Linked List: July 12, 2019

Friday, 12 July 2019

FTC Approves Roughly $5 Billion Facebook Settlement ★

Emily Glazer, Ryan Tracy, and Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The Federal Trade Commission has endorsed a roughly $5 billion settlement with Facebook Inc. over a long-running probe into the tech giant’s privacy missteps, according to people familiar with the matter.

FTC commissioners this past week voted 3-2 in favor of the agreement, with the Republican majority backing the pact while Democratic commissioners objected, the people said. The matter has been moved to the Justice Department’s civil division and it is unclear how long it will take to finalize, one of the people said. Justice Department reviews are part of FTC procedure but typically don’t change the outcome of a decision by the commission.

I’m still with Kara Swisher on this — add a zero and we might have a fine that will change Facebook. $5 billion is just the cost of doing business.

Where Are All the Bob Ross Paintings? ★

Who would’ve thought that it’s next to impossible to buy an original Bob Ross? Delightful video piece from a team at The New York Times — I recommend just opening the link and hitting play.

‘Robot Umpires’ Debuted in the Atlantic League All-Star Game ★

Johnny Flores Jr., reporting for Yahoo Sports:

On Wednesday, the independent Atlantic League, which is a partner of Major League Baseball, debuted the electronic strike zone during its All-Star game, making it the first American professional league to do so.

Home plate umpire Brian deBrauwere wore an earpiece that was connected to an iPhone in his pocket. The earpiece relayed balls and strikes after receiving it from a TrackMan computer system utilizing a Doppler radar and deBrauwere called them as he received them.

Sounds like they need to work on the latency, but this is probably the future for all professional baseball.

Former Tesla Employee Admits Uploading Autopilot Source Code to iCloud ★

Sean O’Kane, writing for The Verge:

Cao denied stealing sensitive information from the automaker in the same filing. His legal team argued he “made extensive efforts to delete and/or remove any such Tesla files prior to his separation from Tesla.” Cao is now the “head of perception” at XPeng, where he is “[d]eveloping and delivering autonomous driving technologies for production cars,” according to his LinkedIn profile.

Uploading very sensitive source code to your personal iCloud account, then going to work for a Chinese competitor — sure sure, nothing suspicious about that.

According to a joint filing from the two parties that was also filed this week, Tesla has subpoenaed documents from Apple. While Apple is not involved in this case, a former employee who worked on the tech company’s secretive autonomous car project was charged by the FBI with stealing trade secrets last July.

That employee allegedly Air Dropped sensitive data to his wife’s laptop and was also caught on CCTV leaving Apple’s campus with a box of equipment. He had left his job at Apple to take a position at XPeng before being arrested.

I’m starting to think this XPeng company isn’t on the up and up.

Apple Disables Walkie Talkie App Due to Vulnerability That Could Allow iPhone Eavesdropping ★

Apple, in a statement to TechCrunch:

We were just made aware of a vulnerability related to the Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch and have disabled the function as we quickly fix the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and will restore the functionality as soon as possible. Although we are not aware of any use of the vulnerability against a customer and specific conditions and sequences of events are required to exploit it, we take the security and privacy of our customers extremely seriously. We concluded that disabling the app was the right course of action as this bug could allow someone to listen through another customer’s iPhone without consent. We apologize again for this issue and the inconvenience.

I was just trying to use the Walkie Talkie feature today and chalked up its inability to connect to a bug. It’s not quite reliable enough, but when it works, it’s a fun and convenient feature.

‘The Shining’ Starring Jim Carrey ★

On the surface this is just fun. But we’re obviously going to soon have real-world scandals based on these “deep fake” videos. Right now, video footage is a compelling way to prove something is true. What happens when we can’t trust video?