According to Ars Technica, a federal labor board on Thursday "filed a complaint against Tesla, alleging that the electric vehicle company had discouraged workers from distributing pro-union information, stopped them from talking about employee safety to the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, and in one case, prevented an employee from taking a picture of the Confidentiality Agreement they had to sign." From the report: The Oakland, California-based regional office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) consolidated the complaints of three former Tesla employees, Michael Sanchez, Jonathan Galescu, and Richard Ortiz, as well as complaints made by UAW. The complaint alleges that on numerous occasions between February 2017 and May 2017, security guards and human resources agents working on behalf of Tesla told employees that they had to leave the Fremont, California, factory premises because they were distributing pro-union leaflets. In addition, one employee says that over the course of two meetings, a Human Resources Business Partner and an Environmental Health Safety and Sustainability Specialist "interrogated the employee about the employee's Union and/or protected, concerted activities," as well as the pro-union activities of other employees. In March, the complaint claims, a supervisor told his employees during a pre-shift meeting that they could not distribute any stickers or pamphlets that hadn't been approved by Tesla first, or they would be fired. In another incident, a Human Resources Business Partner allegedly "attempted to prohibit an employee from discussing safety concerns with other employees and/or with the Union."

Qualcomm has introduced a new Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) chipset and reference design that aims to bring automakers one step closer to deploying the communications systems necessary for fully autonomous vehicles. Ford, Audi, the PSA Group and SAIC are all endorsing the new chipset. ZDNet reports: The Qualcomm 9150 C-V2X chipset, expected to be available for commercial sampling in the second half of 2018, is based on specs from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations. Meanwhile, Qualcomm's C-V2X reference design will feature the 9150 C-V2X chipset, an application processor running the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) V2X stack, as well as a Hardware Security Module (HSM). C-V2X technology encompasses two transmission modes: direct communications and network-based communications. It's key for both safety features and for implementing autonomous driving capabilities.

For instance, its direct communications capabilities improve a vehicle's situational awareness by detecting and exchanging information using low latency transmissions. Relying on the globally harmonized 5.9 GHz ITS band, the 9150 C-V2X chipset can relay information on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) scenarios without the need for a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM), cellular subscription or network assistance. On top of that, C-V2X network-based communications (designed for 4G and emerging 5G wireless networks) supports telematics, connected infotainment and a growing number of advanced informational safety use cases.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: The cryptocurrency markets continued to rise today as the asset class observed strong gains, including most notably, perhaps, litecoin. The digital asset once dubbed "the silver to bitcoin's gold" passed $78 to achieve a new all-time high at 06:54 UTC this morning, according to CoinMarketCap data. Standing at $75.57 at press time, litecoin has increased by 17.28 percent over the past 24 hours and an astonishing 49.37 percent over the last week. Long in the doldrums, litecoin has seen a resurgence since its community moved to activate Segregated Witness (SegWit) on its network early in May -- a scaling solution that also opens the door to new features such as smart contracts going forward. Taking a wider view, the combined market capitalization of all digital currencies attained a new record high today, and had passed $175 billion at press time. That's up from $170.8 billion just yesterday, also going by data from CoinMarketCap.

An anonymous reader shares a report: According to a new law voted in 2016 and which came into effect starting June 1, 2017, foreign companies activating in China could be forced to provide access to their source code to a state agency that has been recently linked to China's nation-state cyber-espionage campaigns. China's new cyber-security law (CSL) gives the China Information Technology Evaluation Center (CNITSEC) the legal power to conduct "national security reviews" of foreign companies that want to activate on the Chinese market. According to articles in the CSL, this also includes the power to request access to any app or service's source code. Chinese authorities say this is to protect citizens by searching the source code of foreign companies for secret mechanisms that collect data on Chinese users and send it to foreign servers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Android is mainly considered an open source mobile operating system, but there are a number of closed source elements that hundreds of millions of people use every day. The actual requirements of Android is that the kernel be open sourced for the public. This is enforced by the GPL but sadly this is one of those gray areas where someone actually needs to take legal action to enforce it. Some companies have violated this time and time again, and a new petition is calling for the developers of Phoenix OS to do the right thing. For those who are unaware, Phoenix OS is one of the only full desktop versions of Android that is still being maintained. [...] So a dedicated fan of the platform, Karol Putra, has created a Change.org petition in hopes that it will change their minds.

About four million Time Warner Cable records containing details of its customers were found unsecured on an Amazon server last month, tech website Gizmodo reported on Friday. From a report: The files, more than 600GB in size, were discovered on August 24 by the Kromtech Security Center while its researchers were investigating an unrelated data breach at World Wrestling Entertainment. Two Amazon S3 buckets were eventually found and linked to BroadSoft, a global communications company that partners with service providers, including AT&T and TWC. The 4 million TWC records are not all tied to unique customers, meaning 4 million individual people were not exposed by the breach. Due to the sheer size of the cache, it was not immediately clear precisely how subscribers were affected. The leaked data included usernames, emails addresses, MAC addresses, device serial numbers, and financial transaction information -- though it does not appear that any Social Security numbers or credit card information was exposed.

Beth Kowitt, reporting for Fortune: Juicero has run out of juice. The San Francisco-based maker of counter-top cold-press juicers said today that it is shutting down operations and suspending the sale of its presses and produce packs immediately. The announcement on the company's website comes after the startup said in July that it was undergoing a "strategic shift" to more quickly lower the cost of its $399 juicers and $5-7 juice packs filled with raw fruits and vegetables. As part of the shift, the company said then that it would lay off about a quarter of its staff. At the time, Juicero CEO Jeff Dunn wrote in a letter to employees obtained by Fortune that the current prices were "not a realistic way for us to fulfill our mission at the scale to which we aspire." But Juicero realized it couldn't bring down the cost of its products as a standalone company. It was too small to achieve the required economies of scale on its own. The company will now focus on finding a buyer, it wrote in Friday's blog post. From an article in April: After the product hit the market, some investors were surprised to discover a much cheaper alternative: You can squeeze the Juicero bags with your bare hands.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has updated its executive leadership page to acknowledge that software engineering chief Craig Federighi now officially oversees development of Siri. The responsibility previously belonged to Apple's services chief Eddy Cue. "Craig Federighi is Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, reporting to CEO Tim Cook. Craig oversees the development of iOS, macOS, and Siri. His teams are responsible for delivering the software at the heart of Apple's innovative products, including the user interface, applications and frameworks," Apple says. Apple's leadership page is only now reflecting Federighi's role as head of Siri, but the transition has been apparent for several months, based on recent interviews and stage appearances at Apple's keynotes.

In the United States, there's a record number of jobs open: around 6 million. That's just about one job opening for every officially unemployed person in the country. From a report: Matching the unemployed with the right job is difficult, but there are some things employers could do to improve the odds. Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist for the job site Glassdoor, says U.S. employers often complain that workers don't have the skills needed for the jobs available. That is true for some upper-level health care and technology jobs. "But for the most part, it doesn't look to be like there is a skills gap," Chamberlain says. "That's not the main reason why there are many job openings." Chamberlain says that with unemployment so low and the U.S. labor force growing slowly, there's no doubt it is harder for companies to find workers. But he says if that were the main problem, you would see wages rising more rapidly in the economy -- and that's not the case in many industries. Part of the hiring problem, Chamberlain says, lies in company hiring policies.

Data for the month of August 2017 from reliable market analytics firm Net Applications is here, and it suggests that Linux has finally surpassed the three percent mark, quite possibly for the first time in recent years. According to Net Applications, the desktop market share of Linux jumped from 2.53 percent in July to 3.37 percent in August. There's no explanation for what accounted for this growth.

Facebook doesn't only know what its 2 billion users "Like." It now knows where 7.5 billion humans live, everywhere on earth, to within 15 feet. From a report: The company has created a data map of the planet's entire human population by combining government census numbers with information it's obtained from space satellites, according to Janna Lewis, Facebook's head of strategic innovation partnerships and sourcing. The mapping technology, which Facebook says it developed itself, can pinpoint any man-made structures in any country on earth to a resolution of five meters. Facebook is using the data to understand the precise distribution of humans around the planet.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft announced this morning that the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update will be made available worldwide on October 17, in step with a new lineup of Windows Mixed Reality headsets that require this release. "We are coming up on our fourth major update to Windows 10, and our mission with these updates is to create a platform that inspires your creativity," Microsoft corporate vice president Terry Myerson says. "The next update of Windows 10, the Fall Creators Update, will be available worldwide October 17. With the Fall Creators Update, we are introducing some fun, new ways to get creative." The Fall Creators Update will upgrade Windows 10 to version 1709 and it brings a number of new features and improvements, especially to key experiences like gaming, security, and photos. But no new technology weighs as heavily on this update as Windows Mixed Reality, Microsoft's attempt to take virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) mainstream.

In the wake of claims that Google got a think-tank research team sacked for criticizing the company, a respected journalist is alleging other abuses by the search giant. Kashmir Hill, a reporter at Gizmodo, is claiming that when she worked for Forbes six years ago, Google told the the magazine's staff that if publishers didn't add the "+" Google Plus social network button at the bottom of stories, those articles would come up lower in search results. From her report: I published a story headlined, "Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers," that included bits of conversation from the meeting. (An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here.) Google promptly flipped out. This was in 2011, around the same time that a congressional antitrust committee was looking into whether the company was abusing its powers. Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn't been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.) It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News. [...] Given that I'd gone to the Google PR team before publishing, and it was already out in the world, I felt it made more sense to keep the story up. Ultimately, though, after continued pressure from my bosses, I took the piece down -- a decision I will always regret. Forbes declined comment about this. But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it -- and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory -- a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google's crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly.

Shaun Nichols, reporting for The Register: Oracle is starting layoffs that will hit its hardware division, The Register has learned. Current and some soon-to-be former staffers have whispered that the database giant is shipping out packages containing the paperwork for ending their employment. The workers have received alerts from FedEx that the packages, which will need to be signed for, are en route for a September 1 delivery. "One of my co-workers emailed that he received a notification from FedEx of a label created by Oracle America, Inc," writes one anonymous employee. "I just checked and a label has been created for my home address. This is in the US. Looks like Friday is it for Sparc MicroElectronics." The layoffs are hardly a surprise, given the performance of Oracle's hardware unit as of late. In the last financial year, Oracle reported hardware revenues of $4.15bn. By comparison, in 2016 the unit logged hardware revenues of $4.67bn. In 2015 it was $5.2bn, and 2014 saw $5.37bn.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast has sued the state of Vermont to try to avoid a requirement to build 550 miles of new cable lines. Comcast's lawsuit against the Vermont Public Utility Commission (VPUC) was filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Vermont and challenges several provisions in the cable company's new 11-year permit to offer services in the state. One of the conditions in the permit says that "Comcast shall construct no less than 550 miles of line extensions into un-cabled areas during the [11-year] term." Comcast would rather not do that. The company's court complaint says that Vermont is exceeding its authority under the federal Cable Act while also violating state law and Comcast's constitutional rights: "The VPUC claimed that it could impose the blanket 550-mile line extension mandate on Comcast because it is the 'largest' cable operator in Vermont and can afford it. These discriminatory conditions contravene federal and state law, amount to undue speaker-based burdens on Comcast's protected speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution... and deprive Comcast and its subscribers of the benefits of Vermont law enjoyed by other cable operators and their subscribers without a just and rational basis, in violation of the Common Benefits Clause of the Vermont Constitution."