Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re: and other possibilities (Score 1) 188

Governments producing children using extracted DNA.

Governments or corporations may want to stealthily grow a genetically advanced army using artificial wombs. Some scientists may also want to grow chimeras using artificial wombs as the fetus + eventual birth may be dangerous to the human surrogate.

Submission + - Chrome's Sandbox Feature Infringes on Three Patents So Google Must Now Pay $20M (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After five years of litigation at various levels of the US legal system, today, following the conclusion of a jury trial, Google was ordered to pay $20 million to two developers after a jury ruled that Google had infringed on three patents when it designed Chrome's sandboxing feature.

Litigation had been going on since 2012, with Google winning the original verdict, but then losing the appeal. After the Supreme Court refused to listen Google's petition, they sent the case back for a retrial in the US District Court in Eastern Texas, the home of all patent trolls.

As expected, Google lost the case and must now pay $20 million in damages, in the form of rolling royalties, which means the company stands to pay more money as Chrome becomes more popular in the future.

Submission + - A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone (theverge.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: "Bikkannavar says he was detained by US Customs and Border Patrol and pressured to give the CBP agents his phone and access PIN. Since the phone was issued by NASA, it may have contained sensitive material that wasn’t supposed to be shared. Bikkannavar’s phone was returned to him after it was searched by CBP, but he doesn’t know exactly what information officials might have taken from the device.
The officer also presented Bikkannavar with a document titled “Inspection of Electronic Devices” and explained that CBP had authority to search his phone. Bikkannavar did not want to hand over the device, because it was given to him by JPL and is technically NASA property. He even showed the officer the JPL barcode on the back of phone. Nonetheless, CBP asked for the phone and the access PIN. “I was cautiously telling him I wasn’t allowed to give it out, because I didn’t want to seem like I was not cooperating,” says Bikkannavar. “I told him I’m not really allowed to give the passcode; I have to protect access. But he insisted they had the authority to search it.”
Courts have upheld customs agents' power to manually search devices at the border, but any searches made solely on the basis of race or national origin are still illegal. More importantly, travelers are not legally required to unlock their devices, although agents can detain them for significant periods of time if they do not. “In each incident that I’ve seen, the subjects have been shown a Blue Paper that says CBP has legal authority to search phones at the border, which gives them the impression that they’re obligated to unlock the phone, which isn’t true,” Hassan Shibly, chief executive director of CAIR Florida, told The Verge. “They’re not obligated to unlock the phone.”

Slashdot Top Deals

"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android

Close