Month: January 2016

Collins Oldsmobile, Indianapolis IN, 1971 (credit: Alden Jewell)

On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) assembled a panel of experts in auto manufacturing and marketing to talk about whether or not automakers should be allowed to sell cars directly to customers.

Representatives from Tesla Motors, as well as Elio Motors, a company that has plans to manufacture cheap, three-seater vehicles, argued that new car companies shouldn’t have to comply with a dealership model of car distribution—something that been a contentious issue for Tesla in previous years. Tesla has been barred from selling directly to consumers in numerous states including New Jersey, West Virginia, and Texas. The FTC, however, has sided with Tesla, calling for legislation to revisit regulations on how cars are sold. (FTC officials stressed at today’s panel that the commission was not going to assert its opinion, but instead leave the stage to the speakers it had assembled.)

On the opposing side, auto industry analyst Maryann Keller and dealership attorney Paul Norman argued that the dealership model is good for consumers because it promotes “intrabrand competition”—or the idea that competition doesn’t just happen between, say, Ford and Volkswagen, but between Ford dealers within the same city.

(credit: anna gutermuth)

However miserable, common colds and other respiratory afflictions are unlikely to clear up from a round of antibiotics. And it’s about time doctors stop handing out the precious drugs for that purpose, according to a joint guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Physicians (ACP).

In the new set of guidelines, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the ACP and the CDC give doctors a play-by-play for how to dodge requests for antibiotics to treat respiratory infections—the most common reason people go to the doctor—and push alternative, over-the-counter treatments instead.

Unnecessary prescriptions, the two groups argue, can expose swaths of bacteria to antibiotics, providing opportunities for the microbes to develop drug-resistance—a huge public health threat that renders drugs nearly useless against some life-threatening infections. Half of all current antibiotic prescriptions handed out likely fall into the ‘unnecessary’ category, costing more than $3 billion annually, the CDC estimates.

(credit: Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson)

General Motors has acquired the technology and most of the employees behind the now-defunct ride-hailing startup Sidecar, according to Bloomberg. Sidecar Co-founder and CEO Sunil Paul will apparently not be joining the company, but no explanation was given as to why.

The deal bolsters GM’s move into the driverless quasi-taxi space—earlier this month, it invested $500 million in Lyft to "leverage GM’s deep knowledge of autonomous technology."

Over the last four years, Uber has rapidly expanded to become the dominant force in the industry. Just last month, it was valued at $62.5 billion, making it the world’s most valuable startup.

Who wouldn't want to see space from the comfort of a balloon capsule? (credit: World View)

There are balloon rides, and then there are balloon rides. And although it may sound like something out of a Jules Verne novel, a company called World View says it will begin taking passengers to the edge of outer space by the end of 2017. In a step toward that goal on Tuesday, company officials confirmed that the first flights will take place in southern Arizona near the Tucson International Airport.

World View plans to fly six passengers in a pressurized cabin to an altitude of 30km, where they will remain for a couple of hours. The generally accepted boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space is 100km, known as the Kármán line. However, at 30km, or about 100,000 feet, the balloon will have risen above 99 percent of Earth’s atmosphere and afford fine views of the planet’s curvature and the blackness of space. The company has priced tickets at $75,000 per person for an experience that will last four to six hours in total.

The company is relying on established technology, as well as new innovations, to bring humans to the edge of space. Weather balloons have flown into the stratosphere for nearly a century. High altitude balloons, like the one World View will use, are made of a high performance polyethylene film. When inflated with helium, at its maximum altitude, World View’s balloon will be about the size of a football field.

San Francisco has a famous bridge that was designed to look like the Cisco logo. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's Build developer conference will be in San Francisco once again, on March 30 to April 1. In spite of costing a little more this year, $2,195 (~£1,550) to last year's $2,095 (~£1,480), the conference sold out in record time. All tickets were gone within one minute. During the brief moment that tickets were available, there was much grumbling about site malfunctions and getting immediately placed onto the waiting list. That high traffic surge appears to be the reason why.

For everyone who didn't get tickets, the majority of the event will be streamed live, and session videos will no doubt be posted online. Steve Guggenheimer, the chief evangelist of Developer Experience, says that for next year, Microsoft is trying to get more attendee capacity. But that'll be too late for this spring's event.

Few details aside from the venue—the Moscone Center—and dates are currently known. Microsoft has yet to publish an agenda for the developer-focused event. The only thing we do know is that, unlike events of the past, there apparently won't be any hardware giveaways for attendees. This is sure to be a disappointment to anyone hoping to pick up a HoloLens headset from their trip to California. Instead, attendees are promised a "deeper technical experience for developers," though precisely what this means is unclear. Our hope is that it means better catering, which has been a particularly weak point of the last couple of Build events.

(credit: amalthya)

For almost three years, millions of servers and smaller devices running Linux have been vulnerable to attacks that allow an unprivileged app or user to gain nearly unfettered root access. Major Linux distributors are expected to fix the privilege escalation bug this week, but the difficulty of releasing updates for Android handsets and embedded devices means many people may remain susceptible for months or years.

The flaw, which was introduced into the Linux kernel in version 3.8 released in early 2013, resides in the OS keyring. The facility allows apps to store encryption keys, authentication tokens, and other sensitive security data inside the kernel while remaining in a form that can't be accessed by other apps. According to a blog post published Tuesday, researchers from security firm Perception Point discovered and privately reported the bug to Linux kernel maintainers. To demonstrate the risk the bug posed, the researchers also developed a proof-of-concept exploit that replaces a keyring object stored in memory with code that's executed by the kernel.

The vulnerability is notable because it's exploitable in a wide array of settings. On servers, people with local access can exploit it to achieve complete root access. On smartphones running Android versions KitKat and later, it can allow a malicious app to break out of the normal security sandbox to gain control of underlying OS functions. It can also be exploited on devices and appliances running embedded versions of Linux. While security mitigations such as supervisor mode access prevention and supervisor mode execution protection are available for many servers, and security enhanced Linux built into Android can make exploits harder, there are still ways to bypass those protections.

(credit: UNICEF)

Children as young as seven years old are working for up to $2 daily mining in dangerous conditions to gather cobalt used in lithium batteries for 16 multinational corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, and others, according to Amnesty International.

If true, a report by the human rights group about mining conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo counters claims by gadget producers that child labor is not involved in their production stream. The report said at least 80 miners have died in the past year in the DRC, which produces about half the world's cobalt. Unicef estimates that there are as many as 40,000 child miners in the region. Amnesty International interviewed dozens of workers, who usually wear no protective clothing while toiling long hours.

A 14-year-old orphan named Paul said he works so long underground that "I had to relieve myself down in the tunnels," according to the report. "I would spend 24 hours down in the tunnels. I arrived in the morning and would leave the following morning," the boy told Amnesty International.