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David Cameron: Former UK Prime Minister Joins U.S. AI Firm

Charlotte Henry ·

Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron has a new job. Mr. Cameron is to chair the advisory board of Afiniti, a Washington-based AI firm, the Guardian reported. He follows his former deputy into the tech sector. Sir Nick Clegg, who served as Deputy Prime Minister between 2010 and 2015, joined Facebook in October 2018.

The position represents one of Cameron’s most prominent appointments since he stood down as prime minister in 2016. He has previously taken a number of roles at not-for-profit organisations and has a memoir, For the Record, due out later this year. Cameron said he was “delighted” to take the job working on “transforming the future of customer service and interpersonal communications”. The advisory board features an array of high-profile figures including John Browne, former chief executive of BP and François Fillon, the former prime minister of France. Afiniti was set up by the US-Pakistani entrepreneur Zia Chishti and specializes in the use of AI in call centers.

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AirPort Base Stations Get 7.9.1 Firmware Update

Andrew Orr ·

Although Apple discontinued its line of AirPort base stations (routers), it recently released a firmware update, version 7.9.1. It fixes several security issues, one of which seems especially bad.

Impact: A base station factory reset may not delete all user information

Description: The issue was addressed with improved data deletion.

CVE-2019-8575: joshua stein

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North Face is Really Sorry for Spamming Wikipedia

Andrew Orr ·

North Face as issued an apology over its manipulating campaign to spam Wikipedia pages and game Google search results.

We believe deeply in @Wikipedia’s mission and apologize for engaging in activity inconsistent with those principles. Effective immediately, we have ended the campaign and moving forward, we’ll commit to ensuring that our teams and vendors are better trained on the site policies.

If the idiots didn’t openly brag about it, they probably could’ve gotten away with it, at least for a while longer.

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An Inside Look at the Qualcomm Monopoly Ruling

Andrew Orr ·

Timothy Lee did a nice deep dive into the 233-page Qualcomm monopoly ruling from Judge Lucy Koh. I’ve heard hot takes of the settlement between Apple and Qualcomm that suggested maybe Apple knew it was going to lose and gave up. But Judge Koh ordered Qualcomm to renegotiate with its customers.

The legal document outlines a nearly 20-year history of overcharging smartphone makers for cellular chips. Qualcomm structured its contracts with smartphone makers in ways that made it almost impossible for other chipmakers to challenge Qualcomm’s dominance. Customers who didn’t go along with Qualcomm’s one-sided terms were threatened with an abrupt and crippling loss of access to modem chips.

In her ruling, Koh ordered Qualcomm to stop threatening customers with chip cutoffs. Qualcomm must now re-negotiate all of its agreements with customers and license its patents to competitors on reasonable terms.