Month: March 2017

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said she'll forgo her 2016 bonus and any stock award for this year after the company admitted it failed to properly investigate hack attacks that compromised more than a billion user accounts.

"When I learned in September 2016 that a large number of our user database files had been stolen, I worked with the team to disclose the incident to users, regulators, and government agencies," she wrote in a note published Monday on Tumble. "However, I am the CEO of the company and since this incident happened during my tenure, I have agreed to forgo my annual bonus and my annual equity grant this year and have expressed my desire that my bonus be redistributed to our company’s hardworking employees, who contributed so much to Yahoo’s success in 2016."

Her note came as Yahoo for the first time said that outside investigators identified about 32 million accounts for which forged browser cookies were used or taken in 2015 and 2016. The investigators said some of the forgeries were connected to the same nation-sponsored attackers who compromised Yahoo in 2014. The cookies tied to the forgeries have since been invalidated. Yahoo also said that the 2014 attacks targeted 26 specific accounts by exploiting the company’s account management tool. The company went on to say unnamed senior executives failed to grasp the extent of the breach early enough.

Jim Resnick

For fifty years, Chevrolet's Camaro has been the car of choice for hot rodders and amateur racers. It has provided a skeleton for engine transplants, bodywork for outlandish paint, and the canvas on which road racers project their Mark Donohue dreams. But no one has capitalized on the platform's flexibility more than Chevy itself.

Just look at the new Camaro ZL1. Judge this book by its cover. It's all splitters, scoops, spoilers, and shouting exhausts. It has big fenders only partially shrouding enormous Goodyear Eagle F1 Supercar tires—of a construction not offered anywhere else—in sizes of 285/30ZR20 up front and 305/30ZR20 in the rear. I'll save you the math—that's over 11 inches of rubber width in front and 12 in the rear.

Enlarge / Las Vegas police search the Jewish Community Center of Southern Nevada after an employee received a suspicious phone call that led about 10 people to evacuate the building on February 27, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Ethan Miller)

US Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants to let Jewish Community Centers (JCCs) trace the phone numbers of people who call bomb threats in to the facilities and has asked for a waiver of caller ID privacy rules to make that happen. Schumer asked for the waiver today in a letter sent to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, who is considering the request.

"On Monday, February 27, 2017, bomb threats were simultaneously made to JCCs in 11 states across the nation," Schumer wrote. The states were Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

"Since the beginning of 2017, there have been 69 incidents at 54 JCCs in 27 states, in addition to one Canadian province," Schumer continued. "Monday’s incident makes this the fifth wave of threats in the past two months." The attacks have disrupted classrooms, required deployment of bomb squads and other SWAT equipment, and "traumatized the Jewish community and struck fear in homes across the country," he wrote.

Enlarge / Oh hey, could you zip up my flesh? I can't reach.

Two University of Oxford biomedical researchers are calling for robots to be built with real human tissue, and they say the technology is there if we only choose to develop it. Writing in Science Robotics, Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy and Andrew Carr argue that humanoid robots could be the exact tool we need to create muscle and tendon grafts that actually work.

Right now, tissue engineering relies on bioreactors to grow sheets of cells. These machines often look like large fish tanks, filled with a rich soup of nutrients and chemicals that cells need to grow on a specialized trellis. The problem, explain Mouthuy and Carr, is that bioreactors currently "fail to mimic the real mechanical environment for cells." In other words, human cells in muscles and tendons grow while being stretched and moved around on our skeletons. Without experiencing these natural stresses, the tissue grafts produced by researchers often have a broad range of structural problems and low cell counts.

That's where robots come in. The researchers propose a "humanoid-bioreactor system" with "structures, dimensions, and mechanics similar to those of the human body." As the robot interacted with its environment, tissues growing on its body would receive the typical strains and twists that they would if they grew on an actual human. The result would be healthy tissue, grown for the exact area on the body it was destined to replace. Mouthuy and Carr note that this would be especially helpful for "bone-tendon-muscle grafts... because failure during healing often occurs at the interface between tissues."

Security updating is an awkward thing. Microsoft knows from experience that people will delay or ignore essential patches, leaving their systems exposed to exploitable flaws. In response, Windows 10 is proactive in installing critical fixes and in rebooting to ensure that those fixes are actually active. This is good for patch adoption, but it's bad when a reboot comes in the middle of a presentation or an online game or anything else that you don't want interrupted.

With the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft is hoping to ease some of this pain. When an update has been downloaded, an alert will show three options: install and reboot immediately, schedule a time (within the next three days) to install it, or snooze the alert to temporarily delay the decision. This won't let you delay an update indefinitely, but it should offer a reasonable trade-off between the need to get systems updated and the annoyance of interruptions.

The large Windows updates (such as last year's Anniversary Update and the imminent Creators Update) bring frustrations beyond the automatic rebooting. Their rollout is handled very conservatively, with Microsoft pushing out the software first to known working configurations (such as systems that were extensively tested by OEMs or Insiders) before deploying it more widely. Similarly, the update will actually be held back from systems with known incompatibilities. This situation leads to some confusion and frustration, especially among enthusiasts: one PC may update immediately, while another takes much longer to receive the update, with no obvious rhyme or reason for the discrepancy.