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      Elizabeth Holmes appeals conviction, 11-year sentence despite bleak outlook

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 6 December, 2022 - 13:14

    Elizabeth Holmes (C), founder and former CEO of blood-testing and life sciences company Theranos, walks with her mother Noel Holmes and partner Billy Evans into the federal courthouse for her sentencing hearing on November 18, 2022, in San Jose, California.

    Enlarge / Elizabeth Holmes (C), founder and former CEO of blood-testing and life sciences company Theranos, walks with her mother Noel Holmes and partner Billy Evans into the federal courthouse for her sentencing hearing on November 18, 2022, in San Jose, California. (credit: Getty | AMY OSBORNE )

    Disgraced biotech founder Elizabeth Holmes has appealed her criminal fraud conviction and federal prison sentence—a move that was widely anticipated but is seen as unlikely to succeed.

    Holmes was convicted in January on four counts of defrauding investors of her now-defunct blood-testing startup, Theranos, resulting in millions of dollars in loss. Holmes, along with her former romantic partner and Theranos COO, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, falsely claimed that their technology could perform more than 200 medical tests with just a few drops of blood. Balwani's sentencing is scheduled for December 7.

    Two weeks ago, Judge Edward Davila of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, who proceeded over the exhaustive trial, sentenced Holmes to 11 years and 3 months in federal prison.

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      Elizabeth Holmes loses bid for new trial despite bizarre visit from key witness

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 8 November, 2022 - 23:16

    Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes (center) arrives at federal court with her father, Christian Holmes, and partner, Billy Evans, on October 17 in San Jose, California. Holmes appeared in federal court related to an attempt to overturn her fraud conviction.

    Enlarge / Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes (center) arrives at federal court with her father, Christian Holmes, and partner, Billy Evans, on October 17 in San Jose, California. Holmes appeared in federal court related to an attempt to overturn her fraud conviction. (credit: Getty | Justin Sullivan )

    Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the defunct blood-testing startup Theranos, lost her bid for a new fraud trial. That's despite the dramatic twist in the case last month, with Holmes winning a last-minute hearing over a bizarre incident in which the government's star witness against her showed up distraught and disheveled at her home.

    Holmes, who was convicted in January on four counts of criminal fraud for deceiving investors, is now scheduled for sentencing on November 18.

    In a ruling filed late Monday, US District Judge Edward Davila flatly denied Holmes' motions for a new trial, concluding that they didn't include new information relating to her case or establish any misconduct by government prosecutors.

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      Movim 0.10 - Holmes

      Timothée Jaussoin · pubsub.movim.eu / Movim · Thursday, 18 August, 2016 - 19:04 edit · 6 minutes

    A few months after Movim 0.9 - Tchouri, here comes a new release of Movim, the decentralized social network! Labeled 0.10, it offers many major improvements both in the project core and in the features offered to end users.

    This new release confirms Movim's position as a serious alternative to other messaging solutions such as Telegram, WhatsApp or Slack. Movim’s goal is to finally deliver a free (as in free speech) communication platform, built with ease-of-use and pleasantness in mind, on top of very reliable standards such as XMPP and Atom, already widely deployed and tested.

    Indeed, instead of creating yet-another closed network as many other projects (whether free or not) have done before, Movim uses the XMPP protocol and actively takes part in improving it.

    Articles management

    Articles management has been a bit reworked:

    • you can now assign tags with accents and special chars to your piece of news
    • public articles will be accessible throughout the whole XMPP network, not just the Movim pod where it was published
    • the « News » page now displays latest public articles from the whole network

    Furthermore, tags and comments of deleted articles are now correctly cleaned (on the XMPP network but also in the Movim local cache database). Pictures management inside content of articles was a little bit reworked as well.

    Instant Messaging

    One of the main goals of this new release was to improve user experience and add some new features to the IM side of the project.

    Last Message Correction

    In this release, Movim implements XEP-0308 : Last Message Correction allowing users to correct the previous message using the ↑ key. This modification is compatible with many clients such as Conversations or Gajim.

    Stickers!

    Stickers support has been added to the project once again via the extension XMPP XEP-0231 : Bits of Binary allowing Movim users to send stickers to other clients such as Pidgin or Gajim.

    To celebrate this new feature, two sets of Creative Commons-licensed stickers have been created exclusively for the project.

    A racoon-themed set of 16 stickers drawn by Corine Tea (CC BY-SA), and a ZeMarmot movie set of 10 stickers drawn by Aryeom Han (CC BY-SA 4.0).

    The idea with these sets is to promote projects that share our values while offering people to use and share nice free stickers with their contacts.

    Thanks to the artists for their work! If you want to add your own stickers to the project, do not hesitate to contact us (room: movim@conference.movim.eu). :)

    And many other things...

    Along with the small user interface fixes and other user experience tweaks, some other changes have also been introduced.

    You can now edit the chat rooms configuration after adding them. You are also notified of new messages published in those chat rooms.

    Some new emojis have been added to the existing ones ;)

    A new algorithm for displaying chat bubbles now allows us to save some space by grouping messages sent by the same person within the same minute.

    Elsewhere in the project

    A new version of the Android client (available in the Playstore and in F-Droid) has been released following a redo of the notification system.

    The desktop client, based on Electron, has also been released in a new version. For now, it has only been packaged for Debian and Ubuntu, but we welcome all packaging effort for any other distributions or OS.

    More generally, the whole project interface has been through a redo to be correctly displayed on small screen.

    Be also advised that all Movim clients can be configured to work with non-official project instances. It means that if you set up your project's own instance (or pod), you'll be able to add it manually through the client loading screen.

    Global search

    In one click or using the Ctrl+M shortcut you can now launch the new global search panel. It will allow you to search instantly through your articles and contacts.

    This version has been named after this new feature; Holmes is indeed the family name of a respectable private eye but also the name of one of our solar system comet.

    Languages

    Thanks again to all the translators who have done some incredible work translating Movim to so many languages. The project is now (almost) completely translated to French, Polish, Danish, German, Spanish, Chinese, Dutch, Portuguese, Hebrew, Czech, Italian… and many other!

    Don't hesistate to come and help us on the translating tool Transifex ;)

    Performances, stability and memory

    Many improvements have been brought to the daemon which was introduced in the last version. It comes with improved performances but more importantly a noticeable decrease of memory consumption thanks to the sharing of some librairies between subprocesses (with a gain of more than 5Mo per session!).

    An important bug concerning Websockets handling which often led to an early shutdown of the session has been fixed. If you use Movim daily, this session can now stay open for several days or weeks!

    Interface and administration

    Administrators can now specify their own XMPP server when signin up into their instance. This is also part of the will of not limiting users wishing to set up their own instances without depending on the official servers.

    More generally, some parts (like story heads and lists) of the interface have been reworked to make browsing through Movim easier. The same has been done for the article style which now offers a better rendering of some HTML tags (like paragraphs, titles, quotes, or code extracts).

    File upload

    Some small improvements have been brought to the file uploading functionnality (which again is based on XMPP, XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload).

    Upload errors are now clearer and big images are resized and compressed on the fly.

    In short

    Initially thought as a minor update of the 0.9 version which had introduced an important rework, this release has finally turned into its own version: the 0.10.

    The heart of the project can now be considered as stable (even if there is still changes down the hill to optimize and improve Movim). Future versions will most likely look like this one in terms of content: better integration of the existing in the user environments, new functionalities which will complete the existing ones and better overall coherence.

    What's coming in Movim 0.11

    The project is still going strong, and the main lines of the futur version are already shaping up.

    One of the key feature of this version will be the improvement of information sharing inside Movim but also with its environment. For example, we plan to allow article sharing with contacts and chat room invites in only a few clicks.

    This version also marks the big return of Jingle in the project (which had dispappeared some versions ago following troubles concerning support and stability). Audio calls will most likely be implemented first. Some tests are also planned for the Android app.

    Integration with desktops client for Windows and MacOS will also among our development efforts. The main idea behind that being to be able to be present on a maximum of OS with large audience.

    Other surprises will also be coming in this new version. We'll tell you more in a coming article, stay tuned ;)

    Thanks to jaes, Christine Ho and all the other translators of this releasenote. The original article in French was published on LinuxFr.org!