Month: February 2016

(credit: Eric Hunsaker)

Trips to the pharmacy are getting more and more expensive. From 2006 to 2013, the average retail cost of a year’s supply of 622 common prescriptions doubled—from about $5,500 to more than $11,000—according to a new report from AARP, a senior citizen advocacy group.

The rising costs are likely to hit senior citizens hardest, the AARP cautioned, noting that the 2013 average cost would come out to about 75 percent of the average Social Security retirement benefit, which is $15,526.

“If these trends continue, more and more Americans will simply be unable to afford the medications that they need to get and stay healthy,” Debra Whitman, AARP’s Chief Public Policy Officer, said in a statement.

(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

A judge in New York ruled Monday in favor of Apple in a case where investigators wanted the court to compel the company to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7, which the company does have the ability to unlock.

This case involves a drug dealer who has already pleaded guilty. It pre-dates Apple's current battle with the government over a locked iPhone 5C that belonged to one of the shooters in the December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino—that case is due to be heard in court next month in nearby Riverside, California. (By contrast, the San Bernardino case involves an iPhone 5c, running iOS 9, which Apple says it cannot unlock. In the California case, federal investigators asked for and received an unprecedented court order compelling Apple to create a new firmware to unlock the device. Last week, Apple formally challenged that order, and the outcome is pending.)

However, on both coasts, Apple is fighting the government's attempt to use the same law, known as the All Writs Act—an obscure catchall statute that dates back to the 18th Century. There are several related AWA cases involving unlocking Apple devices that remain pending nationwide.

In a blog post on Sunday, Snapchat executives revealed that the payroll data of some current and former employees was exposed as the result of a scam e-mail sent to a human resources employee at the company.

"The good news is that our servers were not breached, and our users’ data was totally unaffected by this," a company spokesperson said in the post. "The bad news is that a number of our employees have now had their identity compromised. And for that, we’re just impossibly sorry."

On February 26, an employee in Snapchat's payroll department received a "spear phishing" e-mail that appeared to be from Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel—but that came from an external e-mail address. The message requested employee payroll information. The individual targeted didn't recognize the message as a scam, and they forwarded the requested information.

Step 4: expose yourself digitally to the rest of the plane. (credit: Arjun Singh)

There's a certain degree of doubt about whether it's possible to hack into an airplane's avionics from the in-flight Wi-Fi, as one security researcher claimed last year. But it's possible to do all sorts of things to fellow passengers—as USA Today columnist Steven Petrow recently found out. Following an American Airlines flight, Petrow was approached by a man who claimed to have gained access to the content of his e-mails, which showed communication with sources for a story Petrow was writing.

Petrow offered a bunch of advice on how to protect privacy on mobile devices (strong passwords, password managers, and encrypted communications apps). But none of these really addresses how he got "hacked"—the in-flight Wi-Fi provided a perfect environment for an attacker to undermine the security of other passengers' communications. It's something that could easily be fixed, but in-flight Internet providers are in no hurry to do so, because it's not in their interest.

When you're on any public Wi-Fi, you're bound to give up some personal information to anyone who might be watching the traffic (whether that be the company providing the service, for marketing purposes, or someone with more malicious intent). For example, in previous tests (such as the ones we conducted with NPR), we saw iPads and iPhones that identified themselves to the network by their owner's name, and Web requests to websites and mobile app traffic (some including personal data) were also visible. And as might have happened to Petrow, old-school POP/SMTP e-mail messages could be practically read off the wire.

(credit: Steam)

Virtual reality content is inherently difficult to advertise, especially when its targeted hardware doesn't exist in the wild. You might show a full-screen 2D simulation of what a headset-wearer might see, or you might use goofy-looking footage of people wearing monstrous, face-covering hardware, but neither of those are great at simulating the VR feeling.

VR-game screenshots are even worse, which the creators of VR music-rhythm game Audioshield conceded while trying to promote its upcoming title last month. I gushed at length about how fun the game was, but the screens that creator Dylan Fitterer provided me didn't match my words. Really, they were garbage.

On Monday, the day of the HTC Vive's retail pre-order kick-off, Fitterer finally made a preview video worthy of the Audioshield hype—and I imagine more VR content creators will start to copy Fitterer's impressive mixed-footage approach for future previews. In this trailer, a 2D camera has been set up behind the silhouetted player, while Audioshield's content—an endless barrage of colored orbs dropping from the sky—appears in the shot as if the player was actually standing inside this virtual world. Helping the effect is the additional rendering of the game's colored, handheld shields, which appear in the game as if you're holding them.

A Google self-driving car. (credit: Google)

A Google autonomous vehicle struck a bus in California on Valentine’s Day, according to an incident report (PDF) published by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) on Monday. Google Automotive, the branch of Alphabet that handles self-driving car research, filed the incident report in accordance with California law.

No one was hurt, Google says.

According to the report, the vehicle was in autonomous mode and in the far right lane of a main thoroughfare in the California city of Mountain View. As it approached a red light, the car automatically signaled that it would make a right turn. Cars in the same lane ahead of the autonomous vehicle were waiting at the red light to proceed straight, so the autonomous vehicle got to the right of the lane to pass those other cars, but it sensed some sandbags around a storm drain in the road, and it stopped.

Sheryl Connelly, Ford's in-house futurist. (credit: Ford Motor Company)

There can't be many job titles out there cooler than "futurist." And earlier this week, I sat down with Sheryl Connelly, who holds that position at the Ford Motor Company.

Connelly has been with Ford for two decades now, spending a few years in marketing before moving on to cover global trends and futuring 12 years ago. Her job isn't to think about the cars and trucks of tomorrow, though. "The company has no shortage of subject matter experts in that area," she told me. Rather, it's her job to look beyond the industry, identifying how patterns and forces in the wider world will influence consumer behavior. "Those are typically slow-moving, deeply societal-rooted trends, things like aging population, increasing urbanization. But we also try to engage more with the public about micro trends (that last two to five years rather than two to five decades)."

Ford recently released its 2016 trends, a list built after a series of workshops and consultations with experts around the world. Connelly said that when work began on the current collection last year, she saw there was a lot of disillusionment out there—the economy, a rise in global violence, widespread attention to police misconduct here in the US, and so on.