Tag: privacy-rights

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

Comcast sued by customers for turning routers into public hotspots

A pair of Comcast customers has sued the company for turning Xfinity Internet routers into public Wi-Fi hotspots, saying Comcast’s actions pose risks to subscribers and are taken without seeking their authorization. Plaintiff Toyer Grear and daughter Joycelyn Harris of Alameda County, California, filed the suit on December 4 ( PDF ) in US District Court in Northern California, seeking class action status on behalf of all Comcast customers who lease wireless routers that broadcast Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots. “Without authorization to do so, Comcast uses the wireless routers it supplies to its customers to generate additional, public Wi-Fi networks for its own benefit,” the complaint states. The plaintiffs seek financial damages and an order preventing Comcast “from using residential customers’ wireless routers to create Xfinity Wi-Fi Hotspots without first obtaining authorization.” Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast sued by customers for turning routers into public hotspots

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

New wireless charging gear promises 3x faster charging

Faster charging, like Qualcomm’s “Quick Charge 2.0” (branded as “Turbo Charging” on the Nexus 6), is one of the nicest new smartphone features available. If we can’t make a battery last all day with heavy use, we can at least make it charge faster. The faster charging is possible because these devices charge at a higher voltage—instead of the normal 5 watts from a standard USB charger, these hit about 14 watts. These faster chargers have left wireless chargers in the dust, though. Today’s Qi charging pads still only put out 5W, the same as a slow wired charger. Freescale Semiconductor, a company that provides various chips to OEMs, is out to fix that. Today the company announced integrated circuits for 15 watt wireless chargers —a wireless solution that should be just as fast as a hardwired turbo charger. Of course, you will need new hardware to make this work. Freescale’s solution will require a new chip in your smartphone or tablet and a new charging pad. The good news is that this isn’t a new standard. Freescale’s chips can be tweaked to be compliant with Qi charging, which is found in many smartphone, or with lesser-used standards like the Power Matters Alliance. The Qi “medium power” standard is actually good up to 120W, provided the pad and device support it. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New wireless charging gear promises 3x faster charging

Powerful, highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years

Researchers have uncovered an extremely stealthy trojan for Linux systems that attackers have been using to siphon sensitive data from governments and pharmaceutical companies around the world. The previously undiscovered malware represents a missing puzzle piece tied to “Turla,” a so-called advanced persistent threat (APT) disclosed in August by Kaspersky Lab and Symantec . For at least four years, the campaign targeted government institutions, embassies, military, education, research, and pharmaceutical companies in more than 45 countries. The unknown attackers—who are probably backed by a nation-state, according to Symantec—were known to have infected several hundred Windows-based computers by exploiting a variety of vulnerabilities, at least two of which were zero-day bugs. The malware was notable for its use of a rootkit that made it extremely hard to detect. Now researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have detected Linux-based malware used in the same campaign . Turla was already ranked as one of the top-tier APTs, in the same league as the recently disclosed Regin  for instance. The discovery of the Linux component suggests it is bigger than previously thought and may presage the discovery of still more infected systems. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Powerful, highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years

Apple manager gets year in jail, $4.5m fine for selling industry secrets

Onetime Apple supply manager Paul Shin Devine will spend a year in prison and repay $4.5 million for selling Apple’s secrets to suppliers, the AP reports . Devine, who worked at Apple from 2005 until his arrest in August of 2010 , pleaded guilty to wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering—and could have been sentenced to as much as 20 years in prison. Working with Singapore resident Andrew Ang, Devine was accused of selling confidential information to companies that hoped to become Apple suppliers, and to suppliers trying to negotiate better deals with the company. Winning an Apple contract can be a make-or-break moment for a supplier, as we saw in the recent dust-up between Apple and would-be sapphire manufacturer GT Advanced Technologies ; companies hoping to get in on the action sent “millions in kickbacks” to Devine. Ang and Chua Kim Guan, who were respectively the sales director and general manager of Jin Li Mould Manufacturing, were charged in 2013 for bribing Devine. They were accused of paying Devine $387,600 between 2006 and 2009. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Apple manager gets year in jail, $4.5m fine for selling industry secrets

AT&T still throttles “unlimited data”—even when network not congested

A while back, we reported that AT&T had stopped throttling unlimited data users except in cases when the network is congested. We were wrong. AT&T did change its policy to stop the automatic throttling of many unlimited data plans, but the company’s older, more draconian throttling policy still applies to customers with unlimited LTE data. AT&T told Ars the policy will be changed for all customers sometime in 2015, but it did not say whether that will happen closer to the beginning of the year or the end of the year. Here’s how it works: Customers who have 3G or non-LTE 4G phones and “ legacy unlimited data plans ” are throttled for the remainder of the billing period after they exceed 3GB of data in a month, but only “at times and in areas that are experiencing network congestion.” 4G and LTE are practically synonymous these days, but AT&T also applies the 4G label to its HSPA network technology. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T still throttles “unlimited data”—even when network not congested

Google Glass isn’t dead; Intel-powered hardware reportedly due in 2015

It’s been easy to believe Google Glass is dead given all the problems that have popped up lately. The device was introduced to the world more than two years ago, but it never came close to the original concept . The project’s founder left Google to work at Amazon, and monthly updates from Google have slowed from important feature releases to sometimes single-sentence changelogs . App developers are giving up on the platform, and Twitter recently pulled support for its Glass app. The official forums , once a bustling hive of optimism, now mostly discuss  declining usage  or low morale among remaining Glass users. And unless something happens in the next 30 days, Google will miss its original plans for a consumer release. Glass is not dead, though. A report from The Wall Street Journal   claims that a new version of Google Glass is on the way, and unlike the  minor revision  that Google released last year, it has totally overhauled internals. According to the report, Glass will switch from its dead Texas Instruments SoC to a processor built by Intel and will get a full hardware refresh. Google Glass has had a rough life thanks to its choice of SoC. The original unit (and the revision) used a Texas Instruments chip, but shortly after the launch of Glass, TI quit the smartphone business and ended support for many of its products. That was a big problem for Glass since, as early as this year, the device was still based on Android 4.0—an OS originally released in 2011. Glass was missing out on some big wearable-specific enhancements in later versions of Android like notification APIs, Bluetooth LE, and lower memory usage. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Glass isn’t dead; Intel-powered hardware reportedly due in 2015

New battery composed of lots of nanobatteries

Shalini Saxena We’re increasingly dependent upon our batteries, so finding ways of building ones with enhanced lifetimes would make a lot of people happy. Research on batteries has ranged from trying new materials to changing the configuration of key components. Now, researchers have managed to restructure the materials in a nano-battery, then bundle lots of these individual batteries into a larger device. Batteries rely on two electrodes to create separate currents of electrons and ions, generating electricity. Nanostructured electrodes have useful properties, such as large surface area and short ion transport time, which enables a high storage capacity and enhanced lifetimes—these batteries hold charge longer and can undergo more charge-discharge cycles. 3-D connectivity and organization of nanostructured electrodes could further improve these devices. Previously, researchers had developed 3-D nanostructured batteries by placing two electrodes within a nanopore (made of anodic aluminum oxide) and using ultrathin electrical insulating material to separate them. While this system had improved power and energy density, use of such thin electrical insulators limits charge retention and requires complex circuits to shift current between them—it’s difficult to retain the benefits of the 3-D nano-architecture due to spatial constraints of the material. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New battery composed of lots of nanobatteries

Hotel charges couple’s credit card $156 for negative Trip Advisor review

A British hotel added $156 to a couple’s credit card bill for violating its terms of service that says guests can be dinged for leaving bad online reviews. The Broadway Hotel charged Tony and Jan Jenkinson’s credit card, CNN reported Wednesday, after they left a review on Trip Advisor decrying the Blackpool hotel as a ” filthy, dirty rotten stinking hovel .” The BBC described the hotel’s terms of service contained in a booking document as: Despite the fact that repeat customers and couples love our hotel, your friends and family may not. For every bad review left on any website, the group organiser will be charged a maximum £100 per review. (About $156) This isn’t the first time we’ve seen fines like this from a hotel. In August, the Union Street Guest House in Hudson, NY included a table-turning clause in its reservation policies: if you book an event at the hotel and a member of your party posts a negative review, the hotel will fine you $500 . Amid an Internet firestorm, that hotel changed its policy. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hotel charges couple’s credit card $156 for negative Trip Advisor review