The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Wednesday, July 8

Road trip! Google’s self-driving cars test out the streets of Austin, TexasGoogle has picked Austin, Texas, as the second location to test its self-driving vehicles, expanding the trials beyond Mountain View, California. One of Google’s self-driving Lexus sport utility vehicles is already on Austin’s streets, the company said Tuesday. Until now, public road tests of Google’s self-driving technology took place only around Mountain View, where the search company has its headquarters. Expanding the trial area will allow Google to test its software in a location with different road conditions, traffic patterns and driving situations, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft said to plan more staff layoffs

Microsoft plans a new round of layoffs that could affect its hardware and smartphones businesses, besides other parts of the company, according to a newspaper report.The job cuts will be in addition to the 18,000 staff the company said it would let go about a year ago, The New York Times reported, quoting people briefed on the plans who requested anonymity. The announcement of the cuts could come as early as Wednesday, according to the report, which did not specify the number of staff that will be laid off. Microsoft had over 118,000 employees globally at the end of March, the report said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft said to plan more staff layoffs

Microsoft plans a new round of layoffs that could affect its hardware and smartphones businesses, besides other parts of the company, according to a newspaper report.The job cuts will be in addition to the 18,000 staff the company said it would let go about a year ago, The New York Times reported, quoting people briefed on the plans who requested anonymity. The announcement of the cuts could come as early as Wednesday, according to the report, which did not specify the number of staff that will be laid off. Microsoft had over 118,000 employees globally at the end of March, the report said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New trial on damages ordered in Apple, Smartflash patent dispute

A federal court in Texas has ordered a new trial on damages in a patent infringement dispute between Apple and Smartflash that could modify an earlier US$533 million damages award to the patent-licensing company.District Judge Rodney Gilstrap of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler division, ruled Tuesday that the earlier damages were set aside and vacated as the jury at trial may have not been properly instructed.Smartflash sued Apple in May 2013, alleging that iTunes software infringed on its patents related to serving data and managing access to data. A jury found in February that Apple infringed three Smartflash patents in order to produce and sell its iTunes software. It also found the three Smartflash patents to be valid. Smartflash had asked for $852 million in damages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Android malware masquerades as Nintendo game emulator

A new family of Android malware adds insult to injury by making users pay for the data-stealing application.Palo Alto Networks found three variants of the malware, which it calls Gunpoder, masquerading as emulator applications used to play Nintendo games.Antivirus engines are having trouble detecting Gunpoder’s malicious code since it is packaged with an adware library called Airpush, wrote Cong Zheng and Zhi Xu of Palo Alto’s Unit 42 research group.“The malware samples successfully use these advertisement libraries to hide malicious behaviors from detection by antivirus engines,” they wrote. “While antivirus engines may flag Gunpoder as being adware, by not flagging it as being overtly malicious, most engines will not prevent Gunpoder from executing.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Android malware masquerades as Nintendo game emulator

A new family of Android malware adds insult to injury by making users pay for the data-stealing application.Palo Alto Networks found three variants of the malware, which it calls Gunpoder, masquerading as emulator applications used to play Nintendo games.Antivirus engines are having trouble detecting Gunpoder’s malicious code since it is packaged with an adware library called Airpush, wrote Cong Zheng and Zhi Xu of Palo Alto’s Unit 42 research group.“The malware samples successfully use these advertisement libraries to hide malicious behaviors from detection by antivirus engines,” they wrote. “While antivirus engines may flag Gunpoder as being adware, by not flagging it as being overtly malicious, most engines will not prevent Gunpoder from executing.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lizard Squad hacker draws suspended sentence for online attacks

A teenager who is apparently a member of the Lizard Squad hacker group has received a two-year suspended sentence in Finland in connection with various cybercrimes including attacks against U.S. university servers.The seventeen-year-old, known as “Zeekill” and “Ryan,” was charged with 50,700 counts of hacking and other offenses including credit card fraud, according to a Lizard Squad Twitter account and Finnish news reports.In a Twitter post, Lizard Squad gloated that “Zeekill got a suspended sentence for 2 years. 0 time spent in prison.”The Espoo District Court ruled on hacking incidents including computer tampering involving servers at MIT and Harvard University as well as money laundering conducted to conceal the origin of illegally acquired funds, according to a a Finland Times report, which did not name the offender, a minor under Finnish law.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle gets September trial date against Rimini Street

Oracle has been given a September trial date for its lawsuit against Rimini Street, which sells cut-price maintenance and support services to Oracle software customers.Oracle is seeking US$200 million in damages from the lawsuit, which targets Rimini Street and its CEO, Seth Ravin. A federal court judge in Nevada set the trial date last week, Oracle said Tuesday.The two sides are fighting over whether Rimini Street’s business model is legal, and observers say the case could establish ground rules for companies that provide maintenance services for other vendors’ software.The case is important for Oracle because the company gets a big chunk of its revenue from software maintenance contracts. Rimini Street provides services to customers of both Oracle and SAP for about half the rates they normally charge.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook to use all renewable energy in its next data center

Facebook is building a new data center in Fort Worth, Texas, that will be powered entirely by renewable energy.The company will invest at least US$500 million in the 110-acre site, which is expected to come online late next year.The new location will be the social-networking giant’s fifth such facility, joining existing data centers in Altoona, Iowa; Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden. It will feature equipment based on the latest in Facebook’s Open Compute Project data-center hardware designs, it said.For sustainability, the Fort Worth data center will be cooled using outdoor air rather than energy-intensive air conditioners, thanks to technology it pioneered in its Oregon location. Those designs are now offered through the Open Compute Project.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple Watch sales down 90% from opening week, report says

Since its first week on the market, during which Apple sold about 1.5 million Apple Watches, the company has seen a 90% decline in sales of its smartwatch, according to a MarketWatch article on data collected by Slice Intelligence.On a daily basis, Apple is now selling fewer than 20,000 Apple Watch units, and occasionally fewer than 10,000, according to the report. That's down from an estimated 200,000 sales per day in the first week the device was on the market.Slice, which often releases data on estimated sales of Apple products, also says that the lower-cost (starting at $349) Sport model has accounted for about two-thirds of Apple Watch sales. To date, Apple has sold fewer than 2,000 units of its gold, Edition model Apple Watch, which are priced at $10,000 and higher, according to the report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Survey – WLAN Vendor Selection Criteria

Back in 2011, I ran a short 1-question survey, asking readers to rate the importance of various factors when selecting a wireless LAN vendor. The results from that survey are located here:
http://www.revolutionwifi.net/revolutionwifi/2011/06/wlan-vendor-selection-criteria-what.html

The discussion of "what matters most in WLAN success" came up again recently during a conversation I had with Lee Badman on twitter.

I thought it would be a good idea to run the survey again. Please take a moment to anonymously answer this short 1-question survey. The survey will close at 11:45pm CDT (GMT -5:00) on July 31st, 2015.

Create your own user feedback survey

Cheers,
Andrew von Nagy

Google’s self-driving cars are taking a road trip to Texas

Google has picked Austin, Texas, as the second location to test its self-driving vehicles, expanding the trials beyond Mountain View, California.One of Google’s self-driving Lexus sport utility vehicles is already on Austin’s streets, the company said Tuesday. The vehicle, which has a driver onboard, is driving around a few square miles north and northeast of downtown Austin.Google didn’t mention if the self-driving car prototype it developed will also be tested in Austin or how many Lexus vehicles will appear on the city’s roads.Until now, public road tests of Google’s self-driving technology took place only around Mountain View, where the search company has its headquarters. Expanding the trial area will allow Google to test its software in a location with different road conditions, traffic patterns and driving situations, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EMC sells Syncplicity to focus on core storage business

EMC is selling its Syncplicity file-sharing and collaboration business to private investment company Skyview Capital for an undisclosed sum.EMC bought Syncplicity in May 2012 in response to the growth of mobile computing and bring-your-own-device policies in enterprises. Syncplicity is one of a host of cloud-based file services, including Box, Dropbox and Google Drive, that have emerged in the past few years. It’s available for iOS and Android as well as PC operating systems.In the three years it owned Syncplicity, EMC adapted the system so enterprises could use it for access to data in their own storage systems. The company also added central controls over how specific types of files could be shared and with whom.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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