By BeauHD from
Slashdot's hand-it-over department:
Coinbase has formally notified its customers that it will be complying with a court order and handing over the user data for about 13,000 of its customers to the Internal Revenue Service. Ars Technica reports: The case began back in November 2016 when the IRS went to a federal judge in San Francisco to enforce an initial order that would have required the company to hand over the data of all users who transacted on the site between 2013 and 2015 as part of a tax evasion investigation. Coinbase resisted the IRS' request in court. But by November 2017, after a hearing, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley narrowed the request to only cover 13,000 particular individuals. The San Francisco-based startup is now required to provide "taxpayer ID, name, birth date, address, and historical transaction records for certain higher-transacting customers during the 2013-2015 period." Coinbase reminded its users that it is "unable to provide legal or tax advice." The company also noted, "If you have concerns about this, we encourage you to seek legal advice from an attorney promptly. Coinbase expects to produce the information covered by the court's order within 21 days."
Read Replies (0)
By BeauHD from
Slashdot's narrowly-dodging department:
Volkswagen settled a major diesel emissions class action lawsuit brought by hundreds of vehicle owners right before the case was set to go to trial. "The German auto giant's U.S. division settled the lawsuit brought by a North Carolina man and over 300 other owners of diesel cars who allege fraud and unfair trade practices," reports The Verge. From the report: The trial could have featured testimony from current and former VW executives and would likely have caused a spate of bad press for the automaker regarding the Dieselgate scandal. Since it first broke in 2015, the controversy has led to the resignation of VW's CEO, seen a handful of executives sentenced to jail, and resulted in billions of dollars in fines and settlements. VW is being sued by some consumers after it admitted to using software to cheat on diesel emissions tests, sparking the biggest scandal to hit the auto industry in decades. David Doar, the North Carolina man along with more than 300 other U.S. VW diesel owners, rejected settlement offers from a 2016 class action that would have reimbursed them for the value of their vehicles. Nearly all U.S. owners of affected VW vehicles agreed to take part in a $25 billion settlement in 2016, which included buyback offers and additional compensation for about 500,000 owners. But according to Reuters, some 2,000 owners have opted out, and most are pursuing separate claims seeking additional compensation.
Read Replies (0)
By BeauHD from
Slashdot's business-dealings department:
Craig Wright, the nChain chief scientist who previously claimed to be the pseudonymous bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, is being sued for a whopping $10 billion for stealing $5 billion in bitcoin from a former business partner. CoinDesk reports: The lawsuit is being brought by Ira Kleiman on behalf of the estate of his brother, Dave, who has been linked to the earliest days of bitcoin. Kleiman, a forensic computer investigator and author, passed away in 2013 following a battle with MRSA. At the heart of the new lawsuit, according to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on Feb. 14, is an alleged hoard of more than 1.1 million bitcoins, which Ira Kleiman's lawyers say is worth in excess of $10 billion. He is being represented by Boies Schiller Flexner LLP.
Wright, court records show, has been accused of allegedly conducting "a scheme against Dave's estate to seize Dave's bitcoins and his rights to certain intellectual property associated with the Bitcoin technology." "As part of this plan, Craig forged a series of contracts that purported to transfer Dave's assets to Craig and/or companies controlled by him. Craig backdated these contracts and forged Dave's signature on them," attorneys for the plaintiff wrote. Included alongside the complaint are a number of additional filings, including the business registration for a firm called W&K Info Defense Research LLC, in which Kleiman and Wright were business partners. In addition to the roughly 1.1 million bitcoins, Ira Kleiman is also seeking compensation for the intellectual property his lawyers claim arose from the partnership between his deceased brother and Wright.
Read Replies (0)
By BeauHD from
Slashdot's what's-inside department:
Rei writes: With an estimated 8,670 Model 3s delivered, a race is on as competitors and owners work to figure out its limits and explore the tech behind it. Many-time Tesla teardown expert "Ingineerix" has posted a series of videos and discussed his findings on Reddit. Among them: what appears to be the industry's first switched reluctance motor, a massive "smuggling compartment" allocated for a future front-wheel motor, no physical fuses (all solid-state), significant wiring harness length reductions via the use of multiple body controllers, a swappable crash energy absorption system, a liquid-cooled compute unit, and redundant controllers for all safety-related systems. He followed up by posting a screenshot of the car tricked into "factory mode" to reveal its internal specs, including a 1200A max discharge current, 370kW max discharge power, and a 76 kWh pack with 72,5kWh usable. Meanwhile, Munro and Associates tore down a Model 3 for an undisclosed, "not Tesla" client, releasing a video criticizing its build quality and for difficulty in accessing the HV cables in the event of an accident (Munroe's claims were dismissed by Ingineerix). Meanwhile, engineers from German automakers were extremely impressed by what they found during their teardown -- particularly the power electronics system, which they described as "compact, expandable, fully integrated, modular, easily accessible, well-protected, reasonably priced and astonishingly clever in many details." Other owners have been putting their cars on dynamometers to measure their power. Drag Times suffered some skid and measured a conflicting 281 / 327.6 hp with 552 lb-ft torque. Contrarily, Tesla Repair Channel found consistent readings around 250hp when starting from 30mph, but consistently around 390 hp when starting from 10mph. The reason for the discrepancy is not yet clear.
Read Replies (0)
By msmash from
Slashdot's security-woes department:
Cellebrite, an Israel-based company, knows of ways to unlock every iPhone that's on the market, right up to the iPhone X, Forbes reported on Monday, citing sources. From the report: Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that's become the U.S. government's company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11 . That includes the iPhone X, a model that Forbes has learned was successfully raided for data by the Department for Homeland Security back in November 2017, most likely with Cellebrite technology. The Israeli firm, a subsidiary of Japan's Sun Corporation, hasn't made any major public announcement about its new iOS capabilities. But Forbes was told by sources (who asked to remain anonymous as they weren't authorized to talk on the matter) that in the last few months the company has developed undisclosed techniques to get into iOS 11 and is advertising them to law enforcement and private forensics folk across the globe. Indeed, the company's literature for its Advanced Unlocking and Extraction Services offering now notes the company can break the security of "Apple iOS devices and operating systems, including iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, iPad Pro and iPod touch, running iOS 5 to iOS 11." Separately, a source in the police forensics community told Forbes he'd been told by Cellebrite it could unlock the iPhone 8. He believed the same was most probably true for the iPhone X, as security across both of Apple's newest devices worked in much the same way.
Read Replies (0)
By msmash from
Slashdot's bigger-picture department:
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday suggested that Microsoft could grow more from its Office 365 line of cloud productivity apps than anything in the company's 43-year history. From a report: With business editions of Office 365, Microsoft faces competition from Google, as well as younger players like Box and Dropbox, in the race to get companies collaborating in apps running on remote cloud servers. "The growth opportunity for what is Office 365 is a lot bigger than anything we've achieved, even with our high penetration in the client-server world," Nadella said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media and Telecom conference in San Francisco. When companies transition from Microsoft's traditional licensing business to cloud-based subscriptions, it's "not a one-for-one move," Nadella told Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss at the event. Microsoft recently introduced the Microsoft 365 bundle, which includes Office as well as Windows, along with enterprise security and mobility services. Nadella also talked up the company's potential in the Azure public cloud infrastructure business, where it competes with Google as well as Amazon Web Services. "We had a good business in our server business, but this business is orders of magnitude bigger than what used to be a successful server business," he said.
Read Replies (0)
By msmash from
Slashdot's suuure department:
It's 2018, so why is it still seemingly impossible to get a decent wi-fi on an airplane? From a report: Well, a lot of reasons, it turns out. The Wall Street Journal recently enumerated them: hardware, software, government regulation, aviation regulation, and rivalries between wireless and satellite companies. Despite the obstacles, a new alliance between Airbus, Delta Air Lines, Sprint, and two U.S. satellite companies is trying to find a way to provide faster Internet and a better user experience. Japan's SoftBank, which owns 80% of Sprint, and India's Bharti Airtel are also reportedly supporting the project. The group, which calls itself Seamless Air Alliance, envisions a world where a variety of devices could easily connect to the Internet while in flight at industry-leading speeds, rivaling cable and 5G. The businesses that are either involved in or backing the alliance pack a punch: they already serve about 150 million airline passengers and 450 million mobile users around the globe.
Read Replies (0)
By msmash from
Slashdot's tough-matters department:
The European Union has warned that it will regulate cryptocurrencies if the risks exposed by the meteoric rise of bitcoin and its ilk are not addressed. The Guardian: The boom and bust of cryptocurrencies has seen some investors make millions where others have suffered heavy losses. Bitcoin, which now trades around $9,000 a token but recently dropped to less than $6,000, leads the pack rising nearly 2,000% to just under $20,000 in 2017, fuelling a global investment craze. "This is a global phenomenon and it's important there is an international follow-up at the global level," Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU's financial chief, said on Monday. "We do not exclude the possibility to move ahead (by regulating cryptocurrencies) at the EU level if we see, for example, risks emerging but no clear international response emerging."
Read Replies (0)
By msmash from
Slashdot's closer-look department:
One promise of ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft was fewer cars clogging city streets. But studies suggest the opposite: that ride-hailing companies are pulling riders off buses, subways, bicycles and their own feet and putting them in cars instead . From a report: And in what could be a new wrinkle, a service by Uber called Express Pool now is seen as directly competing with mass transit. Uber and Lyft argue that in Boston, for instance, they complement public transit by connecting riders to hubs like Logan Airport and South Station. But they have not released their own specific data about rides, leaving studies up to outside researchers. And the impact of all those cars is becoming clear, said Christo Wilson, a professor of computer science at Boston's Northeastern University, who has looked at Uber's practice of surge pricing during heavy volume. "The emerging consensus is that ride-sharing (is) increasing congestion," Wilson said. One study included surveys of 944 ride-hailing users over four weeks in late 2017 in the Boston area. Nearly six in 10 said they would have used public transportation, walked, biked or skipped the trip if the ride-hailing apps weren't available. The report also found many riders aren't using hailed rides to connect to a subway or bus line, but instead as a separate mode of transit, said Alison Felix, one of the report's authors.
Read Replies (0)
By msmash from
Slashdot's up-next department:
At Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm demonstrated the real-world potential of 5G by sharing findings of extensive network simulations it has conducted over the past several months. From a report: Instead of just offering guesses as to the gigabit-plus speeds that 5G technology could one day offer, Qualcomm's tests modeled real-world conditions in Frankfurt and San Fransisco, based on the location of existing cell sites and spectrum allocations in the two cities. The simulations factor in conditions like geography, different user demands on the network, a wide spectrum of devices with various levels of LTE and 5G connectivity for different speeds in order to accurately give an idea of what to expect when these networks launch. Additionally, the simulations are intended only to show the kind of 5G NR (New Radio) networks that could feasibly exist next year -- the non-standalone networks built in tandem with existing 4G LTE technology, not the truly standalone 5G networks that will come later on. The Frankfurt simulation is the more basic network, based on 100 MHz of 3.5GHz spectrum with an underlying gigabit-LTE network on 5 LTE spectrum bands, but the results are still staggering. Browsing jumped from 56 Mbps for the median 4G user to more than 490 Mbps for the median 5G user, with roughly seven times faster response rates for browsing. Download speeds also improved dramatically, with over 90 percent of users seeing at least 100 Mbps download speeds on 5G, versus 8 Mbps on LTE.
Read Replies (0)
By msmash from
Slashdot's next-up department:
The Khronos Group, a consortium of hardware and software companies, has announced that the Vulkan graphics technology is coming to Apple's platforms, allowing games and apps to run at faster performance levels on Macs and iOS devices. From a report: In collaboration with Valve, LunarG, and The Brenwill Workshop, this free open-source collection includes the full 1.0 release of the previously-commercial MoltenVK, a library for translating Vulkan API calls to Apple's Metal 1 and 2 calls, as well LunarG's new Vulkan SDK for macOS. Funding the costs of open-sourcing, Valve has been utilizing these tools on their applications, noting performance gains over native OpenGL drivers with Vulkan DOTA 2 on macOS as a production-load example. Altogether, this forms the next step in Khronos' Vulkan Portability Initiative, which was first announced at GDC 2017 as their "3D Portability Initiative," and later refined as the "Vulkan Portability Initiative" last summer. Spurred by industry demand, Khronos is striving for a cross-platform API portability solution, where an appropriate subset of Vulkan can act as a 'meta-API'-esque layer to map to DirectX 12 and Metal; the holy grail being that developers can craft a single Vulkan portable application or engine that can be seamlessly deployed across Vulkan, DX12, and Metal supporting platforms.
Read Replies (0)
By msmash from
Slashdot's unravelling-mysteries department:
The Great Red Spot has been a fixture of Jupiter 's cloudy visage for centuries and is among the most recognizable features in the solar system. But it won't always be there. In fact, the Great Red Spot is shrinking, and recently, news stories reported that it could vanish within the next 10 or 20 years . From a report: Older observations, from the late 1800s, suggest the storm once spanned more than 30 degrees in longitude and was more of a "Great Red Sausage," says Glenn Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But the storm's shape is changing, most significantly in width, and as time marches on it's becoming less oval and more circular. Way back when, the storm stretched more than 25,000 miles across. When the Voyager spacecraft flew by in the 1970s, scientists estimated that the Spot was just 14,500 miles wide. In 2014, a Hubble Space Telescope observation put the Spot at just 10,250 miles across, and by last spring, it spanned just 10,140 miles. So when will it disappear entirely? Truth is, scientists have no idea. But if you measure the rate at which the Great Red Spot has been shrinking, and extrapolate linearly from that, it looks like the spot will vanish completely in about 70 years, says Amy Simon of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Problem is, "we know for certain it doesn't work like that at all," she says.
Read Replies (0)