Tech News Today for July 11, 2016
Tech News for July 11, 2016
Tesla is under fire again in regards to the fatal accident last May involving its Autopilot technology. This time, the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US is looking into whether the company should have disclosed the fatal crash to investors in a securities filing. A source told the Wall Street Journal that the question is whether the crash consituted a “material” event, that is, something an investor would consider to be important. Read more at wsj.com.
Uber is currently enduring a number of investigations and lawsuits. One in particular is a class action lawsuit that charged Uber with violating anti-trust laws with coordinated surge pricing. That was the beginning of something pretty eye opening, as Uber emails reveal a coordinated effort within the company to investigate opposing lawyers on the case. Uber hired private investigation firms including ex members of the CIA to dig up dirt, going so far as to use encrypted chat services like Wickr, to “avoid potential discovery issues.” The string of actions has the presiding judge ruling the evidence has “a reasonable basis to suspect the perpetration of fraud." Read more at TheVerge.com.
Twitter has been integral to a large part of this year’s presidential election race, and it’s about to get even more intertwined with the company announcing that it will be livestreaming the republican and democratic national conventions. This is the same system that we saw used for last week’s Wimbledon coverage, and to be used for the NFL’s upcming thursday night games later this year. In this case, CBS will be shooting the coverage and working with affiliate CBSN to push the livestreaming online. Read more at Wired.com.
Megan Morrone has off this week, but Jason Howell will be joined today by Jonathan Strickland of How Stuff Works. They will be talking with Sam Machkovech of Ars Technica about Pokémon Go. Tech News Today streams live at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. It will be available later on demand at twit.tv/tnt.