Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has failed to convince the court to let her stay out of prison while she's appealing her 11-year sentence. According to The Wall Street Journal, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said Holmes' appeal doesn't raise legal issues or questions that could impact the outcome of the case. Further, even if it does raise questions, they still wouldn't be enough to overturn her fraud conviction. 

Holmes had asked the court to pause her sentence a couple of days before she was supposed to report to prison on April 27th, with her lawyers arguing that she wasn't a flight risk. The appeals court delayed her reporting date while it considered her request, but it has ultimately decided that she has to start serving her sentence. A district court that previously denied the same request from her camp recommended that she serve her time at a Bryan, Texas federal prison camp, which allows family visitations. The appeals court will now decide on a new reporting date for the former executive. 

In addition to her request being denied, Holmes and former Theranos CEO Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani have also been ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to the blood startup's investors. If you'll recall, Theranos promised to revolutionize healthcare with a technology that could diagnose hundreds of diseases with just a few drops of blood. It soon came out, however, that its technology didn't work and that it was using traditional machines modified to use lesser amounts of blood to run its tests. Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp, will get the biggest share at $125 milli. Meanwhile, Walgreens, which was once Theranos' biggest partner and even provided tests in its drugstores, is getting $40 million. 

Immersion Corporation has been suing companies over its rumble haptic technology since at least (checks archives) 2004, and now it has a new company in its sights. Immersion has accused Valve of infringing its patents with the Steam Deck handheld, the Valve Index VR platform, Steam VR software and games including Half-Life: Alyx, The Verge has reported.

Immersion wants an injunction against Valve "from deploying, operating, maintaining, testing and using the Accused Handheld Instrumentalities and Accused VR Instrumentalities," it stated in some fine legalese, and is asking for damages and royalties as well. It cited seven specific patents dating from 2002 to 2016.

If Valve wants to fight this, they've got a mountain of precedent to overcome. Both Sony and Microsoft ended up licensing Immersion's patents after settling lawsuits, and Apple, Google, Motorola and Fitbit did the same. Nintendo and Sony use a different form of rumble tech, but both elected to license Immersion's patents. Valve uses the same type of rumble tech as Nintendo and Sony.

It appears that Immersion didn't sue Valve for its Steam Controller, which was killed back in 2019. The Steam Deck appears to be a much bigger success in terms of sales, however, and has generally been a hit with both critics and gamers.

Tesla is known for being ad-averse and hasn't really ran traditional advertising since it launched in the early 2000's, choosing to rely on word of mouth to promote its vehicles instead. Now things could change for the automaker. During the company's latest shareholder meeting, Tesla chief Elon Musk replied to an audience question regarding advertising with: "We will try a little advertising and see how it goes." Apparently, the executive changed his mind about advertising after acquiring Twitter, which makes most of its money from ads. 

"It's indeed ironic that Twitter is highly dependent on advertising. Here I am, never used advertising really before, and now I have a company that’s highly dependent on advertising. So, I guess I should say advertising is awesome, and everyone should do it." That's a total reversal from the executive's previous stance. He said a few years ago that he hated advertising and that Tesla uses money other automakers set aside for ads and endorsements "to make the product great."

In his response during the shareholder meeting, Musk said Tesla vehicles have functionalities and features that most people don't know about. The company does post them on its Twitter account, but he acknowledges that doing so is like preaching to the choir. In a follow-up interview with CNBC, he said ads could be "informative and entertaining" so that they're more content than typical advertisements. He suggested that future Tesla ads could take on that format and highlight its vehicles' lesser-known features. 

Musk has also teased two new EVs during the shareholder meeting, where he said that the vehicles' design and manufacturing techniques "are head and shoulders above anything else that is present in the industry." He said that the company is already in the process of "building a new product," which could mean that Tesla is already working on a prototype for at least one of the EVs.

YouTube’s recommendations are leading young kids to videos about school shootings and other gun-related content, according to a new report. According to the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a nonprofit watchdog group, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is “pushing boys interested in video games to scenes of school shootings, instructions on how to use and modify weapons” and other gun-centric content. 

The researchers behind the report set up four new YouTube accounts posing as two 9-year-old boys and two 14-year-old boys. All accounts watched playlists of content about popular video games, like Roblox, Lego Star Wars, Halo and Grand Theft Auto. The researchers then tracked the accounts’ recommendations during a 30-day period last November.

“The study found that YouTube pushed content on shootings and weapons to all of the gamer accounts, but at a much higher volume to the users who clicked on the YouTube-recommended videos,” the TTP writes. “These videos included scenes depicting school shootings and other mass shooting events; graphic demonstrations of how much damage guns can inflict on a human body; and how-to guides for converting a handgun to a fully automatic weapon.”

As the report notes, several of the recommended videos appeared to violate YouTube’s own policies. Recommendations included videos of a young girl firing a gun and tutorials on converting handguns into “fully automatic” weapons and other modifications. Some of these videos were also monetized with ads.

In a statement, a YouTube spokesperson pointed to the YouTube Kids app and its in-app supervision tools, which “create a safer experience for tweens and teens” on its platform.

“We welcome research on our recommendations, and we’re exploring more ways to bring in academic researchers to study our systems,” the spokesperson said. “But in reviewing this report’s methodology, it’s difficult for us to draw strong conclusions. For example, the study doesn’t provide context of how many overall videos were recommended to the test accounts, and also doesn’t give insight into how the test accounts were set up, including whether YouTube’s Supervised Experiences tools were applied.”

The TTP report is far from the first time researchers have raised questions about YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. The company has also spent years working to reduce so-called “borderline” content — videos that don't break its rules outright but may otherwise be unsuitable for mass distribution — from appearing in recommendations. And last year, the company said it was considering disabling sharing altogether on some such content.

At long last, you can respond to posts on Instagram with GIFs. Company head Adam Mosseri announced the feature addition in his recent Instagram Channels chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “This is a bit of ‘finally feature,’ but we’re launching GIFs in comments today,” Mosseri told his boss.

The feature, as you would expect, allows you to comment on a post, or something someone else said, with a GIF from Giphy. That’s the same Giphy the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority ordered Meta to sell last year. Mosseri said Instagram is also testing lyrics in Reels. The feature appears to build on the auto-caption sticker Meta introduced back in 2021. Judging from the screenshot Mosseri shared, a timeline at the bottom of the interface will make for user to sync the captions properly. So there you have it, you can finally comment on a post with a GIF. Maybe this means Instagram will finally get around to making a dedicated iPad app at some point.

Blizzard has revealed the Overwatch 2 roadmap for the rest of 2023, including details on when the first story missions are coming to the game. They'll be available in season six, which should start in mid-August.

Story missions are part of the long-awaited co-op side of the game. When Blizzard released Overwatch 2 last October, the player vs. environment (PvE) aspects of the game that it first showed off at BlizzCon in 2019 were not available. That's because the team needed more time to work on the PvE modes. 

The studio didn't want to keep fans waiting much longer for an overhaul of the traditional, competitive (or PvP) side of Overwatch 2 after what was effectively a two-year content drought. So, Blizzard split development of the two halves so it could get the sequel out faster. There have been PvE experiences in Overwatch 2, but so far they've been constrained to limited-time events.

It's worth noting that this won't be the full PvE vision that Blizzard laid out almost four years ago. "Development on the PvE experience really hasn't made the progress that we would have hoped," Overwatch 2 executive producer Jared Neuss said. The team had created "a bunch of amazing content," including "ridiculous" gameplay augmentations for heroes. "Unfortunately, the effort required to pull all of that together into a Blizzard-quality experience that we can ship to you is huge," Neuss said. "With everything we've learned about what it takes to operate this game at the level you deserve, it's clear that we can't deliver on that original vision for PvE."

Hero missions have been cut in order to not pull too many resources away from the live game, which is the priority for Blizzard. As such, talent trees, an RPG-style feature of hero missions that would have enabled players to customize hero abilities, have been scrapped. 

That's not to say there aren't intriguing PvE features coming. A single-player version of a PvE experience with a leaderboard is in the works. A ton of co-op features are planned and Blizzard will continue to add content on a frequent basis, including more story missions.

Before the story missions debut in a few months, there's a whole new season in between. Season five will arrive in June with what appears to be a fantasy theme. Fans can expect a new limited-time event called Questwatch, a new cinematic, the Summer Games event and updates for the Workshop mode, in which players can create custom games. The On Fire system, which lets everyone in a match see when certain players are performing especially well, will return in season five too.

Story missions aren't the only big change on the docket for season six. The developers say this season will mark the biggest update since launch. Blizzard will add another support hero, a firing range and an overhauled player progression system. The Anniversary event will return as well. Perhaps most intriguingly, there will be a new map type for the PvP modes called Flashpoint, which will debut with two new maps.

There will be a bigger focus on building out the story of Overwatch 2 as well. For one thing, seasons will be named and, with the help of in-game cinematics, season six will "push the narrative arc of Overwatch forward for the first time since the original game release."

Looking ahead to season seven and beyond, Blizzard is promising reworks for Sombra (yes, another one) and Roadhog. Also in the pipeline are another collaboration following the One-Punch Man crossover, a fresh tank hero, a control map, a winter event, a lore database and, most excitingly for me, the return of competitive Mystery Heroes.

If you have a Google account you haven’t used in a while but want to hang onto, you may want to log back in. The company announced today that it will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for at least two years. Google frames it as a privacy-enhancing move, but it’s easy to also see it as a cost-cutting measure to free up storage on Google’s servers.

Starting later this year, anyone with an account that’s been inactive for two years will receive an email warning them that it will be deactivated if they don’t log in within 60 days. After deactivation, you’ll have another 60 days to sign in before the company permanently deletes it. So, in total, that’s about four months’ worth of notice to recover your account, which sounds reasonable enough. Google says the earliest it will begin deleting accounts is December 2023.

The company will send warning emails to both the account in danger of being deleted and any recovery emails you added. The deactivation and deletion will apply to everything you use that account for, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, YouTube, Google Photos, Meet and Calendar. It only applies to personal accounts, so work or school emails will be spared the culling.

Although the company’s stated privacy motive may be a convenient way to avoid saying, “We want to save money,” there is some substance to that framing. In addition to not having up-to-date passwords, abandoned accounts are ten times less likely to have two-factor authentication set up, making them more vulnerable to hijacking.

Google has a web tool to simplify avoiding account deletion. The company’s Inactive Account Manager can warn you more frequently about dormant accounts while letting you decide what happens to your data. There, you can choose trusted contacts to alert or even download your account data if it’s in danger of deactivation. And in case it ever does get axed, you can plan ahead by using Google’s age-old Takeout feature that lets you view and export all your data.

Skullcandy is refreshing its popular Crusher ANC headphones with a second-generation model that brings plenty of new features to the table, all at a lower price. Perhaps the biggest improvement with this iteration is the battery life, as these headphones get up to 60 hours of life with active noise cancellation disabled and 50 hours with ANC enabled. The 2019 original version of the Crusher ANC headphones maxed out at 24 hours of juice per charge.

The Crusher line has been widely praised for its bass-heavy audio response and the new ANC headphones continue this tradition. The exterior boasts a rotary dial for adjusting the bass on the fly, with the options to zero in on a specific number or choose from a variety of presets. You can also use the Skull-iQ app to create your own presets that transfer over to the headphones.

These are modern headphones so they ship with modern features like hands-free voice control, multipoint pairing, Bluetooth 5.2 and a dedicated button to launch Spotify. It also sports a quad-microphone design that Skullcandy says increases the efficacy of ANC, in addition to allowing for a transparent ambient mode.

This is the second version of the Crusher ANC, despite several Crusher models without active noise cancellation, so you’d expect a price increase to accompany the added features. Instead, the opposite is true. The new Crusher ANC 2 headphones cost $230, which is $90 cheaper than the original’s $320 asking price.

The new design looks similar to the old one, but the materials appear to be of a slightly higher quality. The Crusher ANC headphones are available today directly from the company.

For many years, rumors have been flying around that Apple has been working on a self-driving car, or at least an electric vehicle with some autonomous functionality. Now, a third former employee has been accused of stealing some of that technology for a Chinese self-driving car company.

A federal court in the Northern District of California has unsealed charges against Weibao Wang, a former Apple software engineer. Wang started working at the company in 2016 as part of a team that developed hardware and software for autonomous systems — technology that could conceivably wind up in self-driving cars.

According to the indictment, in November 2017, Wang accepted a job with a US subsidiary of a Chinese company that was developing self-driving cars but waited more than four months to tell Apple that he was quitting. After Wang left Apple in April 2018, the company found that he "accessed large amounts of sensitive proprietary and confidential information" in the lead up to his departure, the Department of Justice said.

"Large quantities of data taken from Apple" were found during a law enforcement search of Wang's Mountain View residence that June. Wang told agents that he wasn't planning to travel, but he flew back to China that night, according to the indictment.

Wang has been charged with six counts of stealing or attempting to steal trade secrets. He faces a maximum prison sentence of 10 years and a fine of $250,000 for each count. However, that depends on officials being able to extradite Wang, who remains in China, as CNBC reports.

This marks the third instance of a former Apple employee being accused of stealing autonomous trade secrets for Chinese entities. Xiaolang Zhang, who worked at Apple at the same time as Wang, pleaded guilty last year to stealing technology from Apple's car division. Zhang was apprehended at San Jose International Airport in 2018 while trying to board a flight to China.

In 2019, another former employee was arrested before they could flee to China. Jizhong Chen allegedly stole self-driving car tech for a Chinese company. Chen pleaded not guilty and the case is proceeding in federal court.

The US State Department has announced a reward of up to $10 million for information that leads to the arrest of a prolific hacker. On Monday, the Department of Justice filed criminal charges against Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev, a Russian national and resident with links to the infamous Hive, LockBit and Babuk ransomware gangs. Starting as early as 2020, Matveev has allegedly targeted US law enforcement and healthcare organizations on multiple occasions.

In April 2021, for instance, he was linked to a Babuk ransomware attack that saw the computer systems of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington DC locked out. Last May, Matveev, whose online pseudonyms include Wazawaka, Uhodiransomwar, m1x, and Boriselcin, was allegedly involved in a Hive ransomware attack that targeted a healthcare NGO in New Jersey.

Separately, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced sanctions against Matveev. "Matveev has been vocal about his illegal activities. He has provided insight into his cybercrimes in media interviews, disclosed exploit code to online criminals, and stated that his illicit activities will be tolerated by local authorities provided that he remains loyal to Russia," the Treasury said.

Of the ransomware gangs Matveev is allegedly affiliated with, LockBit is among the most active and destructive. As of late 2022, the group’s malware has infected the computer systems of at least 1,400 victims, including a Holiday Inn hotel in Turkey. According to the Justice Department, the gang’s affiliates have extracted at least $75 million in ransom payments. Security researchers recently found evidence that suggests that LockBit recently began targeting Mac computers.