Google trade-secrets case seen as warning to Silicon Valley. Traditionally, trade-secrets-theft cases have been brought by U.S. companies against a former employee. But the federal indictment announced last week against driverless-car engineer Anthony Levandowski is being viewed as a warning to Silicon Valley that prosecutors may scrutinize defections to competitors that involve sensitive technology.
Mr. Levandowski is accused of taking more than 14,000 files a month before he resigned from Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo and later went to work for Uber Technologies Inc. (WSJ)
More Google: Company targeted in antitrust probe. More than 30 U.S. state attorneys general plan to pursue an investigation into Google for potential antitrust violations. (Washington Post)
The challenges with being the world's first ambassador to tech. Casper Klyngem, who has worked in Afghanistan and Kosovo, calls his posting to Silicon Valley, as Denmark's diplomat to the tech giants, among his toughest jobs yet. For one, he still hasn't been able to land an audience with Mark Zuckerberg or Sundar Pichai or Tim Cook. “These companies have moved from being companies with commercial interests to actually becoming de facto foreign policy actors,” he said. (New York Times)
Parents not quite digging the electronic classroom. The widespread prevalence of technology in American schools has been jarring for large numbers of parents, teachers and administrators—many of whom were big proponents just a few years ago. Not only have teaching apps and digital courses failed to bolster academic results in many regions, but parents are already worried about the amount of time their children spend attached to digital devices.
Students or guinea pigs? Now comes a report from the National Education Policy Center that finds the rapid adoption of the mostly proprietary technology in education to be rife with “questionable educational assumptions...self-interested advocacy by the technology industry, serious threats to student privacy and a lack of research support.” (WSJ)
Martin Chavez, Goldman Sachs’s coder-in-chief, to retire. Mr. Chavez, who had once been considered a potential chief executive of the company and has been a co-head of its trading arm for the past 10 months, will retire at the end of the year, The Wall Street Journal's Liz Hoffman reports. A computer programmer who came up in Goldman's trading arm, Mr. Chavez championed its push to open up its internal technology to clients when he was CIO from 2013 to 2017.
Quote. “Everyone looked to the West Coast, and saw how Silicon Valley” was sharing information and making use of their analytic capabilities," Mr. Chavez told the WSJ in a 2015 interview.
Apple AirPods: Love ’em, lose ’em. The sleek white apostrophes that resemble electric toothbrush heads are slippery, small and easily pop out of ears. They are also way expensive, with wearers "MacGyvering" solutions to retrieve a 'pod stuck under sewer grates or on subway tracks. (WSJ)
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