UPDATE (10/15/20230: The court's order did not stand, and by 2023 Caltech had agreed to drop their lawsuit.

Below is Slashdot's original report from 2020:

The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) said it won a $1.1 billion jury verdict in a patent case against Apple and Broadcom. Reuters reports: In a case filed in federal court in Los Angeles in 2016, the Pasadena, California-based research university alleged that Broadcom wi-fi chips used in hundreds of millions of Apple iPhones infringed patents relating to data transmission technology. "While we thank the members of the jury for their service, we disagree with the factual and legal bases for the verdict and intend to appeal," Broadcom said in a statement. Apple said it plans to appeal the verdict, but declined further comment. The company had said in court filings that it believed all of the university's claims against it resulted from it using Broadcom's chips in its devices, calling itself "merely an indirect downstream party." The verdict awarded CalTech $837.8 million from Apple and $270.2 million from Broadcom. "We are pleased the jury found that Apple and Broadcom infringed Caltech patents," CalTech said in a statement. "As a non-profit institution of higher education, Caltech is committed to protecting its intellectual property in furtherance of its mission to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On the night of December 30, Sergeant Vince Iovinella of the Morgan County Sheriff's Department in rural Colorado was on patrol when the calls started coming in about drones. "Residents began calling in reports of drones of unknown origin moving above houses and farms," Iovinella wrote in a statement obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. "The numbers would range from 4 to 10 drones in an area at a time. Some were reported to be low and at least 6 ft. long." Iovinella further reported the drones had white and red flashing lights as he and other deputies made "several attempts" to follow the drones. The drones were moving "very fast at times" but could also "sustain a hover over an area for long periods of time."

"There were many sighting's [sic] coming in and at the same time," Iovinella continued. "It is believed that there could have been up to 30 drones moving around the county if not more and appeared to be working in a search pattern across the county." This was yet another night on eastern Colorado's new drone patrol, following a slate of reports on mysterious fixed-wing drones in the area. They'd come out at night between approximately 7 to 10 p.m. The story, which was first reported by the Denver Post, got international press attention. "In all of these cases," Iovinella wrote in this statement, "it is unknown who owns the drone or what their purpose is." That's because the drones never existed. The Colorado Department of Public Safety (CDPS) "confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity."

"Of the 23 reports between January 6 and January 13 when the investigation was underway, 13 were determined to be 'planets, stars, or small hobbyist drones,'" reports Motherboard. "Six were commercial aircraft, and four remain unconfirmed. None of the 90 reports from November 23 onward were confirmed instances of illegal drone activity."

As it struggles to get content from encrypted messenger apps and smartphones, the U.S. government is getting creative in how it tracks down criminal WhatsApp users, according to a search warrant uncovered by Forbes. From the report: Aside from shedding light on police data-trawling operations, these new efforts are "problematic," legal experts tell Forbes. They show that investigators are willing to test the boundaries of legality by demanding content they may not legally be allowed to collect from WhatsApp. And they're then demanding data from a seemingly endless list of tech providers -- from Google to any telecom company imaginable -- that could feasibly help them catch a single WhatsApp user.

In a bid to find an alleged Mexican methamphetamine dealer, the government demanded that WhatsApp hand over basic subscriber details, according to a previously unreported government order filed in Colorado in October. They'd been tipped off that the dealer -- a fugitive on the DEA's most-wanted list -- was a frequent user of WhatsApp and had even used the app to talk with an undercover agent. That WhatsApp data would come from what's known as a "pen-trap." Think of these as tracking tools that collect limited metadata like user phone numbers, IP addresses and call duration, not the content of messages. Forbes has reported on these before and they're fairly common. So far, so normal.

Mark Zuckerberg sent a message to the public on Wednesday: Facebook is fine doing things that are unpopular, as long as people understand why. From a report: Facebook has come under scrutiny over its political advertising policies, as fellow social media platform Twitter decided to ban political ads. "One critique of our approach for much of the last decade was that because we wanted to be liked, we didn't always communicate our views as clearly because we were worried about offending people," Zuckerberg said on a call with analysts. He said his goal for the next decade "isn't to be liked, but to be understood." That's because in order to be trusted, "people need to know where you stand," Zuckerberg said.

SpiceJet, one of India's largest privately owned airlines, suffered a data breach involving the details of more than a million of its passengers, a security researcher told TechCrunch. From the report: The security researcher, who described their actions as "ethical hacking" but whom we are not naming as they likely fell afoul of U.S. computer hacking laws, gained access to one of SpiceJet's systems by brute-forcing the system's easily guessable password. An unencrypted database backup file on that system contained private information of more than 1.2 million passengers of the budget-carrier last month, TechCrunch has learned. Each record included details such as name of the passenger, their phone number, email address and their date of birth, the researcher told TechCrunch. Some of these passengers were state officials, they said. The database included a rolling month's worth of flight information and details of each commuter, they said, adding that they believe that the database was easily accessible for anyone who knew where to look.

Google has released a neural-network-powered chatbot called Meena that it claims is better than any other chatbot out there. From a report: Meena was trained on a whopping 341 gigabytes of public social-media chatter -- 8.5 times as much data as OpenAI's GPT-2. Google says Meena can talk about pretty much anything, and can even make up (bad) jokes. Open-ended conversation that covers a wide range of topics is hard, and most chatbots can't keep up. At some point most say things that make no sense or reveal a lack of basic knowledge about the world. A chatbot that avoids such mistakes will go a long way toward making AIs feel more human, and make characters in video games more lifelike. To put Meena to the test, Google has developed a new metric it calls the Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), which captures important attributes for natural conversations, such as whether each utterance makes sense in context -- which many chatbots can do -- and is specific to what has just been said, which is harder.

Apple engineers have put forward a proposal today to standardize the format of the SMS messages containing one-time passcodes (OTP) that users receive during the two-factor authentication (2FA) login process. From a report: The proposal comes from Apple engineers working on WebKit, the core component of the Safari web browser. The proposal has two goals. The first is to introduce a way that OTP SMS messages can be associated with an URL. This is done by adding the login URL inside the SMS itself. The second goal is to standardize the format of 2FA/OTP SMS messages, so browsers and other mobile apps can easily detect the incoming SMS, recognize web domain inside the message, and then automatically extract the OTP code and complete the login operation without further user interaction. By doing this, the process of receiving and entering a one-time passcode could be automated, eliminating the risk of a user falling for a scam and entering an OTP code on a phishing site, with the wrong URL.

The plan to ban private cars from Market Street -- one of the city's busiest and most dangerous downtown thoroughfares -- enjoys a remarkable level of local support. From a report: In a city known for stunning vistas, San Francisco's Market Street offers a notoriously ugly tangle of traffic. Cars and delivery trucks vie with bikes and pedestrians along this downtown corridor, as buses and a historic streetcar clatter through the mix. Dedicated lanes for transit and bikes end abruptly several blocks from the street's terminus at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. But the vehicular frenzy is ending, in part: Starting Wednesday, private vehicles -- meaning both passenger automobiles and for-hire ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft -- may no longer drive down Market, east of 10th Street. Only buses, streetcars, traditional taxis, ambulances, and freight drop-offs are still allowed. The closure to private vehicle traffic heralds the start of a new era for the city's central spine, and perhaps for San Francisco at large, as it joins cities around the world that are restricting cars from downtown centers.

"We need to do better than use Market as a queuing place for the Bay Bridge," said Jeffrey Tumlin, the newly arrived executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. "Today represents the way the world is finally changing how it thinks about the role of transportation in cities." After decades of debate, the vision for a car-free Market Street has arrived at a remarkable level of support among activists, politicians, planners, and businesses. (Especially compared to the rancor and legal challenges that greeted New York City's long-delayed effort to create a car-free busway along 14th Street in Manhattan.) In October, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's board of directors voted unanimously in support of a $600 million "Better Market Street" capital construction plan. Ground is set to break on construction for a protected bikeway, repaved sidewalk, fresh streetscaping, and updated streetcar infrastructure by the start of 2021.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pinterest is ramping up its efforts to crack down on political misinformation ahead of the 2020 election -- a sign that the platform best known for lighthearted fare such as recipes, wedding planning and beauty tips is not immune from the challenges facing other major social media sites. The company tells The Technology 202 that it will now remove any content that misleads people about where, when or how to vote. It is also promising to crack down on any hoaxes that could turn off people from participating in the census, as experts warn the count could be a key target for bad actors seeking to meddle with the U.S. democratic process. Pinterest's new "civic participation" policy will apply to content from users' posts and ads on the service.

"This is an Internet problem," said Aerica Shimizu Banks, Pinterest's lead for federal policy and social impact. The only way to address misinformation broadly, Banks adds, is for tech companies and government officials to work together. Pinterest, like other tech companies, will report any count-related hoaxes to the U.S. Census Bureau so that the agency can debunk them and ensure they're not spreading on other social networks.

Starting today, companies across the world have a new free web service at their disposal that will automatically send out email notifications if one of their employees gets phished. From a report: The service is named "I Got Phished" and is managed by Abuse.ch, a non-profit organization known for its malware and cyber-crime tracking operations. Just like all other Abuse.ch services, I Got Phished will be free to use. Any company can sign-up via the I Got Phished website. Signing up only takes a few seconds. Subscribing for email notifications is done on a domain name basis, and companies don't have to expose a list of their employee email addresses to a third-party service. Once a company's security staff has subscribed to the service, I Got Phished will check its internal database for email addresses for the company's email domain. This database contains logs from phishing operations, with emails for phished victims.

Antivirus software giant Avast has announced that it will wind down one of its subsidiary businesses just days after leaked documents revealed the extent to which the Czech company was selling users' browsing data to third parties. From a report: On Monday, Vice and PCMag published details about how Avast had been collating browsing data covering web properties such as Google Maps and Search, LinkedIn, and YouTube and then repackaging it for sale under a subsidiary called Jumpshot, which has claimed clients such as Google, Microsoft, Yelp, Pepsi, Home Depot, and Conde Nast. Although the data was not thought to contain any personally identifiable information, it is often possible to "de-anonymize" data by combining and aligning it with different data sets to unearth shared patterns. Jumpshot was founded back in 2010 but officially launched from a Kickstarter-funded project in 2012. In its original guise, Jumpshot offered a PC-based software that promised to rid machines of viruses, spyware, and the like, and the company was eventually bought by Avast.

Strudelkugel shares a report from Wired: American car insurance rates are going up up up. In the past decade, they climbed 29.6 percent, to an average of $1,548 in 2019 from $1,194 in 2011. The surge, detailed in a new report from insurance shopping site The Zebra, outpaced both inflation (by far) and the increase in average car prices (more narrowly). And it came even as the rate of crashes has fallen year over year. [...] It turns out that new features designed to keep vehicles in their lanes and out of trouble are contributing to rising insurance rates.

That's because the sensors that power those systems make cars much more expensive to fix when they do crash. Dent a steel bumper, and a few hammer blows gets you back on the road. Smash one on a new car, and it could mean replacing a radar, a camera, and ultrasonic sensors, then calibrating them so they work properly. Replacing a cracked windshield now comes with the extra cost of having someone readjust any cameras that look through the glass. While some studies have shown the effectiveness of emergency braking, insurance companies haven't yet seen enough evidence to justify a break in rates for most of these features. That's not to say lane keeping, parking assist, and the rest don't work. They're all relatively new, and the actuaries aren't yet confident that their benefits outweigh the extra costs they incur to repair. Complicating the picture is the fact that each automaker offers its own version of each feature, and that drivers may not keep the systems engaged. "The cost of crash repairs has risen about 5 to 6 percent each year since 2015," the report adds. "In the same span, the frequency of crashes has dropped by just about 2 to 3 percent."

Facebook has agreed to pay $550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) over its use of facial recognition technology in Illinois, "giving privacy groups a major victory that again raised questions about the social network's data-mining practices," reports The New York Times. From the report: The case stemmed from Facebook's photo-labeling service, Tag Suggestions, which uses face-matching software to suggest the names of people in users' photos. The suit said the Silicon Valley company violated an Illinois biometric privacy law by harvesting facial data for Tag Suggestions from the photos of millions of users in the state without their permission and without telling them how long the data would be kept. Facebook has said the allegations have no merit. Under the agreement, Facebook will pay $550 million to eligible Illinois users and for the plaintiffs' legal fees.

The sum dwarfs the $380.5 million that the Equifax credit reporting agency agreed this month to pay to settle a class-action case over a 2017 consumer data breach. Facebook disclosed the settlement as part of its quarterly financial results, in which it took a charge on the case. The sum amounted to a rounding error for Facebook, which reported that revenue rose 25 percent to $21 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with a year earlier, while profit increased 7 percent to $7.3 billion.

Delivery giant UPS has ordered 10,000 electrical trucks from Arrival, a technology company based in the UK. The two companies hope to deploy the trucks across Europe and North America over the next four years. Engadget reports: If everything goes well, UPS has the option to buy another 10,000 vehicles. For now, the trucks are still in a prototype phase. The current iteration is 2.7 meters tall and designed for "walk-in and walk-out" use, according to Patrick Bion, Arrival's chief of product. The final version should have a battery pack "around about 75KWh," he explained, and offer roughly 250 kilometers (155 miles) on a single charge. The vehicle will use CCS, a popular charging standard that cleverly combines the slower Type 2 port with two large DC pins for rapid charging. Arrival has also previously confirmed that its trucks will use BlackBerry QNX, an enterprise-focused operating system designed for cars, robots and medical equipment.

The trucks will utilize a "skateboard" underbelly that Arrival hopes will translate across to all of its future vehicles. According to Bion, this covers "everything below the floor," including the suspension, brakes and steering. The design is flexible enough, however, that changes can be made for different customers and vehicle types. "We have the ability to change the wheelbase," Bion explained, "to add front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive and all-wheel drive. We can also change the battery pack capacity so that the customer, if they only need 150 kilometers (90 miles) per day, doesn't have to pay for a bigger battery that could theoretically do more." Arrival's first UPS trucks will be built in Banbury, Oxfordshire, where it currently runs a research and development facility. The majority of the 10,000 order will be built "local to where it's needed," though, according to Bion. UPS also announced a pilot project with Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary and leading operator of self-driving vehicles. "UPS will use some of Waymo's self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans to shuttle packages between some of its stores in the Metro Phoenix area and its hub in Tempe, Arizona," reports The Verge. "The minivans won't be fully driverless; Waymo says it will keep trained safety drivers in the front seat to monitor operations."

After several weather delays, SpaceX successfully launched its fourth batch of Starlink satellites into orbit and nailed a rocket landing today. Space.com reports: A sooty Falcon 9 rocket -- which made its third flight with this launch -- roared to life at 9:06 a.m. EST (1406 GMT), lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here in Florida. The rocket carried 60 more Starlink satellites for SpaceX's growing constellation, the second such launch by the company this month. The satellites all successfully deployed about an hour after liftoff.

The star of this mission, the Falcon 9 first stage dubbed B1051.3 by SpaceX, previously lofted a Crew Dragon capsule as part of the company's uncrewed mission to the space station (Demo-1) as well as a trio of Earth-observing satellites for Canada. Following the successful launch, the rocket's first stage gently touched down on a SpaceX's drone ship landing platform "Of Course I Still Love You" in the Atlantic Ocean, marking the company's 49th booster recovery. [...] Today's launch is part of SpaceX's goal of connecting the globe with its Starlink network. Each satellite is identical, weighing in at roughly 485 lbs. (220 kg), and is part of a larger network that aims to provide internet coverage to the world below. With this launch, it brings SpaceX's burgeoning constellation up to 240, making it the largest in orbit to date.

Google is temporarily shutting down all of its China offices due to the coronavirus outbreak, as well as offices in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Verge reports: Currently, the offices are closed for the extended Lunar New Year holiday, a measure the Chinese government took to help reduce the spread of the virus by encouraging residents to stay inside and avoid travel. A Google spokesperson says the company now plans to keep its offices closed in accordance with the government guidance, and it's also placed temporary business travel restrictions on flying to mainland China and Hong Kong. The company is also advising employees currently in China, and employees who have immediate family members returning from the country, return home as soon as possible and to work from home for at least 14 days from their departure date. Apple is also taking action to reduce the spread of the virus by temporarily shutting down three stores located China. Two of the stores were in malls in Nanjing and Fuzhou, China, while the other was in Qingdao, China. They are expected to reopen next week.

Matt Warman, the minister for digital and broadband in the UK, writes: From washing machines and children's toys to personal assistants, we are increasingly seeing more of our daily lives connected to the internet. In fact, research suggests by 2025 there will be 75 billion internet connected devices in homes around the world. However, the current security standards of many of these devices are low and the security and privacy risks are too great. Last week, for example, the usernames and for more 500,000 devices including Internet of Things (IoT) products were made available online.

Our aim is to make the UK the world's leading digital economy. But if we are to achieve this ambition we need to make sure people trust technology. I believe we can do this through pro-innovation regulation. So today I've announced we are developing new legislation to hold firms manufacturing and stocking internet-connected devices to account to stop hackers threatening people's privacy and safety. These new laws will mean consumers are protected from devices which do not adhere to the three rigorous security requirements we've developed alongside a code of conduct. These measures will mean all the passwords pre-programmed in internet-connected devices must be unique and not resettable to any universal factory setting.

Google is working on an initiative to streamline its suite of mobile and browser-based apps for businesses into a singular experience, according to The Information. From a report: The app would combine Gmail, Drive, Hangouts Meet, and Hangouts Chat all in one interface, and would provide easier hooks into products like Google Calendar. Google is notorious for its confusing collection of communication apps, from Hangouts Classic to Hangouts Meet and Duo, as well as others that have been killed off (Wave: never forget), and has stumbled with integration before. The company's unification is clearly designed to push back against Microsoft's growth of its Teams product with larger, more established companies. Additionally, Slack has become the de facto method of realtime collaboration and communication among startups. Slack has made integrations with Google products simple while pushing users away from traditional chat like Hangouts, while Microsoft has gone through a renaissance of sorts, releasing a bevy of redesigned communications apps, like Outlook, to positive reviews.

An anonymous reader writes: The Google security team has indefinitely suspended the publishing or updating of any commercial Chrome extensions on the official Chrome Web Store following a spike in the number of paid extensions engaging in fraudulent transactions. Google said the wave of fraudulent transactions began earlier this month. Google engineers described the fraudulent transactions as happening "at scale."

"This is a temporary measure meant to stem this influx as we look for long-term solutions to address the broader pattern of abuse," said Simeon Vincent, Developer Advocate for Chrome Extensions at Google. The ban on publishing or updating impacts all paid extensions. This includes Chrome extensions that require paying a fee before installing, extensions that work based on monthly subscriptions, or Chrome extensions that use one-time in-app purchases to get access to various features. Existing commercial extensions are still available for download via the official Chrome Web Store, however, extension developers can't push new updates.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has paid out over $21 million since launching its bug bounty program in November 2010. In the past year alone, the company distributed $6.5 million to 461 different security researchers, almost double the previous record set in 2018: $3.4 million to 317 different security researchers. Bug bounty programs motivate individuals and hacker groups to not only find flaws but disclose them properly, instead of using them maliciously or selling them to parties that will. Rewarding security researchers with bounties costs peanuts compared to paying for a serious security snafu.