Enlarge / Outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC.Win McNamee / Getty Images News important privacy case pending before the court. The companies, which include Apple, Google, and Microsoft among many others, argue that the current state of the law, which distinguishes between "content" (which requires a warrant) and "non-content" (which does not) "make[s] little sense in the context of digital technologies." The amicus filing by dozens of law professors also concludes that the third-party doctrine "cannot support future application of the Fourth Amendment." The legal theory posits that individuals relinquish their privacy interest in data (like a call record or location data) to a third-party—so the government can access it with a court order rather than a warrant. As Ars reported earlier, this case, Carpenter v. United States, involves a man convicted of six robberies in the Detroit area. Law enforcement was able to obtain 127 days of his cell-site location … [Read more...]

EnlargeBloomberg / Getty Images News sued Uber in state court in New Jersey on Friday, claiming that a negligent driver caused a significant traffic accident last year. The accident resulted in Katherine Vesce being knocked unconscious and sustaining a "serious knee injury." Vesce was en route to the New York City marathon, but she was hurt so badly that she likely will be unable to run any marathons in the future. The Illinois woman is now suing for negligence, fraud, and other allegations, and she's the latest person in a series of similar lawsuits filed against Uber in recent years. Many of the cases make related claims that Uber’s safety and training procedures are woefully inadequate and can result in this type of unsafe behavior by drivers. In January 2017, Matthew Luber, one of Vesce’s attorneys, also sued Uber on behalf of a man who said he was beaten up by his driver on a wintery evening in Philadelphia. This latest lawsuit comes one day after … [Read more...]

EnlargeNurPhoto / Getty Images News opening brief at the Supreme Court in one of the most important digital privacy cases in recent years. This case, Carpenter v. United States, asks a simple question: is it OK for police to seize and search 127 days of cell-site location information (CSLI) without a warrant? Previously, lower courts have said that such practices are compatible with current law. But the fact that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case suggests that at least four justices feel that perhaps the law should be changed. In Carpenter, as is the case in countless modern criminal cases, law enforcement were able to obtain the relevant records directly from the mobile phone provider with a court order that has less stringent requirements than a warrant. This is not a trivial distinction. A so-called "d-order" can be circumspect with how information is obtained by authorities. It does not, as the Fourth Amendment demands, require as much particularity. A warrant also … [Read more...]

Enlarge / Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber, seen here in December 2016.Bloomberg / Getty Images News In the high-profile Waymo v. Uber trade secrets lawsuit, the barbs are flying at a nonstop pace. Last Friday, the deposition of Travis Kalanick, who was CEO of Uber until June 2017, was made available for the first time as part of the court record. During the hours of his July 27 testimony, Kalanick described Levandowski’s given explanation for the claimed data theft—that Levandowski downloaded 14,000 proprietary Waymo files as a way to protect his $120 million bonus—as "fucking dumb." Meanwhile, on Monday, attorneys for Waymo have now accused Uber of "trying to game the system" by only offering to make Uber board members available for depositions far too late during the already approved tight schedule. Also on Monday, the Alphabet subsidiary alleged that Uber disclosed well after a judge’s deadline to do so that engineer … [Read more...]

Getty Images | DonNichols A class action complaint against Comcast can move forward after a federal judge rejected a Comcast motion to dismiss it. The lawsuit, filed in October 2016 in US District Court in Northern California, accuses Comcast of falsely advertising low prices and then using poorly disclosed fees to increase the amount paid by cable TV customers. Those fees are the "Broadcast TV Fee," which had increased from $1.50 a month to $6.50 since 2014, and the "Regional Sports Fee" that rose from $1 to $4.50 since 2015. These fees are not included in the advertised prices, so customers end up paying higher prices than the ones they are led to believe they will pay, the lawsuit said. When customers question Comcast reps about the fees, "Comcast staff and agents explicitly lie by stating that the Broadcast TV Fee and the Regional Sports Fee are government-related fees or taxes over which Comcast has no control," the complaint said. Comcast filed a motion to … [Read more...]

Enlarge / Kim Dotcom, as seen in 2014.Hannah Peters / Getty Images News Kim Dotcom is about to upgrade his lifestyle, and he plans to move from Auckland, New Zealand to Queenstown, a city in the far south of the country, according to a few recent tweets. The Megaupload founder has been battling an American criminal copyright case from New Zealand for years now, and so far he's successfully resisted extradition. Dotcom was also hit with a civil forfeiture case filed by the Department of Justice, which was brought 18 months after the initial criminal charges. Prosecutors have sought to seize an extensive list of assets, including millions of dollars in various seized bank accounts in Hong Kong and New Zealand, multiple cars, four jet skis, the Dotcom mansion, several luxury cars, two 108-inch TVs, three 82-inch TVs, a $10,000 watch, and a photograph by Olaf Mueller worth over $100,000. Earlier this month, a New Zealand judge revealed that the … [Read more...]

Mike Cernovich denounces the Syria strike in an hours-long livestream. Image via Periscope. Shortly after “alt-right” poster-boy Steve Bannon reportedly called Jared Kushner a “cuck,” signaling an escalating battle in the White House between the “Bannonites” and the “globalists,” Donald Trump bucked his isolationist promises and launched a military strike against the Syrian government. The barf-splatter of neo-Nazi conspiracy trolls dubbed the “alt-right” were among those who weren’t happy about it, largely because they weren’t so sure the Assad regime actually murdered people. In a Periscope video chronicled by Politico, noted #PizzaGate theorist Mike Cernovich—who appears to have White House sources and tweeted about the strike hours before it happened—expressed doubt that Assad was responsible for the chemical attack and wondered whether it happened at all, declaring that the media and the … [Read more...]

Screengrab via ABC News. A girl who is estimated to be between 8 and 12 years old was found by police with a group of monkeys in a forest in Uttar Pradesh, part of the Katarniaghat wildlife sanctuary, which is situated on the Indian border to Nepal. When the police grabbed her, the monkeys attacked. The BBC reports that the girl, who has been nicknamed “Forest Durga” in reference to a Hindu goddess, had been reported by woodcutters who saw her living with the pack of monkeys. The monkeys tried to prevent her being taken when authorities arrived. Police officer Dinesh Tripathi described the scene to the Associated Press, saying, “When he [another officer] called the girl, the monkeys attacked him but he was able to rescue the girl. He sped away with her in his police car while the monkeys gave chase.” When she was brought in to the hospital in January, the girl was malnourished and had long nails and wounds on her body. Doctors could not ascertain how long … [Read more...]

Image credit: Gene J. Puskar/AP Images Good morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the important stories you need to read or we’ll get really passive aggressive at you. 1st Gear: Sorry To Burst Your Bubble As a consumer-driven economy, we’ve been programmed to be attracted to the latest, new shiny thing. We’ve gotta have it! And sometimes we don’t have enough money for it! So we take out a loan! Everyone takes out a loan! And then bad shit happens! Sound familiar? This time, it’s cars. And it’s not all on the consumers, by the way. Automakers have been relying on “cheap and easy credit” from financial institutions to help them along, reports Bloomberg. Rising interest rates and bad loans are causing financial institutions to be pickier with who they throw money out to. The reasons for this? From the story: For one thing, subprime borrowers have been … [Read more...]

President Donald Trump leaves the podium after speaking at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, April 6, 2017 (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) The US military launched a missile attack on a Syrian airbase last night, and the President of the United States announced it by uncharacteristically invoking God three times in his three-minute speech. The baby known as Cold War II was conceived long ago. But last night, President Trump helped give birth. Congratulations! It’s a war! There are a lot of things I don’t know. I don’t know how Trump personally feels about Russia; I don’t know what the US will do now that it launched 59 Tomahawk missiles against the Assad regime in Syria; I don’t know if a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton would’ve done things any differently. But I feel pretty confident that I know one thing: The history books will mark 2017 as the official start of the Second Cold War. Now, this isn’t altogether fair to the concept of the Cold War. As … [Read more...]

Photo: Wikimedia commons Events are taking place across the U.S. today to mark the centennial of the nation’s entry into World War I. There’s plenty of interesting bits to read about the war in our archive, but there’s one story we haven’t delved into before: the rumor of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria’s vehicle being haunted. If you’re up on basic facts about the global conflict, you know it began when Ferdinand was assassinated—on a day when he had already survived an attempted bombing of his motorcade. As the Smithsonianrecounts the episode, Ferdinand decided to head to the hospital to visit the victims of the bombing attempt. It was Franz Ferdinand’s impulsive decision, later in the day, to visit them there—a decision none of his assassins could have predicted—that took him directly past the spot where his assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was standing. It was chauffeur Leopold Lojka’s unfamiliarity with the new … [Read more...]

One of eight Tomahawk cruise missiles launches from the stern of the USS Laboon (DDG 58) to attack selected air defense targets in Iraq, September 3, 1996. (Photo by U.S. Navy/Getty Images) The United States military has launched over 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Syria, according to multiple reports. The attack is a direct response to a Syrian sarin gas attack on its own civilian population. Turkish officials said that a fixed-wing aircraft dropped munitions carrying sarin onto an underground hospital, killing at least 86, according to ABC News. Sarin, a nerve agent, is known to be extremely deadly, causing a breakdown of a person’s entire nervous system in as little as a minute. President Donald Trump has criticized attacking Syria in the past without Congressional approval, and it does not appear such approval was sought in this instance: More as we have it. … [Read more...]

Popular App Shazam Trying to Cash in on the Trendiness of AR with Hiring of New CTO While it remains unknown how exactly augmented reality will make its way into the mainstream (the Microsoft HoloLens sitting at $3,000 isn't exactly accessible), many brands have been trying to integrate the tech into their mobile apps, mimicking the success of Snapchat and its popular AR filters. One of those brands going all in on augmented reality is Shazam. Shazam, the extremely popular app with over a billion combined downloads on iOS and Android, can help identify what song is currently playing in the background. Over the past year, they began pivoting their business towards AR. They launched AR-powered Shazam Codes and partnered with Snapchat so that Shazam was available in-app to identify songs from Snap stories. Now they've hired Richard Sharp as Chief Technology Officer to help take these AR ambitions to the next level. Shazam Codes in action. Image via ShazamWhile researching for his PhD at … [Read more...]

Photo: Getty Images Iggy Azaela, a woman that I’d rather not spend that much time thinking about, recently released a music video for a song called “Mo’ Bounce.” In said video, she spends an awful lot of time twerking and apparently lost 15 lbs. as a result. It will come as no surprise to anyone with a passing knowledge of Iggy Azalea’s ouevre and her sterling reputation as a “rapper”that Iggy had to do some considerable training. In an interview with New Zealand radio hosts Fitzy and Wippa, the old Igster revealed that twerking like she does in the video is actually not as easy as it looks. “I did a lot of rehearsals actually, and man I lost 15 pounds in a week dancing to that song!” she said. Perhaps we can consider this next sound bite from Australia’s finest as progress, maybe: “I did take classes. I do have someone who is very, very good at twerking, and she helped me. I never realized how flexible you have to be to … [Read more...]

Image: M Dreibelbis/Flickr Celiac disease can be a nightmare, with the slew of gluten-triggered ails it brings. Those includes everything from gastrointestinal symptoms like bloating and diarrhea, to psychological symptoms, anemia, seizures... pretty much everything that can make the body feel bad, combined into one awful mess. At least one in 141 Americans suffer from celiac disease (that’s a few million), and many aren’t diagnosed. Scientists thought its cause was genetic, something coded in the DNA that causes the immune system to attack the body in the presence of wheat gluten. But now, a large international team of researchers has presented some convincing evidence that the story goes deeper than that—the disease’s trigger might lie in a benign viral infection. Those researchers, who published their work today in the journal Science, suspected celiac disease had some environmental component based on lots of evidence. For instance, two percent of people … [Read more...]

Photo: Jeff Gross/Getty Images Running back Montee Ball’s last brush with the NFL was a practice-squad spot on the Patriots during the 2015 season, and the team cut him in February of 2016 after he was arrested and charged with battery in Wisconsin. The 26-year-old spoke with Alex Marvez of the Sporting News and said alcohol is what ended his football career. Ball, who admitted to his therapist that he was an alcoholic, talked about waking up and going to Broncos practices while still drunk, and said he would drink excessively on Sunday, Monday, Thursday, and Friday nights during football season. He recounted one time where a coach pulled him aside and tried to help him: Ball said Broncos running backs coach Eric Studesville suspected something was wrong when he asked Ball to stay following one running backs meeting. “He talked about how he could smell the alcohol on me and that he thinks I may have a problem with drinking,” Ball said. “He said if I needed any … [Read more...]

GIF Some real-life Torettos made off with an unspecified haul of cash in South Africa this past weekend after blowing the doors off an armored truck and making a getaway in a pair of luxury sedans. The robbers shot out the tires of the armored truck on Saturday on a busy Johannesburg highway and forced its guards out before blowing the doors. A nearby motorist was treated for minor injuries from the blast, as South Africa’s News 24reports. The whole incident was caught on video, posted by the Intelligence Bureau SA. You can hear onlookers in disbelief as the robbers blow the truck, with everybody in traffic figuring out how they can get out of dodge. The robbers escaped the scene with “an undisclosed amount of money in cash boxes and one of the guard’s firearms,” according to local police. The robbers made their escape in a Mercedes-Benz and a BMW, which were later recovered by the police. As of yet, no arrests have been made. … [Read more...]

The $3.3 billion deal is "the beginning of an exciting evolution for Sunoco into a premier nationwide fuel supplier," the company's CEO says. Sunoco LP said Thursday it had agreed to sell most of its convenience stores to 7-Eleven for $3.3 billion so it can focus on its fuel supply business. The deal includes 1,110 Sunoco convenience stores, mostly on the East Coast and Texas, and a 15-year take-or-pay agreement to supply 7-Eleven with about 2.2 billion gallons of fuel annually. 7-Eleven, which is a subsidiary of Japanese retail group Seven & i Holdings, currently operates 8,700 stores in the U.S. and Canada, including those run by franchisees. Sunoco said it plans to be “a leading consolidator in the domestic wholesale fuels business, supplying fuel to a network of more than 8,900 locations of third-party dealers, distributors, and other commercial customers.” The company, a master limited partnership that is owned by Dallas-based Energy Transfer Equity, will sell … [Read more...]

University of Miami pediatrician Judith L. Schaechter, M.D. (L) gives an HPV vaccination to a 13-year-old girl in her office at the Miller School of Medicine on September 21, 2011 in Miami, Florida. Photo via Getty Images. Good reminder that people who fret that giving girls Gardasil will make them “promiscuous” can go kick rocks: New research says a quarter of men have the cancer-causing strain of HPV, as do 20 percent of women. NBC News reports on the latest numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics. Good reminder to book an appointment, if you or your kids are within the range of ages where it’ll do some good: The team looked at large national health surveys, which included HPV tests, taken in 2011 through 2014. In 2013 and 2014, 45 percent of all men aged up to 60 had some sort of HPV strain and 25 percent had one of the strains that can cause cancer. Close to 40 percent of women had any type of HPV and 20 percent had a cancer-causing strain, the … [Read more...]

In court on Friday afternoon, Northern California District Judge Lucy Koh ruled that most of the documents in the giant Apple v. Samsung case would have to be submitted as public documents, something both companies were hoping to avoid. In the days leading up to the case, Judge Koh said that her court will operate with the presumption that every piece of evidence would be publicly disclosed, and will require both corporations to fight for sealed information. And yesterday her decision was no different. IDG News reported that Judge Koh will allow some "source code, royalty rate,s and unreported financial data to be sealed," but she will need to review and approve the redacted data first. Koh was stern with both companies on Friday, chastising both for trying to claim confidentiality for information that had already been publicly submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Many of the documents in dispute have yet to be released to the public so far, but will certainly cause … [Read more...]