News

Tufts University Expelled Student for Alleged Grade Hacking

Tech Crunch:

A day earlier, she was expelled from Tufts University veterinary school. As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. “as soon as possible.” That night, her plane departed the U.S. for her native Toronto, leaving any prospect of her becoming a veterinarian behind.

Filler, 24, was accused of an elaborate months-long scheme involving stealing and using university logins to break into the student records system, view answers, and alter her own and other students’ grades.

Struggling for answers and convinced her MacBook Air — the source of the alleged hacks — was itself compromised, she paid for someone through freelance marketplace Fiverr to scan her computer. Within minutes, several malicious files were found, chief among which were two remote access trojans — or RATs — commonly used by jilted or jealous lovers to spy on their exes’ webcams and remotely control their computers over the internet. The scan found two: Coldroot and CrossRAT. The former is easily deployed, and the other is highly advanced malware, said to be linked to the Lebanese government.

Evidence of a RAT might suggest someone had remote control of her computer without her knowledge. But existence of both on the same machine, experts say, is unlikely if not entirely implausible.

Filler took her computer to an Apple Store, claiming the “mouse was acting on its own and the green light for the camera started turning on,” she said. The support staff backed up her files but wiped her computer, along with any evidence of malicious software beyond a handful of screenshots she took as part of the dossier of evidence she submitted in her appeal.

This is straight out of hackers movie.

Andrew Yang Wants To Give Everyone Basic Income

Vice News:

Yang sees automation as inevitable and even beneficial, with medical AI leading to improved patient coverage, for instance, and self-driving cars leading to fewer crashes. Some of these proposals might sound outlandish; will many couples want an AI life coach to handle their marriage counseling?

Rather than resisting our robot replacements or counterparts, Yang wants to restructure the economy for a future where they prevail. “I love technology, I love innovation, I love progress,” Yang said in an interview. “What I don’t love is an economy that’s going to kick millions of Americans to the curb, and make it so that a relatively small handful of companies and individuals enjoy the benefits of all of this innovation.”

In Yang’s view, $1,000 a month—roughly the federal poverty line for a single-person household—is enough to scrape by, but not enough to lure people away from work. He calls it a “Freedom Dividend.” Yang is stumping up his own money in demonstration, offering a year of payments to one family in New Hampshire and one family in Iowa.

It’s inevitable that we’ll have to give people basic income eventually, once most repetitive laborious jobs are automated. Might not happen next year but it needs to enter the debate.

JS Infinite Alert Prank Code gets Japanese Girl in Serious Trouble

Ars Technica Reporting:

Explaining her actions, the girl said that she’d run into such pranks herself and thought it would be funny if someone clicked the link.

The Twitter user referenced in the message, 0_Infinity_, has a protected account, but the user left a message in their bio field suggesting that they don’t understand why there’s so much fuss about the script today, as it was written in 2014.

To protest the actions of the Japanese police and the absurdity of calling this act a crime, Tokyo developer Kimikazu Kato has published on GitHub a project called Let’s Get Arrested. Forking the project and then creating a branch named gh-pages will create a simple GitHub-hosted website that contains nothing but the infinitely looped alert, putting criminality at our fingertips.

for ( ; ; ) {
    window.alert("　∧_∧　ババババ\n（ ・ω・)=つ≡つ\n（っ ≡つ=つ\n`/　　)\n(ノΠＵ\n何回閉じても無駄ですよ～ww\nm9（＾Д＾）プギャー！！\n　byソル (@0_Infinity_)")
}

Calling her a criminal is totally absurd.

Samsung Galaxy Wireless Earbuds Review

The Verge reporting:

The Galaxy Buds are the most forgettable true wireless earbuds I’ve yet tried. I put them in, and they’re so light that I can forget I’m wearing them. That can also be said of the AirPods, except any nearby reflective surface will remind me of their presence on my head.

In my testing, I tried using the Galaxy Buds with a Pixel 3 XL, and that pairing quickly devolved into a nightmare. I was assaulted with a barrage of connection drop-offs and disconnects while casually walking down the street with the phone in my pocket. No other pair of wireless headphones has given me this much of a headache, but Google’s had its own woes with Bluetooth in the past, so let’s call that an unfortunate combination.

Samsung just does’t care about fine details.

Apple Rumored to Release AR headset glasses

The Verge:

Rumors that Apple is preparing to release its own AR headset have been around since 2017 when Bloomberg predicted that it could release a headset as early as 2019. A further report from CNET last year claimed that the headset could be released in 2020 and would offer a combination of both AR and VR.

Apple’s AR headset won’t be the first to rely on an external phone for its processing power. LG released a similar (albeit VR) headset alongside its G5 flagship back in 2016, while more recently, North’s Focals smart glasses (which the company produced after acquiring the technology portfolio behind Intel’s canceled Vaunt glasses) paired to a connected phone via Bluetooth. Just last month, chipmaker Qualcomm announced a dedicated platform to help manufacturers produce their own phone-connected AR or VR headsets.

I think it’s a dumb idea to work on AR headsets. We should get them into Car windshields first, etc. Humans should be last on the list.

Elizabeth Warren Wants To Break Up Google, Amazon, Facebook

Elizabeth Warren:

I want a government that makes sure everybody — even the biggest and most powerful companies in America — plays by the rules. And I want to make sure that the next generation of great American tech companies can flourish. To do that, we need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor.

That’s why my administration will make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition — including breaking up Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Breaking up the Bell systems in the 80s was considered a good thing.

Valve Lays Off VR Hardware Division

The Verge reporting:

Gaming company Valve confirmed today that it has laid off several full-time employees and contractors, possibly from its virtual reality hardware team. “Last month, 13 full time employees were let go and a portion of our contractor agreements were terminated. It’s an unfortunate part of business, but does not represent any major changes at the company.

Variety reports that today’s layoffs don’t mean that Valve is exiting VR, but it’s not clear whether that’s explicitly confirmed or simply implied from the promise that there weren’t “any major changes at the company.” It’s also possible that Valve could continue to work on SteamVR software but bow out of the hardware market.

On the bright side, the Knuckles drivers were updated last month, and Valve is advertising a job listing for a “VR and hardware” software engineer. Also, Oculus and HTC have both announced new headsets for 2019. So if Valve is still working on VR hardware, we might also hear about it this year.

VR isn’t yet ready for mainstream consumption. We’ve all jumped the gun.

Samsung Galaxy Watch Active Review 2019

The Verge:

The Active’s design is fairly generic. It comes in nicer colors than the black variant I reviewed, but all of them share the same understated style that almost looks like something Pebble would have made. It’s not flashy, but it works. The 20mm bands are easy to replace, as well.

But Samsung took something very important away from the Galaxy Watch Active: it lacks the rotating bezel that has proven to be an intuitive, natural, and fun control mechanism on the company’s other smartwatches. The Tizen Wearable OS 4.0 software is designed to put the display’s circular shape to good use, but navigating the Galaxy Watch Active can feel more finicky without the rotating bezel and its satisfying clicks.

For one, the watch’s software doesn’t really take into account this significant change in how you interact with it. The user experience is largely identical to that of the Galaxy Watch, and it’s clearly meant to work best with a rotating bezel that can quickly scroll through menus.

Translation: not as good as Apple.

Samsung Galaxy Foldable Smartphone Review

New York Magazine, Intelligencer:

It’s not just a matter of how smoothly the physical hinges work as the phone unfurls into tablet mode, but whether the underlying software is equally smooth. If I’m writing an email and want to expand out my workspace so I can drop in a link, how well does a folding phone handle that task? Smartphone UX still orbits entirely around the assumption that I, the user, focus on only one app at a time; there have been many attempts by various phone makers to make it easier to work in a split-screen mode, but none that I’ve tried that are satisfying to use.

Another make-or-break for folding phones: glass. As detailed by Brian Barrett in Wired, the folks at Corning, who supply the Gorilla Glass found in iPhones and a huge number of other smartphones, are working on creating scratch-resistant glass tensile enough to be used in a folding phone.

But there are two reasons why virtually every non-bendy smartphone on the market uses glass: it withstands scratches much better than plastic, and glass feels much better to the touch than plastic.

In 2017, Motorola tried to attack one of the biggest pain points for smartphone users with its Moto Z2 Force, featuring a “shatterproof” plastic screen. The phone was a dud — it picked up scratches remarkably fast, looked cloudy even before it got scratched up, and just felt cheap to the touch.

Seems more gimmicky than useful. With larger screens there is more battery consumption, which is not what anyone wants. What would be more useful is a way to use your phone as a desktop by plugging in a keyboard and monitor at your desk. Something like using your iPhone as an iMac at home.

The Black Keys Release First New Song in Five Years

Pitchfork:

The Black Keys have released a new song called “Lo/Hi.” It is the band’s first new music in five years. Check it out below.

The Black Keys’ last studio LP was 2014’s Turn Blue. In the time since that release, vocalist Dan Auerbach has dropped a solo LP called Waiting on a Song. Drummer Patrick Carney recently produced Calvin Johnson’s album A Wonderful Beast.

Spoiler alert: it’s good.

Listen below:

Elon Musk’s First Amendment Rights To Be Tested

The Verge reporting:

But while some lawyers indicated asking Musk to curtail his tweeting might raise First Amendment issues, it’s not entirely clear the First Amendment would protect Musk’s Twitter presence. A judge may have control over some of Musk’s speech because he’s an officer of a publicly traded company, said Ken White, a former US attorney and attorney at Brown White & Osborn LLP.

“The SEC can put fairly strict limits on a publicly traded company’s communications to prohibit and punish fraud and comply with securities rules,” he said in an email. These communications are “commercial speech,” which has less First Amendment protection than whatever Musk might say in his capacity as, you know, a human. “The exact contours of the SEC’s power in the face of a First Amendment challenge aren’t completely clear,” White wrote.

That might mean that a judge could make Musk delete his Twitter account or at least threaten to remove him from the CEO role unless he stops tweeting, on the grounds that the previous measure in the settlement didn’t work. But, says White, if Musk steps down from Tesla, the judge can’t stop him from tweeting.

Tesla Model 3 Review AutoSteer and AutoPilot

Ars Technica reporting:

Autosteer, when engaged, behaves more like a human driver than the best lane keeping systems we’ve tested from other car makers. Specifically, the car makes a lot of microcorrections to its line between the lane markings.

This doesn’t seem functionally better or worse than the more robotic nature of a system like Cadillac’s Super Cruise, but it was noteworthy. I did find that the Model 3’s software prefers to stick closer to the right-side lane marking than I’d prefer. This would be fine except for the occasions where your lane suddenly widens (for example when there’s an exit on a freeway).

In these instances, I found the Model 3 would lunge toward the right, sometimes alarmingly so, requiring me to override the steering input. For this reason alone, I would urge any Model 3 driver to always heed the car’s instructions to keep your hands on the wheel at all times.

Scary. We need safer cars not self driving cars.

Lakers, LeBron, Playoff chances mathematically improbable

SBnation:

The Los Angeles Lakers’ playoff chances aren’t mathematically zero, but they’re grim. As of March 5, LA trails the No. 8 seed San Antonio Spurs by 5.5 games with just 18 left to play. There’s less than six weeks for LeBron James and his teammates to figure out their defensive flaws and get a crack at postseason play.

That’s both statistically and realistically improbable. ESPN’s Basketball Power Index gives the Lakers less than a one percent chance of playing postseason ball, which is 1.2 percent lower than the odds it gives the New Orleans Pelicans.

Bad news for the greatest player of our gen.

Sony Officially Kills PS Vita

BBC News:

But despite its niche appeal, the Vita ultimately failed to live up to Sony’s expectations, says Stefan Langford.

“It certainly comes as no surprise that the PS Vita has finally ended production, ultimately sounding the death knell of Sony’s mobile gaming ambitions,” says Mr Spendelow.
While the PS Vita has been consigned to history, Sony is believed to be readying a new games console.

Last year, company president and chief executive Kenichiro Yoshida told the Financial Times that it was “necessary” for Sony to work on next-generation hardware. He declined to say whether this machine would carry the name PlayStation 5.

Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.

Chinese Hackers on the Hunt for US Naval Secrets

BBC News:

A report by the Accenture-owned unit iDefense, first obtained by the Wall Street Journal, claims Chinese hackers carried out a targeted campaign against institutions in the US, Canada and South East Asia.

While the full list of universities has not been revealed, iDefense says they share a common interest in research on underwater warfare technology – particularly the launching of submarine missiles.

The attackers used a technique called “spear phishing”, which involved sending emails that were made to look like they had been sent by other universities, but which contained malware that allowed the hackers to access stored research.

The modern warfare.