Tech News
Tech-fueled inequality offers two paths for humanity -- 'digital Athens' or bleak dystopia
Rapid technological advancement is leaving many Americans behind, said a pair of digital business professors, which could create a dystopian nightmare.
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, said Monday on the Bryan Callen podcast that technology is responsible for much of the extreme concentration of wealth that’s taken place in recent years.
“It turns out there’s no economic law that says everybody is going to share equally when technology brings some of these wonders to the planet,” Brynjolfsson said. “It’s quite possible for some people, even possible for a majority of people, to be made worse off in absolute terms.”
That hasn’t been the case over the last two centuries, when industrial growth tended to boost wealth and living conditions for large numbers of people.
“For the last 15-plus years, there has been this decoupling – I call it the ‘great decoupling’ – of ever-faster technological progress of productivity on one hand and the average worker, the median worker, being left behind,” Brynjolfsson said. “We trace that to the inability of people’s skills, organizations, (and) institutions to keep up with ever-faster technological growth.”
This relentless technological advancement will make it difficult for many people to earn what McAfee called “a good, old-fashioned living.”
“Then again,” Callen interjected, “you also talk about how it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to produce a whole lot for a lot of people, so it could be we just create this leisure class, and I’d like to sign up for that. I want to swill wine and wear tweed jackets and lie about celebrities.”
But creating the sort of stratified, hereditary society depicted on “Downton Abbey” carries the risk of unintended consequences, McAffee said.
“We better make sure we’re preparing our society and preparing people for that kind of leisure class, if that’s what where we think we’re headed,” McAffee said. “What happens today, when work leaves a community, unfortunately, we don’t see people have these enlightened lives and debating philosophy and democracy and all of that. These communities are really hurting in a lot of ways, and we need to do better.”
Both agreed that unemployment was not the same as leisure, saying work helped give a person dignity before sketching out possible dystopian scenarios.
“It’s quite possible to let technology run on autopilot, and you get more and more concentration of wealth, and you get not the 1 percent, but the one-hundredth of 1 percent or less, really controlling all the wealth, all the assets, the superstars, and when you have software eating an industry, it does tend to create a winner-take-all market, and left to its own devices, you end up having a lot of other people not participating in that,” Brynjolfsson said.
However, he said, the future offered the possibility of a “digital Athens,” where robot slaves provide the leisure class with food, clothing, and other basic necessities.
“I think science fiction provides both extremes for us,” McAffee agreed. “My happy vision for the future is something like ‘Star Trek,’ where we go around and boldly explore new worlds, and I never heard anyone on ‘Star Trek’ complain about their paycheck, their meals come out of some machine, they entertain themselves on the holodeck, you know, the probably take care of all the needs that you just identified on the holodeck, I don’t know.”
“My dystopian vision is something like the science fiction movie ‘Elysium’ that came out last year, where literally the ultra-wealthy take themselves off the surface of the planet and build these beautiful rings worlds while the rest of humanity is kind of miserable and fighting it out down there,” he continued.
Listen to their discussion posted online by Bryan Callen:
Netflix pans AT&T fiber network as too slow, fears Time Warner-Comcast merger
Netflix Inc, the video streaming service, on Monday criticized AT&T's high-speed fiber network as inadequate and slow, while renewing its call for AT&T to interconnect directly with Netflix.
Netflix made the remarks in a letter to shareholders on its first-quarter results. The company has been calling for greater protections for open Internet rules, also known as net neutrality, which require Internet service providers to give consumers equal access to all lawful content without restrictions or tiered charges.
Netflix, in a letter signed by its chief executive, Reed Hastings, and chief financial officer, David Wells, said AT&T's fiber-based U-verse service has "lower performance than many DSL" Internet service providers.
The letter came hours after AT&T said it expects to expand its fiber network and TV services to up to 21 U.S. cities.
AT&T did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a March blog post, AT&T dismissed Netflix's call for free interconnection as an "arrogant" and unfair attempt to force others to pay for the content provider to gain access to faster broadband speeds and better services.
"The 249 customer comments on AT&T's anti-Netflix blog post indicate that AT&T customers expect a good quality Netflix experience given how much they pay AT&T for their Internet service," the Netflix letter said.
Netflix added that AT&T can connect directly with Netflix for free, saying that doing so would "quickly improve their customers' experience."
Netflix also addressed wider tensions with the Internet service providers it relies on to distribute its services. The company said it opposes the proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable because it would give Comcast a monopoly over high-speed broadband and allow it to charge "unprecedented fees" from transit and service providers like Netflix.
AT&T, which is fighting rivals such as Google Inc as well as cable companies with its fiber-based product, on Monday said it is considering providing broadband Internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second and its U-verse television service in some metropolitan areas, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami.
Before the company can enter these markets, it must make agreements with local leaders in each city.
The services are currently available in Austin, Texas, and some surrounding communities, and will be rolled out in parts of Dallas this summer, the company said.
AT&T said it may consider expanding its reach to 100 cities eventually.
U-verse launched in 2006 and currently has 10.7 million combined Internet and TV customers.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
At Mt. Gox bitcoin hub, 'geek' CEO Mark Karpeles sought both control and escape
In June 2011, when customers of now-bankrupt bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox agitated for proof that the Tokyo-based firm was still solvent after a hacking attack, CEO Mark Karpeles turned to the comedy science fiction novel "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy."
During an online chat, Karpeles moved the equivalent of $170 million in bitcoin at today's market rates -- the virtual equivalent of a bank manager flashing a wad of cash in a wallet to establish credit. The gesture -- with a sly wink to the "geek" culture Karpeles believed he shared with many of his 50,000 customers at the time, including an interest in coding, Japanese manga comics and science fiction -- succeeded.
By moving 424,242 bitcoins, Karpeles, then 26, evoked the random number, 42, described as the "meaning of life" in Douglas Adams' sci-fi novel. "Don't come after me claiming we have no coins," Karpeles said, according to a transcript of that online discussion. "42 is the answer."
As the price of bitcoin soared from a few dollars to above $1,000, Mt. Gox grew to become the world's largest exchange for the digital currency, handling flows worth $3 billion in 2013, by the company's own reckoning.
But even as Mt. Gox boomed, French-born Karpeles seemed both keen to maintain total control of key operations and indifferent to commercial success, according to former staff and associates who spoke to Reuters, but asked not to be named because of ongoing investigations into the exchange's collapse.
Creditors who want to know how Mt. Gox at one point lost some $500 million worth of bitcoin and another $27 million in cash from its bank accounts, are seeking answers from Karpeles, who has spent recent days huddled in meetings with lawyers in Tokyo.
Mt. Gox and its lawyers declined repeated requests for comment for this article.
Lawyers for Karpeles told a U.S. judge last week that he was "not willing" to travel to the United States -- as ordered by the judge to answer questions in a bankruptcy court -- until his attorneys can "get up to speed" on a new subpoena from the U.S. Treasury Department. Karpeles doesn't want to go to the U.S. as he fears he could be arrested by authorities there, a person familiar with his thinking said.
"Regardless of whether it was a massive fraud or whether he was just grossly negligent, at the end of the day he's at fault," said Steven Woodrow, a lawyer representing a U.S. class action against Karpeles brought by Mt. Gox creditors.
Mt. Gox's bid to resuscitate its business was dismissed by a Tokyo court on Wednesday, and the court-appointed administrator said that meant the firm was likely to be liquidated. He added that Karpeles was likely to be investigated for liability in the exchange's collapse.
'The Magical Tux'
In its bankruptcy filing, Mt. Gox said 750,000 customer bitcoins and another 100,000 belonging to the exchange were stolen due to a software security flaw. Karpeles has told others he has been hurt by accusations he masterminded the theft, and wants to return the bitcoins and cash to some 127,000 creditors.
Karpeles, who has said he is reluctant to appear in public because of safety concerns, relieves stress by driving around Tokyo at night in a Honda Civic he bought as a company car at Mt. Gox, people close to him said. He lives alone with his cat, Tibane, whose exploits he used to chronicle on now-deleted Flickr and YouTube accounts.
The cat's name, chosen by Karpeles' late grandmother, inspired the name of his first company, Tibanne, which he set up in October 2009 in Japan. His employer at the time, software platform distributor Nexway, had transferred him to the country earlier that year.
Born in Chenove, in the Burgundy region of France, Karpeles wrote his first computer program aged 10. He wrote on his blog that he "never really felt at home in France," and has not been back since moving to Japan five years ago.
Shy and fearful of confrontation, the self-proclaimed "geek" felt comfortable in Japan, where he could also indulge his love of manga, video games and cosplay -- a combination of "costume" and "play", where people dress as characters from Japanese anime, graphic manga novels and video games. Karpeles found solace in online communities, where he was known as "The Magical Tux", a reference to the penguin mascot of open-source operating system Linux.
His escapism into virtual worlds was accompanied by what some former associates describe as a lack of interest in how running afoul of law and regulation could threaten his business and reputation.
According to blog posts Karpeles wrote in 2006, he was arrested twice in France before he was 21 for computer fraud-related charges. One resulted in a three-month suspended sentence. French authorities in Tokyo said they had seen confirmation of one prior conviction, but did not have details.
In Japan, Karpeles was sued by a customer in 2012 who claimed he had paid 15,000 euros ($20,700) for a website to be developed that was never built. Tokyo District Court ruled last May that Karpeles had to return the money.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security seized $5.5 million in Mt. Gox bank accounts in 2013, saying the exchange had been late to register as a money transmitter.
'A nice experiment'
Karpeles became interested in bitcoin when a customer of his web-hosting services wanted to pay in the digital currency. Unlike other early fans of bitcoin, Karpeles had no particular interest in the libertarian philosophy that drove many bitcoin adopters. Instead, he told Reuters in a 2013 interview, he was interested in the technology as a "nice experiment."
He met the founder of Mt. Gox, U.S. entrepreneur Jed McCaleb, on IRC, an online chat platform. McCaleb, nervous about regulatory scrutiny on bitcoin, wanted rid of the exchange and sold it to Karpeles in March 2011 for no upfront fee, people with knowledge of the deal said. Karpeles told others he had later paid McCaleb a small fee, calling it "a very good deal." McCaleb could not be reached for comment.
Mt. Gox's user base mushroomed from 3,000 to 50,000 within three months as bitcoin gained traction. Unable to keep up with customer support queries, Karpeles hired his first five employees in June of that year, shortly after the company said in public announcements that it believed one or more hackers broke into the exchange's database and drove the price of bitcoin down to zero.
Dazed by that security breach, a former employer said, Karpeles retreated to build a more secure trading platform but left the exchange offline, with thousands of emails from bewildered users unanswered until a group of bitcoin enthusiasts volunteered to come in to help. One was Roger Ver, who says he was stunned when Karpeles proposed they resume work on Monday rather than work through the weekend to solve the crisis.
"He wasn't ever focused on Mt. Gox like he should have been," said Ver.
As the exchange's business grew, Karpeles hired more staff to work in programming, customer support and user verification, eventually taking space in a central Tokyo office with 30 employees, with another dozen contractors overseas.
Robots, exercise balls
Karpeles wanted to be liked, three former employees say. He bought lunch for the entire staff and spent thousands of dollars on gadgets and equipment to make the office more "fun" -- exercise balls for chairs, beer steins and robots. Late last year, in the middle of increasingly strained times for Mt. Gox, he spent an afternoon putting up a hammock in the recreation room.
But staff found it galling that the boss was buying these goodies even while he refused to give pay raises. They also became frustrated as they waited for Karpeles to authorize decisions or make progress on simple tasks. Developers, stuck without direct access to the Mt. Gox source code, resorted to playing video games, people inside the company at the time say.
Employees were also concerned that Karpeles' tight grip on all company affairs was causing a bottleneck: He was the only person who could access the exchange's bank accounts and bitcoin holdings and resolve requests by traders to cash out.
Former employees say they asked Karpeles to share the passwords to Mt. Gox's bitcoin wallets in case he became incapacitated or unable to access the data. He refused, leaving him as the only person able to piece together the passwords, written on paper stored at his home, the office, and an undisclosed location.
Karpeles' secrecy extended to the company accounts, which he refused to show to prospective investors who came to the company with proposals, according to former employees. Mandalah, a Tokyo consultancy that worked for Mt. Gox, was also frustrated by Karpeles' lack of interest in outreach and business growth, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Mandalah declined to comment.
As other competing exchanges developed more sophisticated trading systems, Karpeles diverted his attention from the exchange to buy an unrelated software company called Shade 3D and began to work on launching a 'Bitcoin Cafe' -- which would accept the digital currency as payment -- on the ground floor of the office, according to records and former staff.
Karpeles was planning to serve quiche and apple pies he'd made himself in the cafe, which would also showcase a point-of-sales system he had spent hours tinkering with, a former employee said. The cafe never opened.
Netflix plans to raise prices as U.S. streaming subscriptions grow
By Lisa Richwine
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Video streaming service Netflix Inc said it intends to raise the monthly subscription price for new customers by $1 or $2 a month to help the company buy more movies and TV shows and improve service for its 48 million global subscribers.
Investors welcomed the announcement by Netflix, which had suffered from a consumer exodus and stock plunge after it announced an unpopular price increase in July 2011. The company's shares jumped 6.7 percent in after-hours trading to $371.97, after the company released plans for a price hike and posted a rise in first-quarter profit that beat Wall Street expectations.
Chief Executive Reed Hastings said Netflix had improved its selection of TV shows and movies and added original series like critically acclaimed Kevin Spacey thriller "House of Cards."
With added revenue from higher prices, "we will be able to license much more content and deliver it in very high quality video," Hastings said on a webcast.
The company, in a quarterly letter to shareholders, said it plans to impose "a one or two dollar increase, depending on the country, later this quarter for new members only." It did not name the countries. Existing customers would keep their current price "for a generous time period," it said.
Netflix has "room to raise prices," FBN Securities analyst Shebly Seyrafi said, because "they're still seeing a lot of demand" for the service.
The company said in its earnings report it added 2.25 million customers to its U.S. streaming business during the quarter that ended in March, in line with the company's earlier guidance, for a total of 35.7 million. In international markets, its customer base reached 12.7 million, a gain of 1.8 million during the quarter.
Net income for the quarter reached $53 million, an increase from $3 million a year earlier. Earnings-per-share came in at 86 cents, topping the average forecast of 83 cents, according to analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
During the quarter, it released the second season of critically acclaimed Kevin Spacey drama "House of Cards."
Netflix is investing in original series, such as "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black" to attract and keep subscribers. If faces competition from online video players like Amazon.com Inc and Hulu, as well as on-demand content from cable operators.
Netflix also said it opposed Comcast Corp's proposed purchase of Time Warner Cable Inc. In March, Netflix reluctantly agreed to pay "interconnection" fees to Comcast for faster delivery of its TV shows and movies.
"Comcast is already dominant enough to be able to capture unprecedented fees from transit providers and services such as Netflix," the company said in its letter. "The combined company would possess even more anti-competitive leverage to charge arbitrary interconnection tolls for access to their customers."
Netflix said those fees had improved Netflix service for Comcast customers, but singled out AT&T's fiber-based U-Verse as providing "lower performance" than many other providers.
(Reporting by Lisa Richine; Edited by Ronald Grover, Bernard Orr)
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
Japanese scientist's digital eyes show your emotions for you
Can't be bothered to show anyone what you're thinking? Then a Japanese scientist has the answer -- a pair of digital eyes that can express delight and anger, or even feign boredom.
Building on a long line of slightly wacky and not-very-practical inventions for which Japan is famous, Hirotaka Osawa has unveiled the "AgencyGlass".
"I wanted to build a system that is capable of carrying out social behaviours for humans," he told AFP.
Just as robots can reduce the need for physical labour, the AgencyGlass -- which looks like two small TV screens set in spectacle frames -- aims to cut down its user's emotional demands by carrying out their eye movements for them.
The two organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens, which are connected to motion sensors and an external camera, show a pair of eyeballs that can appear to be making eye contact while the wearer is looking somewhere else entirely.
The wearer has to choose their emotion in advance -- if they want to appear "attentive", for example, they must switch it to this mode before putting the glasses on.
Osawa, of the prestigious Tsukuba University, said possible applications include for flight attendants dealing with irritating passengers, or teachers who want to project an image of kindness towards shy students.
"As the service sector grows and becomes more sophisticated, it becomes increasingly important that we behave by showing understanding to others," he said. "That requires us to behave differently from our true feelings."
Such "emotional labour" has caused some people to become deeply conflicted and develop emotional illnesses, Osawa said, adding that his technology could eventually help them.
The glasses weigh around 100 grams (3.5 onces) with the battery lasting roughly an hour, Osawa said, adding that the prototype cost just over 30,000 yen ($290) to make. They are currently not in production.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
Nintendo's trailblazing Game Boy marks 25th anniversary
Nintendo's trailblazing Game Boy marks its 25th anniversary on Monday with the portable device's legacy living on in cutting-edge smartphone games and among legions of nostalgic fans.
The Japanese firm released its 8-bit Game Boy on April 21, 1989 -- the same year Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan, the Chinese army violently cracked down on protesters in Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall fell.
Billed as a "handy game machine", few knew it would turn the console-based industry on its head, starting a revolution that did for portable gaming what Sony's Walkman had done for mobile music.
It also helped turn Super Mario and Donkey Kong into global franchises, allowing users to change their favourite games on the go just by inserting small cartridges into the device.
Kyoto-based Nintendo, which started life as a games card maker that morphed into a global videogame giant, did not invent portable gaming.
But Game Boy's discount price and popular software blew away the competition at the time and pushed mobile gaming into the mainstream.
"At one point, portable gaming was synonymous with the Game Boy," said Serkan Toto, a Tokyo-based games industry consultant
"It laid the foundation for what we call portable gaming today, regardless of whether it is console or smartphone games, because the basic concept is the same... That's the legacy of Game Boy."
Mobility was crucial, remembers one 21-year-old Japanese, if he wanted to escape his parents' wrath.
"With a standing console I needed to play in the living room where my parents were watching television -- they got angry at me for playing it all the time," the man, who did not wish to give his name, told AFP as he browsed inside Super Potato, a Tokyo store dedicated to retro gaming gadgets.
The device also allowed users to connect with another gamer through a link cable, setting off the beginnings of online gaming networks that now number in the millions of users.
"It made gaming portable, but what's great was it was built on the concept of networking, enabling users to connect and battle each other," said Hirokazu Hamamura, managing director at games research firm and magazine publisher Kadokawa Corp. in Tokyo.
- 'It was a revolution' -
A quarter century later, the company's financial fortunes have suffered.
Nintendo has no commemorative events planned for the Game Boy, which ironically foreshadowed the creation of portable smartphone and tablet computer games that have offered up stiff competition to stationary consoles such as Nintendo's Wii, the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox.
The Game Boy was discontinued years ago. But in its heyday, Nintendo sold almost 119 million original Game Boy consoles and shifted another 81.5 million units of the next-generation Game Boy Advance series, which was launched in 2001.
The original device's red buttons and cross-shaped directional pads may look clunky these days, but they evoke a sense of nostalgia for many fans, including Spaniard Jesus Mera, who was 12 years old when he began playing with his Game Boy Color.
"It was a revolution -- you could play video games anywhere," said the 26-year-old Madrid native during a visit to Tokyo.
Mera was delighted to spot the same type of Game Boy he used to play for hours on end in the gaming store in Tokyo's bustling Akihabara electronics district.
He acknowledged the small screen and games seem outdated, but "in the past what we had was enough".
"Nowadays we have so many possibilities," Mera said.
That isn't necessarily a good thing for people like 21-year-old student Lin Yuki who sometimes struggles with today's hyper-fast world of 3D offerings where movement is limitless -- and tricky to master.
"Recent games have become so complicated that you can be totally lost on what you're supposed to be doing," he said, admitting he sometimes feels "nostalgic" for simple games with black dots and horizontal scrolls.
Researchers use Twitter to predict crime, but not yet sure whether this will reduce crime
Hidden in the Twittersphere are nuggets of information that could prove useful to crime fighters -- even before a crime has been committed.
Researchers at the University of Virginia demonstrated tweets could predict certain kinds of crimes if the correct analysis is applied.
A research paper published in the scientific journal Decision Support Systems last month said the analysis of geo-tagged tweets can be useful in predicting 19 to 25 kinds of crimes, especially for offenses such as stalking, thefts and certain kinds of assault.
The results are surprising, especially when one considers that people rarely tweet about crimes directly, said lead researcher Matthew Gerber of the university's Predictive Technology Lab.
Gerber said even tweets that have no direct link to crimes may contain information about activities often associated with them.
"What people are tweeting about are their routine activities," Gerber told AFP. "Those routine activities take them into environments where crime is likely to happen.
"So if I tweet about getting drunk tonight, and a lot of people are talking about getting drunk, we know there are certain crimes associated with those things that produce crimes. It's indirect."
For the study, Gerber and his colleagues analyzed tweets from the city of Chicago tagged to certain neighborhoods -- measured by individual square kilometers -- and the city's crime database.
They then looked forward and were able to make useful predictions about areas where certain crimes were likely to occur -- something which could be helpful in deployment of police resources.
"This approach allows the analyst to rapidly visualize and identify areas with historically high crime concentrations," said the study.
"Future crimes often occur in the vicinity of past crimes, making hot-spot maps a valuable crime prediction tool."
In recent years, the idea of "predictive policing" has gained momentum, with police departments relying on "big data" analytics from companies such as IBM.
This research comes on the heels of other studies showing how tweets can be analyzed to predict elections, disease outbreaks and other important events.
'I send our algorithms'
Gerber said Twitter data can be relatively easy to use because tweets are publicly available, and many of them are tagged with location information.
In addition, researchers, themselves, do not need to go into the high-crime areas to study the information.
Instead, "I send our algorithms to these locations and see what people are talking about," Gerber said.
"The computer algorithm learns the pattern and produces a prediction."
The study was funded by the US Army, which Gerber said uses similar techniques to determine threats in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are limitations, Gerber notes. Adequate historical data is needed, and some kinds of crimes, such as kidnapping and arson, may not fall into the same patterns of predictability, for reasons the researchers could not explain.
Still, he said the New York police department has already contacted him, and he has begun to review data from that city to determine if the results from Chicago can be replicated.
He hopes to be able to draw on information from other social media to see if they can help improve the predictions.
An important goal, ultimately, is to figure out if the technique can be used in a very practical way.
"We did not address whether this reduces crime," he said. "That's one of the next steps."
Twitter blocks accounts of users critical of Turkish prime minister
Twitter blocked two accounts on Sunday that had been used to spread corruption allegations against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his government and his inner circle. The move came after high-level meetings between the government and executives…
Study: Using the Internet can reduce depression among older adults by 33 percent
A new study published in The Journals of Gerontology suggests that Internet use can reduce the probability of depression among retirees who live alone by 33 percent.
The study was authored by Shelia Cotten of Michigan State University, George Ford of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies, Sherry Ford of the University of Montevallo, and Timothy Hale of Harvard Medical School. They used information gathered during the Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal survey collecting data from more than 20,000 older and retired Americans.
The authors noted "[r]etired persons are a population of interest, particularly because one mechanism by which Internet use may affect depression is to counter the effects of isolation and loneliness, which are more common among older adults."
They found "that for retired older adults in the United States, Internet use was found to reduce the probability of a depressed state by about 33 percent." The number of people living in a household partially determined how much less likely an individual was to be depressed, and the reduction in depression was most significant among survey participants who lived alone.
Internet users in the survey had an average predicted probability of depression of .07, as opposed to a .105 probability for non-users.
"This provides some evidence that the mechanism linking Internet use to depression is the remediation of social isolation and loneliness," they wrote, adding that "[e]ncouraging older adults to use the Internet may help decrease isolation and depression."
["Elderly Hispanic Man Using Laptop In The Park" on Shutterstock]
Tech workers seek to have Steve Jobs' emails admitted as evidence in class action suit
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Four large technology companies should not be allowed to limit evidence about Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs at an upcoming trial over no-hire agreements in Silicon Valley, according to a court document filed late on Thursday by employees suing the firms.
Tech workers brought a class action lawsuit against Apple, Google Inc, Intel Inc and Adobe Systems Inc in 2011, alleging they conspired to avoid competing for each other's employees in order to avert a salary war. Trial is scheduled to begin at the end of May on behalf of roughly 64,000 workers in the class, and plaintiffs say damages could top $3 billion.
The case, which is closely watched in Silicon Valley, is largely built on emails among top executives, including Apple's late chief executive Jobs and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
In one instance, after a Google recruiter solicited an Apple employee, Schmidt told Jobs that the recruiter would be fired, court documents show. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt's note to a top Apple human resources executive with a smiley face appended.
Earlier this week, the four companies asked U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh to prevent plaintiffs from unfairly portraying Jobs as a "bully" at trial. The companies said they did not seek to bar Jobs' communications about the no-hire agreements, but rather evidence gleaned from sources like Walter Isaacson's bestselling biography about Jobs.
However, in the filing on Thursday, the employees said such material had been used in separate antitrust litigation involving Apple over e-books.
"That the jury might draw conclusions about Mr. Jobs' character based on evidence showing the manner in which he pursued the conspiracy at the heart of this case is not grounds to exclude such evidence," they wrote.
A Google spokesman declined to comment. Representatives for Apple, Intel and Adobe could not immediately be reached for comment, nor could an attorney for the plaintiffs.
The four companies agreed to settle a U.S. Department of Justice probe in 2010 that barred them from entering into such no-hire agreements in the future. They have since been fighting the civil antitrust class action, arguing that the plaintiffs cannot successfully prove an overarching conspiracy to impact wages.
In addition to evidence about Jobs' character, the tech companies also asked Koh to prohibit discussion of the government probe at trial. However, on Thursday the plaintiffs argued that the jury should know the reason the companies eliminated their no-hire agreements.
Additionally, the plaintiffs seek to introduce evidence about the personal wealth of executives like Google co-founder Sergey Brin - and how it could be enhanced by holding down workers' salaries and boosting margins, according to the filing.
At a hearing last month, attorneys for Google and the plaintiffs said they were "making progress" in settlement talks.
Walt Disney Co's Pixar and Lucasfilm units and Intuit Inc were also defendants in the original lawsuit but agreed to a settlement, with Disney paying about $9 million and Intuit paying $11 million. A hearing on final settlement approval is scheduled for May 1.
The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is In Re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, 11-cv-2509.
(Reporting by Dan Levine; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)
SpaceX firm launches Dragon capsule to International Space Station
Private U.S. firm SpaceX launched its unmanned Dragon capsule to the International Space Station on Friday, its third trip carrying supplies and equipment to the orbiting lab.
After three earlier delays, the Falcon 9 rocket and its Dragon capsule finally blasted off as planned at 3:25 pm (1925 GMT) from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
About 10 minutes after liftoff, the capsule separated from the second stage of the rocket before going into orbit.
"THAT. WAS. AWESOOMEEE," one person with the handle Petar Le Grand wrote after watching the launch live on SpaceX's website.
It marks the California-based company's third commercial resupply mission and fourth visit to the ISS, where it is due to deliver 2.2 tonnes of cargo.
Dragon is due to meet up with the space station on Sunday at 2314 GMT.
The mission had originally been scheduled for mid-March and was delayed due to a helium leak.
In all, SpaceX is due to complete 12 missions for the US space agency NASA.
Its first successful pilot launch, completed in May 2012, marked the first time a private vessel had docked at the ISS. It was followed by the company's first cargo mission in October 2012.
[Image via Agence France-Presse]
Dutch man arrested for driving Amanda Todd to suicide with webcam blackmail
A 35-year-old Dutch man has been arrested in connection with the suicide of a Canadian teenage girl that sparked a worldwide debate on cyberbullying and online harassment, prosecutors said on Friday.
Canada will begin extradition proceedings "so that the man may face the court linked with the Amanda Todd case," prosecutor's office spokesman Paul van der Zanden told AFP.
The suspect was arrested in January in the southern town of Tilburg and is suspected of having forced dozens of young women as far afield as the United States, Britain and Netherlands of performing sex acts in front of their webcams.
Canadian authorities linked the man to the Todd case as early as October 2012, just after the girl's suicide, van der Zanden said.
Prosecutors allege that the suspect, identified as Aydin C. by Dutch media, blackmailed girls into performing lewd acts, threatening them with the public revelation of earlier acts if they failed to deliver.
According to the suspect's lawyer, quoted by a Dutch news agency, the man has requested a trial in the Netherlands and will fight his extradition.
Todd's suicide, after being tormented by an anonymous cyberbully, sparked a national debate in Canada and worldwide on what is appropriate online behaviour, with calls for criminalising bullying.
In a YouTube video watched by millions worldwide, Todd, 15, said she suffered from anxiety, "major depression" and panic attacks after a photo of her breasts, flashed in an online video chat with a stranger, was distributed in her community in Canada's westernmost British Columbia province.
She said she withdrew and turned to drugs and alcohol, and "cried every night."
In the video Todd laments a lack of friends due to the controversy, a schoolyard beating over a boy and changing schools several times to escape blackmail. "I have nobody. I need someone," she said
After several failed suicide attempts and posting the YouTube video describing her sadness, Todd finally killed herself in October 2012.
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