Techlife News

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PARDON FOR
FORMER GOOGLE
ENGINEER WHO
STOLE TRADE
SECRETS

President Donald Trump pardoned a former
Google engineer who was sentenced to prison
last year for stealing trade secrets from the tech
giant related to robotic vehicles.
Anthony Levandowski left Google in early 2016
where he worked in the autonomous vehicle
division to start his own company called Otto.
That company was acquired by Uber for $680
million as the ride-hailing venture pursued its
own autonomous vehicle division.
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Before leaving, Levandowski downloaded a
trove of Google’s self-driving car technology,
leading eventually to 33 counts of intellectual
property theft against him. He plead guilty to
one count and was sentenced to 18 months in
prison last summer.
Levandowski was among the more than 140
people included in a flurry of clemency action
in the final hours of Trump’s White House term,
which included former chief strategist Steve
Bannon, ex-members of Congress and other
allies of Trump and his family.
In a White House statement, the administration
said the pardon was supported by one-time
Trump supporter and tech billionaire Peter
Thiel, former Disney executive Michael Ovitz,
and Palmer Luckey, founder of the virtual reality
company Oculus VR.
Levandowski thanked the president in an early
morning tweet Wednesday, saying he was
grateful for the opportunity to move forward.
Uber sold its autonomous vehicles
development arm four months after
Levandowski was sentenced.

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HIGH-TECH INDOOR FARMER
APPHARVEST STARTS
SHIPPING TOMATOES

AppHarvest — an indoor farming company
backed by Martha Stewart — thinks the
agriculture sector is ripe for disruption. And now,
its tomatoes are ripe for eating.
The Morehead, Kentucky-based company said
it has begun shipping beefsteak tomatoes
to Kroger, Walmart, Publix and other grocers.
Eventually, AppHarvest plans to ship 45 million
pounds of tomatoes each year from its 60-acre
indoor farm in Morehead.
AppHarvest is one of many players in the
fast-growing field of indoor farming. Others
include New York-based Gotham Greens, which
has eight urban greenhouses across the U.S.,
and Plenty, a vertical farming startup in San
Francisco. In a recent global survey, Agritecture
Consulting — which works with urban farmers
— found that at least 74 indoor farming
companies were founded in 2020 alone.

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The industry is getting a boost from high-tech
farming techniques developed in the highly
profitable cannabis industry, said Evan Lucas,
an assistant professor at Northern Michigan
University who heads its indoor agriculture
program. Falling costs for LED lighting have also
helped decrease the cost of operating indoor
farms, he said.

Greenhouses have been around for decades,
but not until recently have they grown into
such large-scale facilities. At the same time,
consumers are increasingly looking for better-
tasting, sustainably produced food, Stewart said.
AppHarvest uses no chemical pesticides and
says its tomatoes are bred for flavor, not long-
haul travel, unlike tomatoes grown in Mexico.

“We know how flavorless and devoid of
nutrients tomatoes are when they are picked
a month ago,” said Stewart during a video
news conference. “I think that we all need
and want better food for us, for our families,
for our friends.”

Stewart also wants organic produce to be
more affordable and accessible. She said she
was shocked when she went to the grocery
and had to pay $98 for a small cart full of
organic vegetables.

AppHarvest says its Morehead greenhouse,
which houses 720,000 tomato plants over the
equivalent of 45 football fields, is one of the
largest single-story buildings in the world. Its
tomato plants will be harvested continually and
can grow to 45 feet high, helping achieve 30
times the yield of a traditional farm.

Founder and CEO Jonathan Webb, a Kentucky
native, said Appalachia is ideal because of its

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heavy rainfall. AppHarvest uses only recycled
rainwater to water its plants.

But Webb said AppHarvest is also keen to
invest in an economically depressed region
which has long depended on coal. Webb said
the Morehead farm’s 350 employees all make
at least $15 per hour and have health benefits.
The company received more than 10,000
applications for those spots, he said.

In addition to Stewart, “Hillbilly Elegy” author
J.D. Vance is a member of AppHarvest’s board.
Vance’s venture capital fund, Narya, is an
investor in AppHarvest, which plans a public
stock listing this year.

AppHarvest is currently building a 60-acre
facility in Richmond, Kentucky, and a 15-acre
facility to grow leafy greens in Berea, Kentucky.
The company plans to build a total of 12 indoor
farms across Appalachia by 2025.

The company has a long way to go before it
makes a dent in the tomato market. In 2015,
for example, the U.S. produced 2.7 billion
pounds of fresh tomatoes, mostly in Florida
and California. But that production only fed
around 40% of demand. The rest was made up
by imports from Mexico and Canada, according
to a report by the University of Florida. Fresh
tomato production in the U.S. has been
declining over the last two decades, the report
said, partly because of drought.

Webb believes AppHarvest can help reverse
that trend and expand it, eventually, to many
varieties of fruit and vegetables.

“That’s where agriculture, as a whole, is moving,”
he said.

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RIP: MARS
DIGGER BITES
THE DUST AFTER
2 YEARS ON
RED PLANET

NASA declared the Mars digger dead after
failing to burrow deep into the red planet to
take its temperature.
Scientists in Germany spent two years trying
to get their heat probe, dubbed the mole, to
drill into the Martian crust. But the 16-inch-long
(40-centimeter) device that is part of NASA’s
InSight lander couldn’t gain enough friction
in the red dirt. It was supposed to bury 16 feet
(5 meters) into Mars, but only drilled down a
couple of feet (about a half meter).
Following one last unsuccessful attempt to
hammer itself down over the weekend with 500
strokes, the team called it quits.

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“We’ve given it everything we’ve got, but Mars
and our heroic mole remain incompatible,” said
the German Space Agency’s Tilman Spohn, the
lead scientist for the experiment.
The effort will benefit future excavation efforts
at Mars, he added in a statement. Astronauts
one day may need to dig into Mars, according to
NASA, in search of frozen water for drinking or
making fuel, or signs of past microscopic life.
The mole’s design was based on Martian soil
examined by previous spacecraft. That turned
out nothing like the clumpy dirt encountered
this time.
InSight’s French seismometer, meanwhile,
has recorded nearly 500 Marsquakes, while
the lander’s weather station is providing daily
reports. The high was 17 degrees Fahrenheit
(minus 8 degrees Celsius) and the low was minus
56 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 49 degrees Celsius)
at Mars’ Elysium Planitia, an equatorial plain.
The lander recently was granted a two-year
extension for scientific work, now lasting until
the end of 2022.
InSight landed on Mars in November 2018.
It will be joined by NASA’s newest rover,
Perseverance, which will attempt a touchdown
on Feb. 18. The Curiosity rover has been
roaming Mars since 2012.

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BURIED TREASURE,
IMPENDING WAR
AND LOSS IN
‘THE DIG’

Just before the outbreak of the World War II,
a small-time archeologist was hired by a local
woman to excavate her land. The thought was
that it possibly contained some Viking remnants.
But what was unearthed in the mounds out
in the fields was far more significant than they
could have imagined: Buried in the grounds of
Sutton Hoo was actually a ship that would end
up providing a deeper understanding of the
sophistication of the early Anglo-Saxon period.
It’s this true story that John Preston used as the
stage for his novel “ The Dig,” which has been
adapted into a very lovely film by screenwriter
Moira Buffini and director Simon Stone. Carey
Mulligan stars as the Sutton Hoo landowner,
Edith Pretty, a wealthy widow, mother to a pre-
teen son and a bit of an amateur archaeologist
who has a hunch about one of the mounds on
her property. There’s also a ticking clock behind
her expedition — the story is set in the summer
of 1939 and by September, Britain would be
declaring war.

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The man she chooses for the job is Basil
Brown (Ralph Fiennes), a local excavator for
a provincial museum. He is no doubt a
brilliant archaeologist and an expert in his
region, taught by two generations of his
own family, but his formal education and
external demeanor denote a lower class and
thus he’s not taken seriously by many.
Even his colleagues call him “unorthodox
and untrained.”

Basil establishes a connection with Edith,
however, who had purchased the lands with
her husband to explore the mounds together.
The project was derailed by his untimely death
and she and her son, Robert (Archie Barnes,
excellent), are determined to finish even with
the impending war and much of the country
distracted elsewhere.

When they do realize what lies beneath
the mounds is in fact more important than
Viking graves, suddenly the big museums
and important archeologists find the time
and resources to contribute to the dig. This
adds a whole host of subplots and characters,
including Edith’s cousin, Rory (Johnny Flynn),
who has enlisted with the air force, and
newlywed archaeologists Stuart (Ben Chaplin)
and Peggy Piggott (Lily James), all of whom roll
their sleeves up to join in the project.

It’s here where the film’s novel origins become
a bit of liability as they rush through various
side stories with the Piggotts and Rory. These
threads were likely more rewarding in the
book, yet they do still add scope and context
to this very insulated story. And it’s very easy to
get swept away by it all.

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THE DIG starring Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes
Official Trailer | Netflix

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Mulligan is also too young for this part (Nicole
Kidman was originally slated for the role),
although she excels nonetheless with a subtle
and heartbreaking performance.
The director, Stone, is an acclaimed theater
director in his native Australia without many
film credits to his name. His 2015 debut, “The
Daughter,” an Ibsen adaptation, was not widely
released in the United States.
But in “The Dig” he and his talented filmmaking
team have made a truly beautiful piece,
contemplative and melancholy, with a lovely
score by Stefan Gregory and enveloping scenery
shot by Mike Eley. In some ways “The Dig” feels
like its own artifact too, like a lost Anthony
Minghella film made 30 years ago and buried
until now.
“The Dig,” a Netflix release in theaters Friday
and on Netflix Jan. 29, is rated PG-13 by the
Motion Picture Association of America for “brief
sensuality and partial nudity.” Running time: 112
minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

MPAA Definition of PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material
may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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‘LOCKED DOWN’
MIRRORS OUR
QUARANTINE
EXPERIENCES

Doug Liman’s “Locked Down,” one of the first
and most ambitious films to be conceived and
shot during the pandemic, is, like our own
quarantine experiences, erratic, a little absurd
and sporadically delightful.
Unlike our time in quarantine, it has Chiwetel
Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway. This, not a small
difference, is crucial in “Locked Down,” an

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energetic romantic comedy-slash-heist movie
that makes a game entry into the emerging
genre of COVID-19 movies. Liman, the director
of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,”“The Edge of Tomorrow”
and “The Bourne Identity,” has always, in a movie
world of lumbering, oxygen-depleted action
films, had a knack for more agile and playful
films that give A-list performers ample room
to breathe.

That serves “Locked Down” well, with Hathaway
and (especially) Ejiofor making a charming
pair, even as they play a couple that, just
before lockdown began, have had it with each
other. The script is by Steven Knight (“Eastern
Promises,”“Peaky Blinders”), who penned an
early breakout for Ejiofor in the very good,
London-set “Dirty Pretty Things.” Knight wrote
“Locked Down,” which debuted Thursday on
HBO Max, in July, and by September, they were
filming in London with COVID on-set protocols
—mainly shooting in a townhouse, on empty
city streets and a culminating scene at Harrods.
That things build to a semi-ridiculous heist is
fitting; the whole movie feels stolen.

It also feels very March-April 2020. There are
pajama pants, baking plans and Zoom calls
(Ben Stiller, Ben Kingsley and Mindy Kaling
make remote cameos playing characters seen
only through the computer screen). “Locked
Down” points to one problem of pandemic
movies: So much has changed so fast that some
of the novelties of last spring now feel dated
and stale.

But seeing two terrific performers like Ejiofor
and Hathaway in such circumstances lends
them a far less familiar glamour. Knight’s lively

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Locked Down - Official Trailer - Warner Bros.

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Anne Hathaway Talks About “Locked Down”

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and verbose script (he also wrote the even-
more-confined “Locke”) gives the actors a kind
of quarantine-screwball atmosphere rich in
claustrophobia and shut-in frustration. The
experience is causing Linda (Hathaway) and
Paxton (Ejiofor) to doubt much in their lives.
Linda, who has initiated the break-up, runs
the London division of a global corporation.
After being ordered to fire her staff by Zoom,
she begins to question her career. Paxton’s
never got going. A biker and poet who
occasionally reads to his locked-down block
from the middle of the street, he’s never risen
above delivery man, his record tarnished by a
long-ago crime.

For a while, they’re both monologuing around
the house in between videoconference
confessions, but their existential distress
eventually syncs up, and “Locked Down” — like
someone finally settling into a pandemic rhythm
— takes shape.

“Locked Down” is inevitably, and intentionally,
of the moment. But I hope some of its off-
the-cuff spirit lasts after the pandemic. So
much Hollywood moviemaking is laboriously
preordained. The largest studios have release
calendars planned out years in advance. Little is
spontaneous and, as a consequence, films that
feel connected to their time are hard to find
at the studio level. Hopefully the COVID-made
movie is soon a relic, but its fleet-footedness
sticks around.

“Locked Down,” a Warner Bros. release, is rated
R by the Motion Picture Association of America
for language throughout and some drug
material. Running time: 118 minutes. Three stars
out of four.

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NETFLIX’S
BIG 4Q LIFTS
VIDEO SERVICE
ABOVE 200M
SUBSCRIBERS

Netflix’s video streaming service has surpassed
200 million subscribers for the first time as its
expanding line-up of TV series and movies
continues to captivate people stuck at home
during the ongoing battle against the pandemic.
The subscriber milestone highlighted Netflix’s
fourth-quarter results released this week. The
service added another 8.5 million subscribers
during the October-December period, capping
Netflix’s biggest year since its inception as a DVD-
by-mail service in 1997. Netflix ended the year
with nearly 204 million worldwide subscribers.
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The fourth-quarter gains easily topped the
projections of the roughly 6 million additional
subscribers projected by Netflix’s own
management and Wall Street analysts. Netflix’s
stock surged by more than 13% extended
trading after the latest subscriber numbers
came out.

After its upending of the DVD-rental industry,
Netflix introduced the then-revolutionary
concept of streaming TV shows and films 14
years ago. At that time, its service had a mere 6
million subscribers.

The streaming service began to grow
rapidly seven years ago when Netflix started
producing its own shows and accelerated a
worldwide expansion that now spans more
than 190 countries. Since the February 2013
debut of its first original series, “House of Cards,”
Netflix has attracted more than 170 million
additional subscribers.

Netflix gained another 37 million subscribers
last year, a 22% increase from 2019. Its stock
fared even better, rising by 67% last year. The Los
Gatos, California, company now boasts a market
value of more than $220 billion.

“Our strategy is simple: if we can continue to
improve Netflix every day to better delight
our members, we can be their first choice for
streaming entertainment,” the company wrote in
its quarterly update to shareholders. “This past
year is a testament to this approach.”

For all its success, Netflix still faces challenges in
the coming years from bevy of deep-pocketed
rivals, with perhaps the most formidable
posed by a more experienced and even larger
entertainment company: Walt Disney Co.

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After deciding to stop licensing its library
to Netflix, Disney introduced its own video
streaming service 14 months ago. The service,
Disney Plus, has proved far more popular than
anyone imagined, accumulating nearly 90
million subscribers in its first year, emboldening
the company’s management to predict that it
will boast as many as 260 million subscribers at
some point in 2024.

To retain and attract subscribers, Netflix has
been spending so much money on original
programming that the company usually
ends up shoveling out more cash than its
video services brings in from its subscribers,
although it has remained profitable under
the accounting standards allowed in the
entertainment industry.

The company earned $542.2 million on revenue
of $6.64 billion in the fourth quarter, a relatively
thin profit margin.

But Netflix finally stopped burning through
cash last year, largely because government
restrictions imposed during the pandemic
curtailed the production of programming.
Netflix posted a positive cash flow of $1.9
billion during 2020, the first time that has the
company hasn’t had a negative cash flow for an
entire year since 2011.

In another breakthrough, Netflix predicted it
will no longer need to raise additional cash
from lenders to help finance its original-
programming budget. The company said
it doesn’t expect to experience the same
drain on its cash as it has for most of the
past decade.

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DR. DRE BACK HOME
AFTER REPORTED
BRAIN ANEURYSM
TREATMENT

Image: Richard Shotwell

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Dr. Dre was back at home after being treated
at a Los Angeles hospital for a reported
brain aneurysm.
Peter Paterno, an attorney for the music mogul,
said Dre was home but offered no other details
in an email exchange. The rapper and producer
reportedly was released from Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center.
In a Jan. 5 social media post, Dre, 55, said he was
“doing great and getting excellent care from
my medical team.”TMZ had reported that he
suffered a brain aneurysm the day before and
was recovering at the medical center.
The actor and rapper Ice T posted that he had
connected with Dre on FaceTime and that he
had “just made it home. Safe and looking good.”
Born Andre Young in the Southern California city
of Compton, Dre broke out on the music scene
as a co-founding member of N.W.A., producing
the group’s groundbreaking 1988 debut album,
“Straight Outta Compton.”

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He produced his own hits and multiplatinum
albums, along with crafting music for many
others including Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick
Lamar, 50 Cent, Jay-Z and Nas. He also found
success outside of the rap genre, producing pop
hits for Gwen Stefani and Mary J. Blige.

Dre founded Beats Electronics in 2008 with
Jimmy Iovine, and six years later they launched
a streaming subscription service, Beats Music.
Apple acquired both in a $3 billion deal in 2014.

Image: Mike Coppola

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CYBERSECURITY
FIRM: BOOTING

HACKERS A
COMPLEX CHORE

Efforts to assess the impact of a more than
seven-month-old cyberespionage campaign
blamed on Russia — and boot the intruders
— remain in their early stages, says the
cybersecurity firm that discovered the attack.
The hack has badly shaken the U.S. government
and private sector. The firm, FireEye, released a
tool and a white paper to help potential victims
scour their cloud-based installations of Microsoft
365 — where users’ emails, documents and
collaborative tools reside — to determine if
hackers broke in and remain active.

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The aim is not just to ferret out and evict the
hackers but to keep them from being able to
re-enter, said Matthew McWhirt, the effort’s
team leader.

“There’s a lot of specific things you have to do —
we learned from our investigations — to really
eradicate the attacker,” he said.

Since FireEye disclosed its discovery in mid-
December, infections have been found at
federal agencies including the departments of
Commerce, Treasury, Justice and federal courts.
Also compromised, said FireEye chief technical
officer Charles Carmakal, are dozens of private
sector targets with a high concentration in the
software industry and Washington D.C. policy-
oriented think tanks.

The security software company Malwarebytes
announced that it was among the victims —
and said it was compromised through the very
Microsoft email system the FireEye tool aims to
button down.

The intruders have stealthily scooped up
intelligence for months, carefully choosing
targets from the roughly 18,000 customers
infected with malicious code they activated
after sneaking it into an update of network
management software first pushed out last
March by Texas-based SolarWinds.

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“We continue to learn about new victims almost
every day. I still think that we’re still in the early
days of really understanding the scope of the
threat-actor activity,” said Carmakal.

During a Senate confirmation hearing on
Tuesday, national intelligence director nominee
Avril Haines said she’s not yet been fully briefed
on the campaign but noted that the Department
of Homeland Security has deemed it“a grave risk”
to government systems, critical infrastructure
and the private sector and“it does seem to be
extraordinary in its nature and its scope.”

The public has not heard much about who
exactly was compromised because many
victims still can’t figure out what the attackers
have done and thus “may not feel they have an
obligation to report on it,” said Carmakal.

“This threat actor is so good, so sophisticated,
so disciplined, so patient and so elusive that it’s
just hard for organizations to really understand
what the scope and impact of the intrusions are.
But I can assure you there are a lot of victims
beyond what has been made public to date,”
Carmakal said.

On top of that, he said, the hackers “will continue
to obtain access to organizations. There will be
new victims.”

Microsoft disclosed on Dec. 31 t hat the hackers
had viewed some of its source code. It said it
found “no indications our systems were used
to attack others.” Malwarebytes said it had
determined that “the attacker only gained
access to a limited subset of internal company
emails” and said the conduit — Microsoft’s Azure
cloud services — are not used in its software
production environments.

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Carmakal said he believed software companies
were prime targets because hackers of this
caliber will seek to use their products — as
they did with SolarWinds’ Orion module — as
conduits for similar so-called supply-chain hacks.
The hackers’ programming acumen let them
forge the digital passports — known as
certificates and tokens — needed to move
around targets’ Microsoft 365 installations
without logging in and authenticating identity.
It’s like a ghost hijacking, very difficult to detect.
They tended to zero in on two types of accounts,
said Carmakal: Users with access to high-
value information and high-level network
administrators, to determine what measures
were being taken to try to kick them out,
If it’s a software company, the hackers will
want to examine the data repositories of
top engineers. If it’s a government agency,
corporation or think tank, they’ll seek access to
emails and documents with national security
and trade secrets and other vital intelligence.

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Image: LM Otero

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TEENS TUTOR
PEERS ONLINE TO
FILL NEED DURING

PANDEMIC

When her suburban Dallas high school was
forced to move online last spring because of the
coronavirus pandemic, Charvi Goyal realized
that the schoolmates she’d been informally
tutoring between classes would still need extra
help but wouldn’t necessarily be able to get it.
So she took her tutoring online, as well.
Goyal, a 17-year-old high school junior from
Plano, roped in three classmates to create
TutorScope, a free tutoring service run by high
schoolers for other kids, including younger
ones. What started with a handful of instructors
helping friends’ siblings in their hometown has
blossomed into a group of 22 tutors from Texas,
Arizona, and Ohio that has helped more than
300 students from as far away as South Korea.
“I could foresee that schools were going to go
virtual. And with that there were a couple of
problems because the interactions between
students and students, and students and
teachers would be weakened,” Goyal said.

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TutorScope provides the one-on-one support
that teachers have traditionally given while
roving the aisles of their classrooms but now
often can’t because of the time and technology
constraints posed by online schooling.

On a night near the end of the fall semester,
tutor Avi Bagchi worked with 7-year-old twins
Monika and Massey Newman on a reading
comprehension lesson about discerning between
fact and opinion. During their half-hour video
chat, the 16-year-old Plano West Senior High
School student provided the children from nearby
Corinth with examples — it’s a fact that the pen
is red but an opinion if one doesn’t like it — and
reined them in when they got off topic a bit: Can’t
it be a fact that someone holds an opinion?

“I love candy. That’s a fact ...” said Massey, “...
because it’s true,” he and his sister said in unison.

Their mother, social worker Sarah Newman, said
the twins’TutorScope sessions have been really
helpful and have freed up her and her 17-year-
old son to focus on their own work.

“With these tutors, I realize they have time,” she
said. “I think they are very patient with these
younger kids, which I do not even have as a
mother. I have patience in other things, (but) I
don’t have patience in the teaching.”

Newman discovered TutorScope a few
weeks into the fall semester on Nextdoor, a
neighborhood-based social media app, and
signed up her twins for sessions, which can be
up to an hour each week per subject.

“At the time I was even looking for tutoring for
them, like private tutoring, and every spot that
I hit was too costly for those two kids. I’m like, I
can’t afford it,” Newman said.

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TutorScope isn’t the first nonprofit to offer online Image: LM Otero
tutoring and is just one of the workarounds
people have come up with to educate kids
during the pandemic, from a teacher in Nigeria
who grades homework from around the world
to a so-called sidewalk school in Mexico that
offers online instruction to children, including
some stuck at the border awaiting decisions on
U.S. asylum requests.

What makes the TutorScope effort unique is the
bond between the teenage volunteers and the
peers they’re helping.

“We kind of want to keep the whole ‘for students
by students’ thing really prominent since it
provides a sort of solidarity. Because everyone
is going through the same thing, you know that
your tutor is also having the same struggles
learning right now that you are,” Goyal said.

The group accepts donations from adults but
limits volunteers to students, including at least
one college undergrad.

Now in their third semester, the TutorScope
board has secured nonprofit status from the
IRS and persuaded a software company to give
them free access to a scheduling platform.
Jessica Ding, 16, manages the website and
parent emails, Angelina Ehara, 17, coordinates
public outreach and social media, and Kaustubh
Sonawane, 16, runs the signup process.

The tutors, for their part, get experience that will
look great on a college or job application — no
small thing with many other extracurriculars
shelved during the pandemic. They also get a
sense of whether they might want to teach full-
time or run a business or an NGO someday.

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