Month: July 2016

Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes. (credit: Max Morse for TechCrunch)

Late last Thursday, blood testing company Theranos announced that the worst possible outcome of its troubled dealings with federal regulators had come to pass: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) had issued sanctions that, among other things, would revoke the company’s license to operate its Newark, California laboratory and bar its high-profile CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes from owning, operating, or directing any lab for at least two years.

The massive blow from the CMS should be no surprise for Theranos; for months, the company had been dogged by reports that its propriety testing device—said to perform hundreds of tests with just drops rather than vials of blood—didn’t work properly. Theranos was forced to void or correct years’ worth of test results and its valuation dropped from $9 billion to $800 million. In the CMS’ 33-page letter to the company informing it of the sanctions, the agency outlined extensive problems at the California lab and the company’s inexplicable failure to fix them. And the company also faces criminal probes from the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission over whether it misled investors and regulators, plus at least eight lawsuits from ex-costumers, each seeking class-action status for bogus testing.

Still, last week’s news raises the question of what will happen to the company’s other clinical laboratory in Scottsdale, Arizona, at which 90 percent of the company’s tests are processed. So far, that lab has passed regulatory muster and the company said it will remain open for now. But, if Theranos intends to keep it running, it must split from Holmes before the sanctions take effect September 5.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal published Monday afternoon, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating whether Tesla Motors should have disclosed the nature and circumstances of a recent fatal crash to investors earlier than it did. By SEC rules, companies must report “material” events to shareholders, although auto companies do not generally report individual car crashes to investors.

Still, this particular crash has earned so much attention because it involves the first fatality in a car running autonomous functions (although Tesla cautions in its user manual that autopilot features do not make the car fully autonomous and car owners still bear the responsibility for driving the car). The victim was a 40-year-old Tesla owner who crashed into a left-turning truck on a Florida highway in early May.

“A person familiar with the matter” told the WSJ that “the SEC’s inquiry is in a very early stage and may not lead to any enforcement action by regulators.”

(credit: Langer Research)

A poll out Monday concludes that a majority of Americans disapprove of the FBI's decision not to recommend charges against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presumptive nominee for president who has been embroiled in a scandal involving her treatment of classified e-mail when she was Secretary of State.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted by Langer Research Associates found that 56 percent of those surveyed said they "disapprove" of FBI Director James Comey's decision last week. Attorney General Loretta Lynch backed the recommendation. Thirty five percent answered that they "approve" of the decision. About 9 percent of respondents said they had "no opinion" on the issue.

Clinton (credit: CSPAN)

The poll was conducted July 6-7 of a random sample of 519 adults on landlines and mobile phones. It has a margin of error rating of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

(credit: Wikimedia)

Over the past few months, a cluster of megabreaches has dumped account credentials for a mind-boggling 642 million accounts into the public domain, where they can then be used to compromise other accounts that are protected by the same password. Now, there's software that can streamline this vicious cycle by testing for reused passcodes on Facebook and other popular sites.

Shard, as the command-line tool has been dubbed, is designed to allow end users to test if a password they use for one site is also used on Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, or Instagram, its creator, Philip O'Keefe, told Ars. The security researcher said he developed the tool after discovering that the randomly generated eight-character password protecting several of his accounts was among the more than 177 million LinkedIn passwords that were leaked in May.

"I used that password as a general password for many services," he wrote in an e-mail. "It was a pain to remember which sites it was shared and to change them all. I use a password manager now."

You fight for me now.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a settlement on Monday with Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Inc. over the studio’s alleged failure to properly disclose that it had paid top YouTube “influencers” to promote the 2014 game Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. While the FTC’s complaint against Warner Bros. (PDF) does not mention any specific influencer, the commission’s press release calls out PewDiePie, the world's top-earning YouTube video creator, as one of the so-called influencers that took the studio’s money.

The FTC’s complaint says that a third-party marketing team hired by Warner Bros. gave the YouTube game reviewers “cash payments often ranging from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars,” as long as the videos they made about Shadow of Mordor met certain criteria. Among those criteria were stipulations that the video had to be positive about the game; could not show any bugs or glitches that the reviewer may have found in the early release copy they were given to play; could not contain any negative sentiments about the game, Warner Bros., or its affiliates; and had to include “a strong verbal call-to-action to click the link in the description box for the viewer to go to the [game’s] website to learn more about the [game], to learn how they can register, and to learn how to play the game.”

In addition, the YouTube creators also had to make at least one Facebook post or one Tweet to promote the video they made about Shadow of Mordor.

(credit: CDC)

Cigarette smoking causes emphysema, a disease characterized by serious structural damage to lung tissues. Smoke introduces oxidizing agents into the lung that activate inflammation and induce over-production of nitric oxide in lung tissues, leading to emphysema. A new paper published in PNAS shows that tobacco smoke exposure can be partly counteracted by doses of vitamin C and another drug, a selective nitric oxide synthase inhibitor. In other words, vitamin C could provide some protection against smoking-related lung damage.

The authors of this study have previously shown that cigarette smoke damages lung proteins via oxidation, but they hadn’t fully characterized the mechanisms involved. To further explore tobacco-induced lung damage, the researchers worked with a guinea pig model, exposing some animals to cigarette smoke and comparing them to controls. They found that exposed guinea pigs showed extensive breakdown of major lung structural proteins and that this damage helped foster emphysema.

The experiments also showed that smoke-exposed lungs had altered expression of nitric oxide synthase proteins, which resulted in increased production of nitric oxide in these tissues. Cigarette smoke exposure was directly linked to the presence of nitric oxide in exposed tissues and those tissues’ oxidative damage.

If you sign into Pokémon Go on iOS, you may be giving it more access than it needs. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Update: Niantic has confirmed in a statement that the Pokémon Go app requests more permissions than it needs, but that it has not accessed any user information. Google will automatically push a fix on its end to reduce the app's permissions, and Niantic will release an update to the app to make it request fewer permissions in the first place. The full statement:

"We recently discovered that the Pokémon Go account creation process on iOS erroneously requests full access permission for the user's Google account. However, Pokémon Go only accesses basic Google profile information (specifically, your user ID and e-mail address) and no other Google account information is or has been accessed or collected. Once we became aware of this error, we began working on a client-side fix to request permission for only basic Google account information, in line with the data we actually access. Google has verified that no other information has been received or accessed by Pokémon Go or Niantic. Google will soon reduce Pokémon Go's permission to only the basic profile data that Pokémon Go needs, and users do not need to take any actions themselves.

Original story: A word of warning if you're playing Pokémon Go on iOS: signing into the app through Google currently gives the game full access to your Google account (hat tip to Adam Reeve for discovering the issue). External apps that you sign into with Google often ask for a small subset of permissions based on what they need to do—view your contacts, view and send e-mail, view and delete Google Drive documents, and so on. But Niantic's Pokémon Go iOS app doesn't ask, and with full account access, it can theoretically do all of those things and more. You can check on and revoke permissions for Pokémon Go and any other external app on this page.

We've independently verified that the game requests full account access on iOS, but the Android version doesn't appear to have the same problem; you can sign in with Google but the app doesn't show up on the permissions page. And, of course, you don't need to use a Google account to play Pokémon Go—an account created through the Pokémon site will also work. However, that site is currently having server problems and you may not be able to create an account right now if you don't already have one.