Month: September 2016

Enlarge / iOS 10 is here. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

By nature, iOS is not a permissive operating system. Apple started from a position of not trusting third-party software developers, fearing those outsiders could screw up the company's platform (a completely reasonable position to take, incidentally). Every new version of iOS since the second one has been very cautious and deliberate about what new capabilities are given to third-party apps.

iOS 10 offers a lot of new stuff for users, including several redesigned apps, a new design for notifications, an improved Control Center, and more. But it's also got a lot of under-the-hood changes for developers in the vein of iOS 8: it opens up notifications, the UI for making and receiving voice and video calls, the Maps app, and Siri, and it re-imagines Messages as a sort of platform-unto-itself complete with its own branch of the App Store.

We'll be running down the highlights for both users and developers, and we'll also be looking at how iOS 10 runs on a wide variety of hardware. There's a lot to talk about, so let's dive right in.

(credit: Mike Mozart)

On Tuesday, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf released a statement promising that the bank would eliminate product sales goals for its employees after thousands of employees were found to have opened fake accounts using real customer names and identification in order to boost internal sales numbers. Stump did not go so far as to say that the practice of cross-selling financial products would end at Wells Fargo, but The Wall Street Journal reported that the company would put a temporary hold on the practice.

Last week, three regulators fined Wells Fargo $185 million, including a $100 million fine from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Wells Fargo fired 5,300 employees who allegedly created about 2 million fake accounts. In some cases, consumers were charged low balance and overdraft fees when Wells Fargo employees temporarily moved money from customers’ approved accounts to accounts they had not approved.

In his statement, Stumpf said, “We are eliminating product sales goals because we want to make certain our customers have full confidence that our retail bankers are always focused on the best interests of customers.” The sales goals will be eliminated effective January 1.

Enlarge / Administrator Charles Bolden speaks with NASA Social attendees on Thursday, September 8 at Kennedy Space Center.

Charlie Bolden is nearing the end of his tenure as administrator of NASA—he will likely leave the agency after the presidential election this year or early in 2017. Perhaps for this reason, he is more willing to really share his mind on the private sector and its ambitions to build large heavy lift rockets. And Bolden clearly does not approve.

On Tuesday, during a Q&A session at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Space 2016 Conference, Bolden was asked for his opinion on the emerging market for small satellites and launchers. He chose to respond instead with his thoughts on NASA's own rocket, the Space Launch System, and private-sector development of larger launch vehicles.

"If you talk about launch vehicles, we believe our responsibility to the nation is to take care of things that normal people cannot do, or don’t want to do, like large launch vehicles," Bolden said. "I’m not a big fan of commercial investment in large launch vehicles just yet."

As Tesla's vocal fans will tell you, a significant factor in that company's success is the fast-charging infrastructure it has built out. According to the Department of Energy, there are a total of 1,881 DC fast-charging stations and 4,109 charging outlets for EVs across the nation.

But Tesla Superchargers account for 297 of those stations and 1,973 of the charging outlets—a more than significant share. (For the sake of consistency, we've used the data from the DOE site. However, when you take the number of individual SAE Combo, CHAdeMO, and Tesla stations and outlets together, there appear to be a few discrepancies.) Things are going to get a little better for non-Tesla drivers on the East and West Coasts, though. On Tuesday, ChargePoint, BMW, and Volkswagen announced the completion of a pair of express corridors: one from Boston to Washington, DC, and another from Portland, Oregon, to San Diego, with 95 DC fast-charging stations in total.

It's been a busy year for ChargePoint so far; at the end of August, the company announced that it activated its 30,000th charging spot, located at Hamilton Place Mall in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Enlarge (credit: We-Vibe)

It was only a matter of time before the Internet of Things caught up with sex toys and led to products like apps that remotely control vibrators from an Apple or Android device via a Bluetooth connection.

And now, one of those apps is accused of being a little too connected to its users.

Standard Innovation—the maker of the We-Vibe vibrator and accompanying app—is the subject of a federal privacy lawsuit. The suit, which seeks class-action status, claims the We-Vibe vibrator app chronicles how often and how long consumers use the sex toy and sends that data to the company's Canadian servers. The suit says that the app also monitors "the selected vibration settings," the vibrator's battery life, and the vibrator's "temperature" with consumer consent. The data, along with the person's e-mail address, is stored on the vibrator-maker's Canadian servers, according to the lawsuit. (PDF) The app also has a "connect lover" feature, enabling partners to exchange text messages, engage in video chats, and  "control a paired We-Vibe" device.

Enlarge / The city of Berkeley, as seen in the foreground, looking west toward San Francisco. (credit: Daniel Parks)

SAN FRANCISCO—Two titans of the legal world faced off Tuesday before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a case that pits the cell phone industry against the city of Berkeley, California. If the court ends up reversing a lower court’s earlier decision and ruling in favor of CTIA - The Wireless Association, it would overturn a new Berkeley city law that aims to alert cell phone users about possible radiation risks by forcing retailers to post signs in their stores.

That law went into effect earlier this year after the cell phone trade group sued to halt it. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled in favor of the defendants in CTIA v. City of Berkeley, allowing a municipal ordinance to stand, with one small revision.

The Cellular Telephone Industries Association (CTIA), meanwhile, has argued that this violates the industry’s First Amendment rights, as it compels speech. “This is confusing,” Ted Olson, a former solicitor general under the George W. Bush administration, argued before the 9th Circuit on behalf of CTIA. “What the [Federal Communications Commission] says, your honors, with respect to its findings of cell phones used in the US is that they are safe. What Berkeley's message says is: ‘Watch out!’”

Enlarge (credit: Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil)

The World Anti-Doping Agency confirmed Tuesday that hackers accessed a database of confidential medical data and released the drug regimens of gymnast Simone Biles and three other top US Olympians. The agency went on to say the Russian government was behind the move.

The organization, which screens Olympic athletes for performance-enhancing substances, said the attack was carried out by "Fancy Bear," one of the same Russian government-sponsored hacking groups that security experts say broke into Democratic National Committee servers and made off with confidential documents. Fancy Bear members used a technique known as spear phishing to gain access to the Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS) database through an account that was created by the International Olympic Committee, the agency said in a statement.

"WADA has been informed by law enforcement authorities that these attacks are originating out of Russia," agency Director General Olivier Niggli said in the statement that also named Fancy Bear as the group. "Let it be known that these criminal acts are greatly compromising the effort by the global anti-doping community to re-establish trust in Russia further to the outcomes of the Agency’s independent McLaren Investigation Report." The McLaren investigation refers to an inquiry into allegations of Russian government-sponsored doping at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. The investigation has been a major source of controversy between Russia and Olympics organizers.

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

AT&T will stop exploiting a loophole that it used to deny a discounted home Internet service to poor people in areas where it hasn't upgraded its network.

AT&T's purchase of DirecTV came with a Federal Communications Commission requirement to offer Internet service for either $5 or $10 a month to households in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But AT&T was able to avoid making this discount price available to low-income people in areas where its network doesn't support download speeds of at least 3Mbps. 

A broadband advocacy group called the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) asked AT&T to reconsider recently, and AT&T denied the request. But AT&T changed its mind after the NDIA wrote a blog post that was widely shared by news media and fueled criticism of the carrier.

Enlarge / Captain Jack Harkness has arrived in Cardiff to be your mostly sober ambassador—and prevent aliens from drinking too much. (credit: Torchwood)

We now have solid scientific evidence that people are completely unable to determine how soused they are when drinking with a group. A team of social scientists recently completed a study of bar and club hoppers in Cardiff, Wales and discovered that most had incredibly inaccurate notions of their drunkenness and the dangers of drinking. But the researchers also learned something non-obvious and intriguing about how people estimate their levels of inebriation.

In a BMC Public Health paper, the researchers write that they wanted to know "how people judge their drunkenness and the health consequences of their drinking whilst they are intoxicated in social drinking environments." So they spent several months going to four different party neighborhoods in Cardiff between 8pm and 3am on Friday and Saturday nights. These neighborhoods had, as the researchers put it, "a high density of premises licensed for the on-site sale and consumption of alcohol." To get a broad sample of bar hoppers, researchers would approach every seventh person they saw and ask them to participate in the survey. The idea was to try to get people who were out with different social groups, because the researchers were interested in how peers influenced people's subjective experience of drunkenness.

Once a Cardiff drinker agreed to participate, the researchers would administer a blood alcohol test to determine their actual level of inebriation. Then they would ask the drinker a series of four questions: