Sonos became a favorite with audiophiles by selling sleek, wireless speakers for streaming music long before technology titans such as Alphabet''s Google entered the market with cheaper, internet-connected models. Now Sonos is hoping a U.S. trade judge finds Friday that its partner turned foe, Google, infringed its patents for multiroom audio systems. From a report: Sonos is asking U.S. International Trade Commission Judge Charles Bullock to support its bid to block imports of Google's Home and Chromecast systems and Pixel phones and laptops, which are made in China. "Google has thrown everything at us in this case, but we believe that the evidence before the ITC demonstrates Google to be a serial infringer of Sonos' valid patents and that the ITC case represents just the tip of the iceberg," Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus said in an earnings call Wednesday.

The dispute has caught the attention of regulators and Congress who are investigating whether the big Silicon Valley tech companies have become too powerful. Sonos officials urged politicians to beef up antitrust laws and enforcement against companies like Google and Amazon.com. Sonos and Google have each accused the other of bad behavior, and suits have been filed in California, Texas, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. A federal judge last year said the legal fees being incurred in the global battle "will likely have been able to build dozens of schools, pay all the teachers, and provide hot lunches to the children." Sonos is fighting over what CEO Patrick Spence says is the "Golden Age of Audio." Buoyed by consumers who buy more audiobooks, streaming music and podcasts and are looking for "theater-like" sound while watching movies from home, the focus on home sound systems is likely to survive even after the Covid-19 pandemic and work-from-home orders end.

On Wednesday afternoon in Northern Utah, Northrop Grumman successfully fired up a full-scale test version of the boosters it is building for NASA's Space Launch System rocket. "Two of these large boosters, each with a mass of 1.6 million pounds, account for 75 percent of the SLS rocket's thrust during the first two minutes of flight," reports Ars Technica. "They are composed of five segments of a powderized, solid fuel that is ignited upon launch. Northrop has already built 26 of the 30 segments NASA needs for the first three launches of the SLS rocket." From the report: The primary reason for Wednesday's test was that Northrop's supplier of aluminum-based fuel could no longer deliver the product. Therefore, Northrop needed to ensure that a new vendor could provide the solid rocket fuel needed for future launches of the SLS rocket beyond the first three. NASA also used the test to assess some changes to the nozzle design, said Bruce Tiller, manager of the SLS boosters office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. With this test, Tiller said NASA remains on track to potentially launch the SLS rocket in late 2021. The boosters for this flight are already being stacked in Florida. The main question is whether the rocket's large core stage, which is set to undergo a critical test firing in Mississippi this fall, will be ready to go. These solid rocket boosters are a holdover from the space shuttle era, when they powered that vehicle. However, the new boosters have been modernized with improved avionics and made more powerful with the addition of a fifth segment.

Google has removed 49 Chrome extensions from the Web Store that posed as legitimate cryptocurrency wallet apps but contained malicious code that stole crypto-wallet private keys, mnemonic phrases, and other raw secrets. From a report: The 49 extensions were discovered by Harry Denley, Director of Security at the MyCrypto platform, who shared his findings exclusively with ZDNet last week. Denley says the 49 extensions appear to have been put together by the same person/group, believed to be a Russian-based threat actor. "Whilst the extensions all function the same, the branding is different depending on the user they are targeting," Denley said. The MyCrypto security researcher says he has identified malicious extensions posing as known crypto-wallets apps such as Ledger, Trezor, Jaxx, Electrum, MyEtherWallet, MetaMask, Exodus, and KeepKey.

A reader quotes a report from CBS News: A swarm of meteors heading towards Earth could have the potential to cause a catastrophic impact, a new study from Western Ontario University says. The so-called Taurid swarm is a recurring event that some scientists believe could have played a role in the biggest Earth impact of modern times, in 1908, when a space rock slammed into Siberia with enough force to destroy an entire forest. What has become known as the Tunguska explosion of 1908 was so powerful that the blast leveled 80 million trees over an 800-square-mile area. It's considered to be a one-in-1,000-year event, according to Western Ontario University. But while the Tunguska explosion occurred just over a century ago, another such phenomenon could occur much sooner than its 1,000-year expectancy, the researchers say. That's why they're focusing new attention on the Taurid swarm.

The Taurid swarm is a dense cluster of meteors within the Taurid meteor stream. Earth periodically passes through the Taurid swarm, and it is one of the three space phenomenons that could result in a catastrophic collision. Near Earth Objects (NEOs) such as asteroids and meteoroids, as well as comets are the other two potential causes. The Taurid swarm is created when Earth passes through the debris left behind by Comet Encke, according to NASA. The comet's dust barrels through Earth's atmosphere at 65,000 mph, burns up and creates a meteor shower. This Taurid meteor shower is usually weak, but there are some years where it is more visible, NASA says. The Taurid swarm heightens the possibility of a large collision, Western Ontario University researchers hypothesized. This summer, Earth will approach within 30,000,000 km of the center of the Taurid swarm, the study says. That would be Earth's closest encounter with the swarm since 1975 and the best viewing opportunity we'll have until the early 2030s.