Month: March 2015

Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel made headlines three weeks ago when they agreed to a combined $415 million settlement for thousands of Silicon Valley workers who claimed in a lawsuit that their wages were not as high as they should have been because of illegal non-compete agreements between the tech giants. Citing evidence from that litigation, Google shareholders filed suit Monday against Google’s board of directors, claiming that the no-poaching “handshake” agreements alleged among the companies also depressed Google’s stock.

The West Palm Beach Pension Fund claims that the anti-competitive practice burned shareholders because it made it harder for talented workers to change companies, according to the suit (PDF) filed in San Jose federal court.

“Google has lost out on many of the best and brightest high-tech employees, thereby resulting in lost opportunities for innovation in a company that is wholly dependent on such innovation,” the suit said. It continued:

An international group of digital rights organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in the US, has launched the “Manila Principles on Internet Liability,” what it calls “a roadmap for the global community to protect online freedom of expression and innovation around the world.”

The principles concern Internet intermediaries—telecom companies, ISPs, search engines, social networks, etc.—that run key parts of the online world’s infrastructure. As EFF’s Senior Global Policy Analyst Jeremy Malcolm, one of the people behind the Manila Principles, explains: “These services are all routinely asked to take down content, and their policies for responding are often muddled, heavy-handed, or inconsistent. That results in censorship and the limiting of people’s rights.” The Principles are designed to provide a framework of safeguards and best practice when responding to such requests to remove content.

In an e-mail, Malcolm told Ars about the Principles’ background and motivation. The original partners were the EFF, the Centre for Internet and Society in India, and free speech organization Article 19. Other groups were added to give a more global balance. Malcolm says: “The motivation for this work was that intermediaries have been drifting back into the view of regulators and private interests who want to restrict content online. Whereas a decade ago the idea of immunizing intermediaries from liability was well accepted, it is now being questioned again.”

The State of Tennessee is fighting for its right to enforce a law that prevents municipal broadband networks from providing Internet service to other cities and towns.

Tennessee filed a lawsuit Friday against the Federal Communications Commission, which last month voted to preempt state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that prevent municipal broadband providers from expanding outside their territories. The FCC cited its authority granted in 1996 by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, which requires the FCC to encourage the deployment of broadband to all Americans by using “measures that promote competition in the local telecommunications market, or other regulating methods that remove barriers to infrastructure investment.” (Emphasis ours.)

In Tennessee, the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga offers Internet and video service to residents, but state law prevented it from expanding outside its electric service area to adjacent towns that have poor Internet service. Tennessee is one of about 20 states that impose some type of restriction on municipal broadband networks, helping protect private Internet service providers from competition.

Today, the US Energy Information Administration announced that California had passed a key milestone, becoming the first state to produce five percent of its annual electricity using utility-scale solar power. This number represents more than a doubling from the 2013 level, when 1.9 percent of the state’s power came from utility-scale solar, and means that California produces more electricity from this approach than all of the remaining states combined.

The growth in California was largely fueled by the opening of two 550MW capacity photovoltaic plants, along with two large solar-thermal plants. In total, the state added nearly two GigaWatts of capacity last year alone. The growth is driven in part by a renewable energy standard that will see the state generate 33 percent of its electricity from non-hydro renewables by 2020; it was at 22 percent in 2014.

Other states with renewable standards—Nevada, Arizona, New Jersey, and North Carolina—rounded out the top five. Both Nevada and Arizona obtained 2.8 percent of their electricity from solar; all other states were at one percent or less.

Twitch, the Amazon-owned game video streaming service, has reset passwords for all its users after warning of a security breach that may have allowed hackers to access user names, passwords, and other personal information.

According to a blog post Twitch published Monday evening, current passwords have been expired and users will be required to create a new one the next time they log in. Accounts have also been disconnected from Twitter and YouTube. As is standard practice, anyone who used the same password for multiple services should assume it’s compromised and create a new and unique passcode for each property. Credit card data was not affected, the company said.

Monday’s advisory provided few details. E-mails sent to users said hackers may have gained unauthorized access to Twitch usernames and associated e-mail addresses, encrypted passwords, the last IP address users logged in from, and—for users who provided such information—first and last names, phone numbers, addresses, and dates of birth. According to a report from Venturebeat, a separate e-mail sent only to select users provided an intriguing additional detail. “While we store passwords in a cryptographically protected form, we believe it’s possible that your password could have been captured in clear text by malicious code when you logged into our site on March 3rd,” it said.

Last year Pixar announced that it would be releasing a “free” (that is, available without cost) version of Renderman, the in-house rendering engine that produces the visuals in all of Pixar’s animated films and many other Hollywood blockbusters. Though the actual release process ran into some delays, it has finally happened: Renderman is now free for non-commercial usage on Windows, OS X, and Linux.

FOSS advocates will take note that the software is free-as-in-beer, not free-as-in-speech—that is, while Renderman can be downloaded and used non-commercially without paying anything, it has not been open-sourced (and we bring the distinction up because that’s what more than half the story’s discussion thread on Slashdot has focused on).

To download Renderman, Pixar requires you to register for a forum account and provide a valid e-mail address. Once that’s done, you are given an installation package which in turn downloads the actual Renderman components appropriate for your operating system and 3D package.