Insurance goes to court over cyberattacks. Mondelez International Inc. and Merck, two victims of 2017's NotPetya cyberstrike, are suing insurers for rejecting claims related to the attack. Some of the insurers are falling back on what the New York Times calls a "rarely used" clause in contracts: "war exclusion," where insurers aren't responsible for costs related to damage from war.
Not helping: White House linked act to wider conflict. "In a statement in 2018, the White House described NotPetya as 'part of the Kremlin’s ongoing effort to destabilize Ukraine',” the Times reports.
Whereas previously... John Carlin, the assistant attorney general at the Justice Department under the Obama administration, said the White House specifically avoided linking North Korea's 2014 attack on Sony Entertainment to cyberwar in part because they thought it would trigger the clause.
VW recognizes China's self-driving expertise. With five R&D sites and 4,000 engineers in China, the auto maker expects the region to supply the bulk of software development for its autonomous-vehicle effort, Reuters reports. The company's car chief in China tells Reuters that coders there soon "will be able to do 15 to 20 million lines of programming code on an annual basis.”
YouTube appended a "September 11 attacks" panel below some Notre Dame fire livestreams. "These panels are triggered algorithmically and our systems sometimes make the wrong call," according to a spokesperson.
In-the-field medical diagnosis by smartphone. The $2,000 Butterfly iQ, an ultrasound scanner that attaches to an iPhone, is allowing doctors to bring medical imaging to remote communities, far from the nearest X-ray machine and where an early diagnosis for pneumonia can be a lifesaver. The New York Times reports on the effect of the iPhone-enabled device from western Uganda.
SpaceX is raising $500 million. The fundraising amid internal questions about the viability of an internet-via-satellite business considered key to the company’s growth, the WSJ reports. Some industry estimates suggest it will cost $10 billion to launch Starlink, a proposed constellation that eventually could amount to many as 11,000 satellites providing broadband connectivity world-wide. The largest such network operating today has fewer than 100 satellites aloft.
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