Bytes: What’s new in tech

Google wins spying case

Silicon Valley’s biggest industrial espionage scandal led to a $179 million judgment last week against a former Google engineer, said Thomas Ricker in TheVerge.com. Anthony Levandowski, a pioneer in self-driving car technology, has been “embroiled in several legal actions since being accused of stealing 14,000 documents from Google containing proprietary information about the company’s self-driving program.” In August, he was charged with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft by federal prosecutors. Google pursued its own case against Levandowski for poaching employees, and this ruling “upholds the award Google won in arbitration” in December. Levandowski left Google to start an autonomous trucking company, Otto, that was acquired by Uber for $600 million; Uber fired him in 2017.

A tourism deal for SpaceX

The private space company Axiom has “forged a partnership with SpaceX to fly paying tourists to the International Space Station” for 10day trips as soon as the second half of 2021, said Mariella Moon in Engadget.com. Axiom is the company that NASA chose to provide a “commercial destination module”—essentially a space hotel—attached to the space station.

SpaceX will ferry three tourists at a time, and an Axiom staff member, taking one day to reach the station and one to return. Axiom has previously put the price of a ticket at $55 million. NASA will get only a very small fraction of that—$35,000 a night for each visitor. A key job of the staff member: making sure that the space tourists “don’t interfere with the NASA crew members doing their job.”

New tools to stop child porn

A new bill could hold tech companies accountable for the sharing of child abuse imagery, said Michael Keller in The New York Times, by carving an exemption in Section 230. That provision in the 1996 Communications Decency Act protects companies from liability for content uploaded on their platforms by users. However, last year “tech companies reported nearly 70 million images and videos related to online child exploitation,” and victim advocates say they have not done enough to combat the sharing of illegal imagery. The bipartisan Senate legislation would also “create a 19-member commission to recommend strategies” for spotting and categorizing illegal material. U.S. agencies also released a set of voluntary guidelines developed in conjunction with the tech industry.