developers can more or less ignore the base system. Instead of spending all their time and effort making sure whatever Ubuntu has changed works with Mint, they can focus on what makes the ecosystem great—namely, its two primary desktops, MATE and Cinnamon. Read 32 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Rovio lays off 110 people as Angry Birds hype fades

Rovio has confirmed that 110 people will lose their jobs as the Angry Birds maker also shuts down its game-development studio in Tampere, Finland. The layoffs, first announced in October, amount to about 14 percent of the company’s workforce. It had been expected that Rovio would make 130 people redundant but after a round of consultations this number has now been reduced. Rovio said that as a result of the redundancies “several positions” have been opened for internal applications. The actual number of employees out of work will depend on how many new internal positions are filled. The closing of its Tampere development studio means that Rovio will move all of its Finnish operation to its Espoo headquarters. The company shot to fame in 2009 when it released Angry Birds , its 52nd game . The title went on to become the most downloaded mobile game of all time. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Police officer fired for refusing to turn on body cam

The idea of putting body-worn cameras on police officers has spread since protests and unrest following the shooting of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. Earlier this week, the Obama administration proposed federal funding to get 50,000 more officers equipped with the cameras. The increased use of cameras makes a few policy questions around them more pressing. One such question: what happens when a police officer fails—or straight-up refuses—to turn on the body camera? The issue was highlighted in today’s Wall Street Journal , which features a story about a New Mexico police officer who “was fired for allegedly not following an order to record and upload all contacts with citizens,” according to the Albuquerque Police Department and the officer’s lawyer. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FBI seizes 20 boxes of documents on LAUSD iPad program

On Monday morning, the FBI seized 20 boxes of documents pertaining to a $1.3 billion iPad program from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), according to the Los Angeles Times . The program, which was intended to give iPads to every student, teacher, and campus administrator of the nation’s second-largest school district, has met with many catastrophic difficulties, and this latest federal investigation led the new superintendent of the school system to shelve the project indefinitely on Tuesday. The program first hit a bump in the road back in 2013 when a number of students “hacked” the iPads —which is to say they deleted profile information that designated the user as a student, thus letting the student browse the Internet unencumbered by the filter restrictions enforced by the school district. At the same time, many teachers reported that they felt ill-equipped to use and teach with the iPads. In October, the LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy resigned amid allegations of malfeasance , although he claimed no wrongdoing. Deasy drew attention after the disclosure of his ties to Apple and curriculum-provider Pearson. On Tuesday, Deasy told the Los Angeles Times that he had had no contact with the FBI, nor did he know what the investigation was about. Ars contacted the FBI for more details about the investigation, but a spokesperson said she could not comment. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Feds want Apple’s help to defeat encrypted phones, new legal case shows

OAKLAND, CA—Newly discovered court documents from two federal criminal cases in New York and California that remain otherwise sealed suggest that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is pursuing an unusual legal strategy to compel cellphone makers to assist investigations. In both cases, the seized phones—one of which is an iPhone 5S—are encrypted and cannot be cracked by federal authorities. Prosecutors have now invoked the All Writs Act , an 18th-century federal law that simply allows courts to issue a writ, or order, which compels a person or company to do something. Some legal experts are concerned that these rarely made public examples of the lengths the government is willing to go in defeating encrypted phones raise new questions as to how far the government can compel a private company to aid a criminal investigation. Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Feds want Apple’s help to defeat encrypted phones, new legal case shows

T-Mobile forced to stop hiding slow speeds from throttled customers

When T-Mobile US customers exceed their monthly data caps, they aren’t cut off from the Internet entirely. Instead, T-Mobile throttles their connections to 128Kbps or 64Kbps, depending on which plan they have, for the rest of the month. But T-Mobile has made it difficult for those customers to figure out just how slow their connections are, with a system that exempts speed test applications from the throttling. After complaints from consumer advocates , the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigated the issue and has forced T-Mobile to be more honest about its network’s throttled speeds. Announced today , an agreement between T-Mobile and the FCC ensures that customers will be able to accurately gauge their throttled speeds. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile forced to stop hiding slow speeds from throttled customers

Local judge unseals hundreds of highly secret cell tracking court records

Scott A judge in Charlotte, North Carolina, has unsealed a set of 529 court documents in hundreds of criminal cases detailing the use of a stingray, or cell-site simulator, by local police. This move, which took place earlier this week, marks a rare example of a court opening up a vast trove of applications made by police to a judge, who authorized each use of the powerful and potentially invasive device. According to the Charlotte Observer , the records seem to suggest that judges likely did not fully understand what they were authorizing. Law enforcement agencies nationwide have taken extraordinary steps to preserve stingray secrecy. As recently as this week, prosecutors in a Baltimore robbery case dropped key evidence that stemmed from stingray use rather than fully disclose how the device was used. The newspaper also reported on Friday that the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s office, which astonishingly had also never previously seen the applications filed by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD), will now review them and determine which records also need to be shared with defense attorneys. Criminals could potentially file new claims challenging their convictions on the grounds that not all evidence was disclosed to them at the time. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Local judge unseals hundreds of highly secret cell tracking court records

Ken May

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