Month: June 2016

Enlarge (credit: @ChelseaGatesTV)

Online miscreants took over the National Football League's Twitter account and used it to falsely report the death of league commissioner Roger Goodell.

During the brief span that @NFL was taken over, it followed exactly one new Twitter account—specifically, @IDissEverything, which has now been suspended. Before the account was suspended, it claimed the password protecting the NFL Twitter feed was "olsen3culvercam88." The Daily Dot said someone connected to the IDissEverything account claimed the password was revealed after someone managed to get into the email of a social media staffer at the NFL, where we found the credentials in a message." It's still not clear how the group got access to the e-mail account.

Tuesday's breach was only the latest one to affect a high-profile Twitter user. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently saw his dormant Twitter account taken over by someone who discovered its password—"dadada"—was the same one that protected his LinkedIn account. Zuckerberg's LinkedIn account, in turn, had been compromised in a 2012 breach of the career networking site. Other celebrities, including Kate Perry, Lana Del Rey, and Kylie Jenner have also reportedly had their Twitter accounts taken over in recent days.

(credit: Dennis Skley)

In adapting to our environment, we'd ideally use the results of previous actions to inform future choices, updating our expectations and decisions to reflect knowledge gained from earlier experiences. However, sometimes we ignore the past's feedback when we really should pay attention it, leaving us trapped in a series of bad decisions. A study published in PNAS demonstrates that this “bad choice persistence” occurs when changing our decisions would go against our existing biases. This means that our beliefs can trap us in a difficult-to-break bad-decision feedback loop.

To examine this phenomenon, researchers looked at how subjects integrated new experiences with their past history when completing a sensory stimulus task. The participants were asked to predict whether a visual stimulus would appear on the left side or the right side of a screen based on where the stimulus appeared in previous trials.

In the first set of experimental trials, the location of the stimulus was randomized. These trials assessed the subjects’ baseline biases towards choosing one side of the screen or the other. After establishing these biases, the participants began a second set of experimental trials. In these experiments, the stimulus' location was determined by a probabilistic model that set the odds of its location using both the participants' previous choice history and the item's previous locations.

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Enlarge / A late 2008 MacBook Pro with El Capitan, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD upgrade feels a whole lot more modern than it should. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

I took a vacation last month. I traveled some. I read a lot. And I refurbished an old late 2008 MacBook Pro, one of the original aluminum unibody models. I completely took it apart, dusted it out, put it back together, and stuck in a memory and SSD upgrade. This is the kind of thing I do to unwind.

There are lots of differences between this thing and a new MacBook of any stripe. They’re smaller and they’re thinner and they’re faster and they have better screens, better performance, better batteries. But once you’ve put in a few more modern parts and plunked a fresh install of El Capitan onto the SSD, it feels a whole lot like a modern Mac. Using a Windows laptop from 2008 to run Windows 10 is totally possible, but the screens, trackpads, and general build quality of a laptop from the last year or two will feel way better.

Upgrading and using an old-ish Mac for a bit drives home a point I’ve been trying to articulate for a while—Apple’s Mac lineup simply doesn’t feel ahead of the curve in the ways that it used to. Starting especially with those late 2008 Macs, Apple started some trends (big, multitouch trackpads; chiclet keyboards; aluminum unibody designs) and properly identified others before the rest of the industry could jump on them (SSDs, the death of the optical drive, high-resolution “Retina” displays). Apple led with the MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pros, and the PC industry largely followed.

The Yongbyon nuclear facility in North Korea—back in business and making plutonium, based on IAEA analysis. (credit: Keith Luse, Senior Professional Staff Member, U.S. Senate)

Although North Korea has had a string of bad luck with its only suspected nuclear-capable ballistic missile—which had four failed test launches in the last two months—the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is clearly intent on shifting its nuclear capabilities into overdrive. On Monday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced that North Korea's government had apparently re-activated the nuclear fuel production reactor at Yongbyon—the plant responsible for the creation of plutonium used in the DPRK's nuclear weapons program.

The analysis by the IAEA, as IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said during a news conference on Monday, pointed to “resumption of the activities of the five megawatt reactor, the expansion of centrifuge-related facility, [and] reprocessing—these are some of the examples of the areas [of activity indicated at Yongbyon]." In this instance, "reprocessing" refers to the extraction of plutonium from irradiated uranium fuel.

These conclusions were reached based on satellite imagery, as North Korea has denied IAEA inspectors access to the plant. But if the IAEA is correct, the expansion of the centrifuge facility would indicate that North Korea is preparing to produce more fuel for nuclear warheads.

(credit: EHang)

A Chinese drone company has just been granted permission to test its on-demand, passenger-carrying autonomous aerial vehicle in Nevada, making it the first such drone to be tested anywhere in the United States.

According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, state authorities from the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems granted permission Monday for EHang to fly its EHang 184 in the Silver State. EHang already makes a consumer model, the "Ghost Drone."

EHang debuted its drone at CES in Las Vegas earlier this year.