Court rules cell phone passcodes protected under Fifth Amendment

The federal district court in Eastern Pennsylvania has ruled that plaintiffs in the case SEC v. Bonan Huang et al cannot be compelled to give up the passcode to their cell phones. At issue was whether the defendants could be forced to give up passcodes to devices that were provided by their employer, but secured by passcodes chosen by the employees themselves.

The question of whether or not defendants can be required to unlock a personal device has generally been answered “No,” but the SEC argued that these were products owned by a corporation and merely provided to employees. The men in question, Bonan and Nan Huang, are accused of insider trading, turning a $150K initial investment into more than $2.8 million through illegal profiteering.

VW diesel scandal spreads to Audi, Porsche — and possibly even BMW

Fallout from the Volkswagen diesel scandal continues to grow, as this morning brings reports that Audi’s head of research and development Ulrich Hackenberg and Porsche’s engine chief Wolfgang Hatz are both out — two of the top engineering figures in the Volkswagen’s other flagship brands. That comes as a bit of a surprise, even though it’s widely expected more heads will roll at VW aside from Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of the company’s worldwide operations, who resigned effective yesterday.

Nvidia launches overclock-friendly GTX 980 desktop GPU for gaming laptops

Earlier this month, we covered Asus’insane water-cooled laptop and the appearance of a new Nvidia GPU that looked for all the world like a GTX 980 desktop chip in a mobile form factor. Today, Nvidia is taking the lid off that particular project — and it’s even crazier than we thought it was. Putting a GTX 980 in a notebook chassis is a bit nuts, even if these systems are only portable in the same way that a five-gallon bucket is portable.