Month: October 2016

Federal authorities say a group of scammers that "bilked millions" from US consumers with pop-up ads and hijacked Web browsers has been sued by the Federal Trade Commission.

The scheme, which operates under the name Global Access Tech Support, used pop-up ads that told consumers their computers were "hacked, infected, or otherwise compromised," according to the FTC complaint (PDF) published yesterday. Consumers are then instructed to call a toll-free number in the message. The pop-ups "are typically designed so that consumers are unable to close or navigate around them, rendering consumers' web browser unusable."

Anyone who calls the toll-free number is connected to telemarketers in India, who then roll out a sales pitch explaining that the caller's computer is "in urgent need of repair." The telemarketers claim they're affiliated with either Microsoft or Apple or are "certified" by those companies.

Enlarge (credit: Yahoo patent)

Yahoo wants to take advertising to the next level—that is, the Orwellian level—bombarding people in public places with targeted advertising served up by the surveillance society. That's according to a Yahoo patent application recently published by the US Patent and Trademark Office. According to Yahoo, the time has come to move outdoor and public-facing advertising into the digital age—and get there by deploying more intrusive techniques than how it's now done online.

Introducing "Smart Billboards," as Yahoo calls them. These digital billboards—which Yahoo envisions being placed along freeways and in bars, airports, planes, ferries, buses, trains, and other public spaces—might rely on video cameras, satellites, drones, microphones, motion detectors, and "biometric sensors" such as fingerprint, retinal, and facial recognition devices. Combined, these "sensor systems," as Yahoo calls them, analyze their surroundings to determine a common theme to serve up ads, in what Yahoo describes as "grouplization."

Yahoo's patent proposal notes that "the sources of data and information that may be used to enable the techniques described herein are virtually limitless."

Enlarge

A new build of Windows 10, version 14946, was released to insiders today. In common with the other builds we've seen since the release of the Anniversary Update, the new build doesn't offer a whole lot of new functionality—we're not expecting to see a ton of new features until Microsoft's Windows 10 event later this month—but it does make a few small changes. One of these is a new interface for configuring touchpad gestures, pictured above.

This comes after the previous build made updates to touchpad handling to improve the detection of two-finger gestures and clicking. The Windows 10 Anniversary Update also made changes in this area, adding new four-finger gestures.

These changes are good to see. One of Apple's traditional strengths with its computers has been its touchpads. Not only does Apple have accurate algorithms with accurate detection of clicks and gestures, it also has rich and configurable gestures built in to, and updated with, the operating system. With Windows 10, Microsoft is able to match this capability.

The premium car market has changed quite a bit in recent years. The luxobarge has been toppled from its throne, and there's a new king in town: the big crossover SUV. People are actually buying them—most companies playing in this segment are reporting big year-on-year growth. These four-wheeled flagships get packed full of the latest and greatest technologies their makers have to offer, and if they succeed in the showroom, that shine (and that technology) trickles down to cheaper models. That makes Audi's latest Q7 a very important vehicle for the German car maker.

And packed full of technology it is. There's our favorite digital dashboard, the Virtual Cockpit, an HD affair that fills the binnacle with a Google map running at 60fps thanks to one of NVIDIA's Tegra 3 processors. And there's a suite of sensors and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that are among the best on offer in 2016. But on top of being a tech-fest, the Q7 is also extremely practical; it seats seven and swallows luggage with nary a peep of automotive indigestion.

Enlarge / That's not a comet, it's a carbon delivery vehicle. (credit: Nicolle Rager-Fuller, NSF)

The rate at which carbon is now accumulating in the atmosphere appears to be without precedent in the geological record. That makes it hard to find situations analogous to the current changing climate. Likely the closest analog occurred over 55 million years ago and has been termed the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum (PETM). During the PETM, there was a geologically rapid change in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, which was followed by an equally sudden change in temperatures. The change upset ecosystems across the planet and led to a major extinction event in the oceans.

While these features are relatively easy to determine from the geological and fossil records, there's one major aspect of the PETM that has remained uncertain: where the carbon came from. While various plausible ideas have been floated, there was no definitive evidence backing up any of them.

A few years back, a couple of researchers from Rutgers University suggested that the carbon literally showed up from outer space, delivered by a comet. While the idea was met with skepticism at the time, the same team is back with more evidence to back their idea: debris that they claim is likely to have been from an impact.

As it turns out, that junction box in the background can handle inputs from non-PlayStation sources as well.

With the word "PlayStation" right there in the name, you'd think Sony's new PlayStation VR headset would only work with the PlayStation 4. Surprisingly enough, though, the headset seems to work in a limited "cinema mode" when plugged into any valid HDMI input.

After seeing reports of the headset's extra-Sony compatibility leak via Reddit, we put our own PlayStation VR headset to the test this afternoon. The headset easily displayed games running on the Wii U and Xbox One and even showed a Windows desktop when plugged into a PC tower. We can only assume other HDMI sources (cable boxes, mobile phones with output adapters, Ouya, etc.) would work just as well.

There was no discernible display latency or lag that affected non-PlayStation gameplay on the headset, and the PSVR's included headphone jack handled audio from these external sources just fine, too. The HMDI passthrough on the PSVR junction box also works with non-PlayStation sources, sending the raw signal to an external TV as well as the headset (though the processor box has to be plugged into a wall outlet for any of this to work).