Author: Megan Geuss

(credit: Sean Gallup / Getty Images)

Update, 9/24: The Wall Street Journal reports that a source close to the matter has re-affirmed that Porsche CEO Matthais Müller will take over as head of Volkswagen Group. Rumors of Winterkorn’s resignation and Müller’s succession were reported on Monday, but Volkswagen denied the reports. Our original report on Winterkorn’s resignation is below.

Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of Volkswagen Group, resigned today amid a scandal involving the emissions control systems on Volkswagen and Audi diesel vehicles. According to Bloomberg, he could benefit from a $32 million pension on his way out. If the company’s supervisory board decides he is not responsible for the circumstances surrounding his exit, Winterkorn could also reap millions more in severance.

In his notice of resignation, published on Volkswagen’s website, Winterkorn wrote, “I am shocked by the events of the past few days. Above all, I am stunned that misconduct on such a scale was possible in the Volkswagen Group.”

A first look at the consumer-facing Powerwall from Tesla. (credit: Megan Geuss)

Tesla has begun shipping 7kWh stationary batteries—branded by Tesla as Powerwalls—to be installed on the homes of pilot customers. The 7kWh batteries are designed for daily cycling, so they’ll likely be attached to homes with solar panels, allowing owners to power their homes at night with power collected by solar panels during the day.

“Over the next few weeks, we will continue to ramp up volume production,” a Tesla spokesperson explained to Ars via e-mail, adding that 7kWh Powerwalls are initially being delivered to customers in North America, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Australia.

Tesla made headlines in April when it announced the stationary battery, mostly due to the battery’s price—at only $3,000, it’s considerably cheaper than other lithium-ion batteries its size. The battery can discharge 5 kilowatts during continuous use, a specification that was improved after the battery’s announcement—originally Tesla said the 7kWh battery would only discharge 2.2 kilowatts, but critics protested that the lower amount wasn’t enough to feed a household off the grid.

On Monday, a federal appeals court ruled that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has the power to take action (PDF) against companies that employ poor IT security practices. The ruling, from the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, came as part of a lawsuit between the FTC and Wyndham Worldwide Corporation, which manages a collection of hotels throughout the US.

In 2008 and 2009, Wyndham suffered three different breaches of its network, ultimately losing payment card information for more than 619,000 customers and causing $10.6 million in loss due to fraud. The FTC sued Wyndham in 2012 for failing to protect its customers from hackers, and Wyndham countered by saying that it was a victim of the hack itself and should not be penalized by the FTC for the breach.

The Philadelphia-based appeals court allowed the FTC’s case against Wyndham to go forward in district court, and it noted that the FTC could use its authority to pursue “cybersecurity” cases under 15 U.S.C. Sec.45, part of a 1914 law that gives the FTC the power to prohibit “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” The court also noted that the FTC didn’t have to spell out the specific security practices that Wyndham fell short of to bring a case against the company. However, the FTC did that in this instance, claiming that Wyndham allowed its partner hotels to store credit card information in plain text, allowed easily guessable passwords in property management software, failed to use firewalls to limit access to the corporate network, and failed to restrict third-party vendors from access to its network, among other things.

Intel announced on Tuesday that it has created a $125 million venture capital fund aimed at increasing the number of women- and minority-led technology startups.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich pledged that the company would commit $300 million to improve diversity in tech. The statement came after the company found itself embroiled in controversy just a few months before, when it pulled an advertising campaign from gaming website Gamasutra after GamerGate supporters were displeased with a “controversial” article.

According to the Associated Press, Intel’s new Diversity Fund will overlap somewhat with the $300 million pledge. Still, Intel said, the capital fund won’t overlap completely, raising the company’s diversity commitment to more than $300 million, although Intel did not say by how much.

A Hawaii-based company called Total Recall Technologies (TRT) is suing Facebook-owned Oculus Rift and its founder Palmer Luckey, saying that Luckey used confidential information he learned from the company in 2011 to build his own head-mounted display.

On Saturday, Nepal was shaken by a massive earthquake that registered a 7.8 on the Richter scale, causing widespread destruction in areas of dense population, and preventing aid workers from reaching more isolated villages in the mountainous regions. As of Tuesday, at least 5,000 people were dead and at least 10,000 were injured. Hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless.

With any natural disaster, communication can often become a matter of life and death, and if phone lines are broken and cell towers crumble, relaying messages to the outside world and coordinating rescue efforts becomes that much more difficult. Add to that the fact that Nepal’s government is woefully unprepared to handle such a humanitarian crisis, and chaos reigns.

Still, some volunteers are trying to impose order on the chaos. After the quake, which shook cities in India as well as Nepal, volunteer ham radio operators from India traveled to the region to relay messages from areas whose communications infrastructure is broken or overloaded. Ham radio, also called amateur radio, is a means of sending and receiving messages over a specific radio frequency, and it is often used in disaster situations because it operates well off the grid; transceivers can be powered by generators and set up just about anywhere.

On Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission announced that AT&T would pay $25 million to settle an investigation into data breaches that occurred at the company’s call centers in Mexico, Colombia, and the Philippines. The FCC said that at least two employees confessed to stealing private information belonging to thousands of US customers, including names, full and partial social security numbers, and account-related data, known as customer proprietary network information (CPNI). CPNI data is usually found on a person’s phone bill and contains call metadata.

In all, the FCC estimates that almost 280,000 US customers were affected.

The commission also said that it had been looking into whether AT&T had promptly notified law enforcement regarding the theft of customers’ CPNI.

SAN FRANCISCO—Today, court is not in session for the high-profile gender discrimination case between reddit CEO Ellen Pao and her former employer, Kleiner Perkins. But after four weeks of testimony, this week will bring the culmination of all the courtroom sniping—closing arguments start Tuesday followed by jury deliberation and, hopefully, a verdict.

Pao is asking for $16 million in damages for lost wages. Late Friday night, the presiding judge ruled that Pao’s attorneys can also seek punitive damages from Kleiner Perkins, writing “There is sufficient evidence from which a reasonable juror could conclude that Kleiner Perkins engaged in intentional gender discrimination by failing to promote Ms. Pao and terminating her employment and that Kleiner Perkins attempted to hide its illegal conduct by offering knowingly false and pretextual explanations for its decisions not to promote Ms. Pao and to terminate her employment.”

Still, the last time court was in session, Kleiner Perkins was finally allowed to call its own witnesses. The company chose from its coterie of Kleiner senior partners to toe the party line and discredit some of Pao’s arguments, trying to make one final memory for jurors.

A former Facebook technology partner, Chia Hong, is suing Facebook and a number of unnamed employees for gender and race discrimination. The case was filed this week in San Mateo County Superior Court (PDF), and it echoes a high-profile gender discrimination case currently underway in San Francisco. In that case, former Kleiner Perkins employee Ellen Pao is suing the venture capital firm for gender discrimination and retaliation.

Hong is not just following in Pao’s path; she has also hired lawyers from the same law firm—Lawless and Lawless—to represent her. (Yes, that is the real name of the firm.)

Therese Lawless, who has led much of the examination of witnesses during Pao’s case over the last few weeks, is an employment lawyer who has been practicing since the ’80s. Her sister and firm partner, Barbara, is also listed as representing Hong.

On Wednesday evening, Twitter changed its rules to state that it would forbid users from posting revenge porn and non-consensual nudes on the service. In the private information section of the site’s policy list, the company added that users “may not post intimate photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject’s consent.” Twitter also updated its Abusive Behavior Policy with the same language.

The social platform has long had a problem with users harassing and intimidating other users, but until recent months, its response had been tepid at best. In February, Twitter announced a “report abuse” function and reportedly tripled the number of abuse support staff to streamline the process of suspending accounts that appear to harass others. At the time, Twitter’s abuse crackdown focused mainly on doxing, or the practice of making public “private and confidential” information against a person’s wishes.

Revenge porn, too, has a storied history in Internet circles. Recently, California, as well as England and Wales, outlawed the practice, which involves posting nude or sexually explicit photos of someone—usually an ex-partner—without their consent. The practice gained notoriety due to the popularity of websites run by the likes of Hunter Moore, Kevin Bollaert, and Craig Brittain, all of whom faced or are facing some sort of legal action for demanding money from victims in exchange for taking down the nude photos.