Author: Nick Farrell

Cannabis makes better batteries

Posted on August 15, 2014 by - News

thanks Wikipedia

thanks Wikipedia

Boffins have been cooking “certain substances” in their cauldrons and have come up with a way of turning cannabis into   high-performance energy storage devices.

They “cooked” cannabis bark into carbon nanosheets and built supercapacitors “on a par with or better than graphene”.

We guess that it will be the first computer to run for several hours before insisting on a pizza and several boxes of pringles.

According to ASC Nano, which we get for the “Where is the green Nanowire” competition, Dr David Mitlin of Clarkson University, New York said that people were always asking him “why hemp” and his answer is “why not”.

He said he could dash off graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price  and we’re doing it with waste.

Now the hemp that he is growing is legal and is not the sort of stuff that gets you stoned. He said that there was absolutely no overlap in his recreational activities.

In countries including China, Canada and the UK, hemp can be grown industrially for clothing and building materials.

The only problem is that the leftover bast fibre – the inner bark – typically ends up as landfill.

Dr Mitlin’s team looked at the fibres and recycled them into supercapacitors that rely on sharp bursts of power. In electric cars, for example, supercapacitors are used for regenerative braking.

Graphene might be great for commercial supercapacitors, it is prohibitively expensive to produce and hemp based versions might be a lot more useful.

Mitlin’s team experimented with all flavours of biowaste – from peat moss to eggs. Most recently, they turned banana peel into batteries.

He said that with banana peels, you can turn them into a dense block of carbon – we call it pseudo-graphite – and that’s great for sodium ion batteries,” he explained.

“But if you look at hemp fibre its structure is the opposite – it makes sheets with high surface area – and that’s very conducive for super capacitors.”

Mitlin’s peer-reviewed journal paper ranks the device “on par with or better than commercial graphene-based devices”.

Hemp cannot do all the things graphene can, but for energy storage, it works just as well. And it costs a fraction of the price -$500-1,000 a tonne.”

Blue screens hit Black Tuesday

Posted on August 15, 2014 by - News

Backstreet_Boys_-_Black_&_Blue_album_coverThree different patches from this week’s Black Tuesday crop are causing Blue Screens of Da’ath,   causing some users to plunge into the abyss.

MS14-045/KB 2984615 kernel-mode driver patches, KB2976897 and KB2982791, have been implicated in triggering Blue Screen Stop 0x50 messages since users starting updating their systems this week.

Most of the people suffering from most of the glitches say they are using 64-bit Windows 7 but the  Windows 8.1 “Update 2” fix that adds the ruble character as an official currency marker in Win 8.x and Win7, KB 2970228, also seems to be causing the problem, too.

There is no word from Microsoft on the problem yet, but it would appear that if you have not upgraded your system on Patch Tuesday it might be a good idea not to do so for little while.

You just knew that something was going to go wrong when you saw the number of patches that Microsoft was asking you to install.

Microsoft released 41 updates, including one that fixed an Internet Explorer vulnerability that may allows hackers to take control of a computer.

Included in the updates were two patches that were meant to fix “critical” problems. The first one, with the title “Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer,” addresses 26 vulnerabilities: one publicly disclosed and 25 that were privately reported. In the most severe cases, the vulnerability may allow attackers to have the same rights as the legitimate user. The security hole can be exploited when a user views a malicious website using Internet Explorer. Before the patch, users who had administrative rights on their computers were more susceptible to the security flaw.

Another critical patch, with the Bulletin ID MS14-043, is meant to fix a security flaw in Windows Media Centre that may also allow for remote code execution.

Aside from the critical patches, there were updates that have been labelled as “Important.” The software that have been tapped for the patches include OneNote, SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint Server, .NET Framework and Microsoft Windows itself. The problems range from the remote code execution, elevation of privileges and security features bypass.

 

Gartner thinks of Internet of Thongs

Posted on August 15, 2014 by - News

LOD_Cloud_Diagram_as_of_September_2011While the Internet of Fangs is not with us yet, analysts at Gartner claim that the hype surrounding it has reached its peak.

Each year the research firm puts out a Hype Cycle of emerging technologies, in which it provides a report card for various trends and buzzwords.

This year the Internet of Thongs (IoT) tops the list above some other words such as wearable user interface and consumer 3D printing.

Gartner believes that emerging technologies go through a natural process in which they are triggered by some innovation, then they rise to a peak of inflated expectations.

Big G thinks that as the technologies mature, markets become hacked off that they failed to bring about a cure for cancer before they start to become mainstream and just part of everyday technology.

This year the list is topped by IoT, wearable user interfaces and natural-language question answering which are also just about at the top of their hype. All three of those technologies will be commonplace in the market within 5 to 10 years, Gartner predicts.

Some buzzwords do make it into the mainstream. Cloud computing was something that as just hype and talked about non-stop before it became real. Hybrid Cloud Computing is headed that way, but was still more hyped. Not to mention Chipzilla and the Vole.

Big Data and in-memory database management systems are just beyond the peaks of their hype, while gamification which is when you give rewards using game techniques is coming down from its peak hype. Last year, big data topped the list as the most buzzworthy of tech terms.

3D printing appears everywhere.  Consumer 3D printing is at the peak of its hype, while enterprise 3D printing and 3D scanning are both maturing toward mainstream, according to Gartner.

Gartner has a look that the buzzwords of tomorrow too. These include autonomous vehicles, predictive analytics, smart robots, holographic displays, software-defined anything, quantum computing and the connected home.

Gartner said that its hype graph is useful for companies to work out when it is the best time to release their product.

What worries us is when the Tibetan monks jump on the bandwagon and we get the Internet of No-Things.

Qualcomm is in denial

Posted on August 15, 2014 by - News

bad-dogQualcomm, under investigation for possible monopolistic practices in China, said it had no direct financial links with an antitrust expert.

Zhang Xinzhu, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and one of China’s leading antitrust experts was sacked from a government advisory post after state media reported he had received payments from Qualcomm.

Qualcomm is being investigated by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), one of China’s three antitrust regulators, over how the company licenses its patents and prices its chipsets.

The chipmaker did not hire Zhang directly. When it was investigated by the NDRC it hired Global Economics Group to produce an economic analysis for submission to the regulator. Global Economics Group employed Zhang Xinzhu.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday that Zhang had been fired from the State Council’s expert commission on competition issues for taking “huge rewards” from Qualcomm. The implication was that Qualcomm had been bribing Zhang to suggest that the regulators should be nice to the American chipmaker.

Qualcomm paid Global Economics its standard rates for the firm’s services,” Trimble said, and did not have “any financial dealings” with Zhang directly.

Qualcomm’s analysis was submitted to the NDRC in May and had three principal authors, including Zhang.

The Chinese said that Zhang had “contravened work discipline” and been removed from his position on the anti-monopoly committee.

The news agency said “certain multinational companies” had been attempting to delay antitrust probes, including spending money to gain support on experts groups and complaining of being picked on for being foreign.

“Against this backdrop, hiring relevant ‘experts’ from government departments to ‘speak on behalf of foreign companies’ is a violation of discipline … This matter should be gotten to the bottom of and bought to light,” Xinhua said.

The 21-member anti-monopoly academic experts group from which Zhang was dismissed was established in 2011. The group is seen to serve the principal role of providing the bureaucracy with the supporting arguments needed to justify its industrial policy aims.

But Zhang has been critical of the NDRC, and claimed that the regulator had acted outside of its jurisdiction and misused antitrust principles. It appears that the regulator, might just want him out of the way.

Don’t plug an iPhone into a PC

Posted on August 14, 2014 by - News

Apple_iPhone_5_white-330x330Security experts at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered that Apple’s already dismal record on security on its iPhone is made worse when the shiny toy is plugged into a  computer.

The attack takes advantage of design problems in iOS in which for some reason the Apple geniuses believed that they should trust anyone who connects to the phone with a USB,

Tielei Wang, a co-author of the study and research scientist at the institute said that Apple overtrusted the USB connection.

It all started when Wan and his team developed some malware called Jekyll, an iPhone application with well-masked malicious functions that passed Apple’s inspection and briefly ended up on its App Store.

However, that was not good enough, as it was pointed out that no one could see his or her malware in the huge App store.

Wang said they set out to find a way to infect a large number of iOS devices and one that didn’t rely on people downloading their malicious app.  The attack required the use of “botnet herders” to install malware onto PCs.

Apple requires a person to be logged into his account in order to download an application from the App Store. Wang and the researchers developed a man-in-the-middle attack that tricked the Apple device that’s connected to a computer into authorising the download of an application using someone else’s Apple ID.

As long as the application still has Apple’s digital signature, it does not even need to still be in the App Store and can be supplied from elsewhere.

To stop Apple refusing to publish the malware on its App store Wang’s team found they could sneak a developer-provisioning file onto an iOS device when it was connected via USB to a computer.

This allows a self-signed malicious application to be installed. Legitimate applications could also be removed and substituted for look-alike malicious ones. All this can be done without a user knowing.

While it sounds convoluted, it is worthwhile if you are attempting to take over a large number of iOS devices.

It is also worthwhile if you are state-sponsored hackers wanting to carry out a targeted attacks aimed at just a few users.

Apple has known about the problem for nearly a year now and is yet to fix it.  At the moment, Wang said, the best advice is to not connect your phone to a computer, especially if you think the computer might be infected with malware.

 

“Murderer” relied on Apple to hide body

Posted on August 14, 2014 by - News

appleThe award for the most stupid Apple fanboy of the year has to go to a bloke who relied on Apple’s Siri to find him a good place to hide the body of his murder victim.

A Florida man currently on trial for murder reportedly attempted to use Siri to garther ideas about where to bury the body of his dead roommate, a court was told.

Prosecutors said that a University of Florida student named Pedro Bravo was incandescent with rage with his roommate in late September of 2012 over a dispute involving an ex- girlfriend and strangled him

Bravo then turned on Siri on his iPhone and entered the following query, “I need to hide my roommate”.

Siri was rather helpful and asked him what kind of place he was looking for? Swamps. Reservoirs. Metal Foundries. Dumps.

Following Siri’s advice, police say he buried the body in a makeshift grave in a forest close to Bravo’s apartment. During the same period he asked Siri for advice on where to hide the body, also used a flashlight app nine times which detectives think helped him see while he buried the body.

What Bravo did not know was that during a murder inquiry, Siri will squeal like a stuck pig to the cops and all computer records are handed over.

The trial is continuing, and even if Bravo didn’t do it, his conversation with Siri makes him look a little suspicious.

 

Routers start to forget the net

Posted on August 14, 2014 by - News

forget-it-forget-me-1962(1)The worldwide web is slowing down as routers start to forget about some parts of the internet.

Internet speeds are slowing and some sites would not load because Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing tables have hit the limit, and older routers are failing.

Many tier-one internet service providers (ISPs), and in turn, the last mile ISPs they support are providing bad service throughout the US and some parts of Canada.

Level 3, AT&T, Cogent, Sprint, Verizon, and others have suffered from serious performance problems at various times on yesterday and it is likely to get worse.

Some Web hosting companies, such as LiquidWeb, and its sites have been effectively knocked offline.

BGP is the routing protocol used to share the master routes, or map, of the internet. Some routers have to process 512K routes which is much more than they were designed to handle. Some old hardware and software is just crashing or ignore newly learned routes in protest.

Internet engineers knew this problem was coming was early as May and predicted that something unpleasant was going to hit the fan in August. In fact, they were lucky that it did peak in August as most of Europe is closed.

It is strange that the telcos did not heed the warning, rush out, and buy some newer routers. Apparently, they were too busy fiddling or something. So it looks like telcos and ISPs are having to call their engineers back off their hols to fix the problem. However, it does mean that the internet is going to be rubbish for a couple of weeks.

Wikipedia shocked by hatred

Posted on August 13, 2014 by - News

walesThe Wikimedia movement’s 10th Wikimania conference at the London Barbican  turned out a little more badly than expected.

Normally the event is a love fest between the editors and staff of Wikipedia all centred on the founder Jimmy Wales.

But according to wikipediocracy  the event was spoiled as the British Press failed to share the love and kicked the event to death.

Wales made the mistake of being interviewed in a Newsnight interview with James O’Brien, in which Wales insisted that the right to be forgotten only covered links and should adjudicated by a court of law.

Wales is a member of Google’s advisory board and his theory is that European taxpayers should pay, without limitation, for their already-overburdened court systems to deal with every single revenge-porn complaint Google receives under the ruling.

However Wales should have chosen his sparing person a little more carefully  O’Brien, has been repeatedly defamed in his Wikipedia biography has little love for the way Wackypedia operates.

“I could go on Wikipedia now and describe you as believing in fairies and a man whose – I don’t know – favourite drink is the blood of freshly slaughtered kittens. That’s neither history nor truth, but it could be on Wikipedia,” O’Brien snarled at Wales.

When Wales started laughing O’Brien growled:  “It’s not funny, if you’re sort of an ordinary person and you have a degree of public profile, and people have deliberately altered your Wikipedia page. I have spoken publicly about my children having been born as a result of fertility treatment. And my Wikipedia page, which I didn’t even know existed, contained a phrase along the lines of ‘he wasn’t man enough to impregnate his own wife’. That was there for weeks, months possibly, until my wife found it. Shouldn’t that be your priority?”

All Wales could come up with was that it was up to the victims to police his site.

What Wales did not get was that that three years of their own spying scandals, the UK press is big on privacy so when Wales proudly tried to put a positive spin on their refusal to grant any of the 304 “content removal requests” wackypedia had received in the past two years, it came out badly.

The Guardian published a profile of Wales that referred to his past as an “internet pornographer” and said that Wikipedia is populated by “self-selecting cliques” that pay more attention to the site’s coverage of female porn stars than to its listing of women writers.

Ironically Wikimania ended with a presentation by Jimmy Wales on “civility”. This seemed to involve talking about users who have a reputation in the community for creating good content, and for being incredibly toxic personalities.

Wales said, stating that “these editors cost us more than they’re actually worth”. It was a “big mistake” to tolerate them, he continued, receiving rapturous applause.

At least he has learned something.

Senators fire rocket at SpaceX

Posted on August 13, 2014 by - News

spacex-grasshopperIt seems that SpaceX has rattled the chains of the defence establishment and is doing its job a little too well.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is putting payloads into orbit for less money than the big government contractors charge and it appears that has angered those in the defence community who have been making a fair bit of dosh flogging more expensive projects and gear to NASA.

In the US when a corporate feels threatened it uses one of its tame lobby senators to go on the attack and so far their weapon of choice has been Senator Richard Shelby. He threw needless layers of bureaucracy at SpaceX .

Now it appears that more senators have been drawn in on the side of the other defence contractors.

Three House members—Mike Coffman, Mo Brooks, and Cory Gardner have sent a memo to NASA demanding that the agency investigate what they call “an epidemic of anomalies” with SpaceX missions.

The three are insisting that as a contractor, the company should be accountable to the American taxpayer. On this they are on a sticky wicket. According to Space News, NASA did not actually pay for the development of the Falcon 9; Elon Musk did so there is no public funds being used to develop the rockets in the first place.

The three senators are also moaning that SpaceX has experienced launch delays and other problems that has prevented payloads getting into space. However that is normal and it is unlikely that NASA could have done any better.

The congressmen’s complaint that SpaceX is behind schedule is also deeply ironic when the Sentator’s chum’s own project NASA’s Space Launch System—a next generation rocket that is supposed to replace the Shuttle—is also delayed.

Space expert Phil Plait  thinks that what the big defence contractors are worried about is that the space launch system is so behind that  SpaceX is catching up with its Dragon V2 and the Falcon Heavy which will launch next year.  The Space Launch System will not test launch until 2017.

Plait said that it is a transparent attempt from members of our Congress to hinder a privately owned company that threatens their own interests.

Boeing, which is the major SLS contractor has a big plant in Alabama, Brooks’ and Shelby’s home state. The United Launch Alliance has its HQ in Colorado, home to Gardner and Coffman – coincidence perhaps?

 

App promises to shut up Satan

Posted on August 13, 2014 by - News

devilA phone App is marketing itself with the magical ability of causing the Satan, the Prince of Darkness, and infernal ruler of the world, to stop speaking.

The Shut Up, Devil! App, is based on the concept that whenever the Devil shows up, a good Christian user is unable to remember a pithy bible verse which can be guaranteed to send Satan back to where he lives.  Our last known contact address for Satan was the troubled Northborough Estate in Slough.

While Christians cannot carry a bible with them, they do always have a mobile phone, which makes it apparently appropriate to use to call an invisible friend to deal with an invisible enemy.

It is bible search with a category for just about any issue you face—anxiety, depression, fear, lustful thoughts about your neighbour’s dog etc.

Select a category and you’re presented with related cards. Each card features a relevant scripture and a personalised version designed for you to read aloud like a magic spell to make the devil run away. You can share a card with your friends on your social networks which will make sure that you keep them.

The press release we have says:

“Thousands already use the app and report transformed thinking and great victory in spiritual warfare. I know that you’ll experience the same, and in just a short time you’ll realize that you’re no longer under attack—you are on the attack!”

The app conception stemmed from Charisma House’s upcoming book, Silence Satan by Kyle Winkler, which releases in September. Winkler is founder of Kyle Winkler Ministries, a media and teaching ministry broadcasting on the Christian Television Network. It is available on the iPhone and Android so is truly interdenominational.

Satan was too busy running a Tea party meeting in Texas to respond to our calls.

 

Firmware has more holes than Blackburn Lancashire

Posted on August 13, 2014 by - News

the_beatles_yellow_submarineA team of security experts has discovered that the code for firmware is so badly constructed that it could form an attack vector of cyber attacks.

Researchers with Eurecom, a technology-focused graduate school in France, developed a web crawler that plucked more than 30,000 firmware images from the websites of manufacturers including Siemens, Xerox, Bosch, Philips, D-Link, Samsung, LG and Belkin.

They found code which contained poorly-protected encryption mechanisms and backdoors that could allow access to devices. They reported all the problems to the vendors, but it had not been realised how bad the problem really was until now.

In one instance, the researchers found a Linux kernel that was 10 years out of date bundled in a recently released firmware image.

Aurélien Francillon, a coauthor of the study and an assistant professor in the networking and security department at Eurecom said that most of the firmware analysed was in consumer devices, a competitive arena where companies often release products quickly to stay ahead of rivals.

This has an ethos of being first and cheap and to do that you don’t want a secure device.

US Patent Office is lazy

Posted on August 12, 2014 by - News

lazyThe US Patent Office has found out that one of the reasons why so many obvious patents are awarded to trolls might be because the US Patent Office is jolly lazy.

Following several whistleblower complaints, the US Patent and Trademark Office began an internal investigation two years ago into a programme which allowed employees to work from home.

Some of the 8,300 patent examiners, about half of whom work from home full time, lied about  hours they were putting in and received bonuses for work they didn’t do. While supervisors knew what they were doing, top agency officials blocked their efforts.

Effectively examiners could do what they like, when they liked, and charge what they like and do basically nothing.

To make matters worse, when it came time last summer for the patent office to turn over the findings to its outside watchdog, the most damaging revelations had “disappeared.”

The final report sent to Commerce Department Inspector General Todd Zinser concluded that it was impossible to know if the whistle-blowers’ allegations of systemic abuses were true.  This was different from the original USPO report which described systematic abuse of the system.

The agency’s army of examiners and other officials has been falling behind, with a backlog of patent applications swelling to more than 600,000 and estimated waiting times of more than five years.

Chief communications officer Todd Elmer called the original report a “rough draft for discussion purposes” that was an “initial attempt to describe the full investigation record”.

We guess he means that the first report got his department into so much trouble it was better to prepare a report that said there were not problems here and no one would have be fired.

Elmer said that the original report was looked at by a lawyer who said that most of the allegations were unproved so they had to be ignored. This is a little odd because both versions of the report were written by chief administrative officer Frederick Steckler.

Our guess is that the US Patent Office will be providing material for trolls for many years at this rate.

McDonald’s takes control of lost satellite

Posted on August 12, 2014 by - News

mcdonaldsAn independent team of boffins, working from an abandoned McDonalds, is taking control of a a NASA satellite and running a crowdfunded mission. The entire project uses old radio parts from eBay and a salvaged flat screen TV.

The ISEE-3 is a disco-era satellite that used to measure space weather like solar wind and radiation, but went out of commission decades ago.

Now, a small team led by a former NASA employee Keith Cowing,  has taken control of the satellite with NASA’s blessing.

The satellite’s battery has been dead for over 20 years, but it had solar panels to power 98 percent of the satellite’s full capabilities. When it was working it ran missions around the Moon and Earth, and flew through the tail of a comet.

Everyone knew it would come back in 2014, but NASA was not sure it was a project worth rescuing.

Since the satellite went offline, the team had retired, the documentation was lost and the equipment became outdated.

A crowdfunding campaign raised $160,000 to get the satellite back into service.

At the outset of the crowdfunding campaign, they brought the idea to NASA, but there was no precedent on which to base an agreement. No external organization has ever taken command of a spacecraft, but NASA didn’t want to say no, so they asked the team if they needed any help.

Their new control centre, has been dubbed “McMoon’s.” For their console, they pulled a broken flatscreen TV from a government dumpster and fixed the power supply. The other pieces are from eBay, including a Mac laptop and some radio parts.

With just those bare-bones pieces, they were able to MacGyver a computer-radio hybrid that made contact with the ISEE-3.

Once they were able to communicate with the satellite, they established a new orbit around the Sun, slightly larger than the Earth’s orbit. This will allow more testing. It will be providing solar weather data and then open sourcing it.

Google has been helping the team build a site that will open up the data to the world. Everything coming from the satellite will be available in different formats and packages so that anyone can get it.

 

NSA makes many become one

Posted on August 11, 2014 by - News

shoe phoneBoffins at Carnegie Mellon University, sponsored by the US’s number one spying outfit, has come up with a programming Esperanto which unites all different programming languages under a single umbrella.

Any excitement about the development is that since it is funded by the NSA it will be full of backdoors which can harvest personal details on behalf of the US government, but you can still admire the technology.

Dubbed Wyvern which was a mythical dragon-like thing that only has two legs instead of four it helps programmers design apps and websites without having to rely on a whole bunch of different stylesheets and different amalgamations spread across different files.

Jonathan Aldrich, the researcher developing the language, wrote in his blog that Web applications are written as a poorly-coordinated mishmash of artifacts written in different languages, file formats, and technologies. For example, a web application may consist of JavaScript code on the client, HTML for structure, CSS for presentation, XML for AJAX-style communication, and a mixture of Java, plain text configuration files, and database software on the server.

“This diversity increases the cost of developers learning these technologies. It also means that ensuring system-wide safety and security properties in this setting is difficult, he said.

This creates security problems, which was why the NSA was interested. After all it has protect its own systems from hackers.

Wyvern can automatically tell what language a person is programming in, based solely on the type of data that’s being manipulated. That means that if the language detects you are editing a database, for instance, it’ll automatically assume you’re using SQL. The language is still a prototype and is all open saucy

Megacorps get the hard word

Posted on August 11, 2014 by - News

Judge-DreedA settlement between Apple, three other IT outfits and their employees has been rejected by a judge saying it was too low given the strength of the case against the employers.

Apple, Google, Intel  and Adobe failed to persuade  US District Judge Lucy Koh to sign off on a $324.5 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit by tech workers, who accused the firms of conspiring to avoid poaching each other’s employees.

Koh in San Jose, California, said there was “substantial and compelling evidence” that Apple Messiage founder Steve Jobs “was a, if not the, central figure in the alleged conspiracy,” Koh wrote

In their 2011 lawsuit, the tech employees said the conspiracy had limited their job mobility and, as a result, kept a lid on salaries. The case has been closely watched because of the possibility of big damages being awarded and for the opportunity to peek into the world of some of America’s elite tech outfits.

The whole case was based largely on emails in which Jobs and Google’s  Eric Schmidt hatched plans to avoid poaching each other’s prized engineers.

In rejecting the settlement, Koh referred to one email exchange which occurred after a Google recruiter solicited an Apple employee. Schmidt told Jobs that the recruiter would be fired. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt’s note to a top Apple human resources executive with a smiley face.

The four companies agreed to settle with the workers in April shortly before trial. The plaintiffs had planned to ask for about $3 billion in damages at trial, which could have tripled to $9 billion under antitrust law.

The plaintiffs are worried because workers faced serious risks on appeal had the case gone forward.

But Koh repeatedly referred to a related settlement last year involving Disney and Intuit. Apple and Google workers got proportionally less in the latest deal compared to the one involving Disney under the settlement.

To match the earlier settlement, the latest deal “would need to total at least $380 million,” Koh wrote.

A further hearing in the case is scheduled for September 10.