Month: March 2017

Jonathan Gitlin

It's still surprising that Tesla has had the high-end electric car market to itself for all these years. The Model S has existed for nearly five years, and even today, potential rivals remain in the prototype stages. Porsche is going ahead with the Mission E. Faraday Future has the FF91 under development, and then there's Lucid. Formerly known as Atieva, it's backed by the same Chinese billionaire as Faraday Future, and this week the company brought a prototype of its first model to Washington, DC, for us to check out.

Small on the outside, big on the inside

With its concept car looks and a pearlescent coat of paint, the Lucid Air certainly drew people's attention as it sat parked outside of one of the US Senate buildings. The first thing that strikes you is the car's relative compactness. Lucid CTO (and former Model S chief engineer) Peter Rawlinson explained that the goal was to be a similar size to the Mercedes-Benz E Class on the outside but with S Class-beating space on the inside.

Enlarge (credit: Christiaan Colen)

In early 2015, architects of Google's Android mobile operating system introduced a new feature that was intended to curtail the real-time tracking of smartphones as their users traversed retail stores, city streets, and just about anywhere else. A recently published research paper found that the measure remains missing on the vast majority of Android phones and is easily defeated on the relatively small number of devices that do support it.

Like all Wi-Fi-enabled devices, smartphones are constantly scanning their surroundings for available access points, and with each probe, they send a MAC—short for media access control—address associated with the handset. Throughout most of the history of Wi-Fi, the free exchange of MAC addresses didn't pose much threat to privacy. That all changed with the advent of mobile computing. Suddenly MAC addresses left a never-ending series of digital footprints that revealed a dizzying array of information about our comings and goings, including what time we left the bar last night, how many times we were there in the past month, the time we leave for work each day, and the route we take to get there.

Eventually, engineers at Apple and Google realized the potential for abuse and took action. Their solution was to rotate through a sequence of regularly changing pseudo-random addresses when casually probing near-by access points. That way, Wi-Fi devices that logged MAC addresses wouldn't be able to correlate probes to a unique device. Only when a phone actually connected to a Wi-Fi network would it reveal the unique MAC address it was tied to. Apple introduced MAC address randomization in June 2014, with the release of iOS 8. A few months later, Google's Android operating system added experimental support for the measure. Full implementation went live in March 2015 and is currently available in version 5.0 through the current 7.1; those versions account for about two-thirds of the Android user base.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | KrulUA)

The US Senate today voted to eliminate broadband privacy rules that would have required ISPs to get consumers' explicit consent before selling or sharing Web browsing data and other private information with advertisers and other companies.

The rules were approved in October 2016 by the Federal Communications Commission's then-Democratic leadership, but are opposed by the FCC's new Republican majority and Republicans in Congress. The Senate today used its power under the Congressional Review Act to ensure that the FCC rulemaking "shall have no force or effect" and to prevent the FCC from issuing similar regulations in the future.

The House, also controlled by Republicans, would need to vote on the measure before the privacy rules are officially eliminated. President Trump could also preserve the privacy rules by issuing a veto. If the House and Trump agree with the Senate's action, ISPs won't have to seek customer approval before sharing their browsing histories and other private information with advertisers.

Enlarge (credit: imbd.com)

A Senegalese man was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered Wednesday to pay the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America $71,000 in restitution for his role in an Atlanta-based DVD and CD pirating operation that unlawfully sold millions of copies of copyrighted works without authorization from rights holders.

Mamadou Aliou Simakha had pleaded guilty in 2010 to one count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement but then fled the country. He was arrested last year in Morocco and extradited to the US in December, the authorities said. The FBI investigated the case with a variety of government agencies in addition to the RIAA and MPAA.

"Simakha admitted his part as a high-volume seller in a conspiracy to produce and traffic millions of pirated music CDs and DVDs which was a leading supplier for the southeastern US," John Horn, the US attorney, said in a statement. “His decision to flee the country garnered him the statutory maximum sentence he deserves for his many years as a disc counterfeiter and international fugitive."

The Apple A8 die shot as mapped out by Chipworks. (credit: Chipworks)

The semiconductor industry is beyond remarkable when it comes to the the complexity and precision of the processes. A modern integrated circuit is not a single layer of circuitry, but many layers, all stacked on top of each other. This is all done through photolithography, where a pattern is imaged on a silicon wafer. Each layer requires a separate image, and all the images have to be aligned. If you take the 14nm number seriously (a nanometer is 1/1,000,000th of a millimeter), then wafers and masks, which are seriously hold-in-two-hands-big, have to be aligned with a precision that is better than the feature size. But, how do you know you've done it right?

The obvious answer is whether or not the chip works. But it would be nice to image the circuit so that it can be compared to the design. Apart from detecting problems during manufacturing, being able to image the final product would also allow for the design to be improved, since it would let you identify areas of a chip that consistently cause problems. But, how do you image structures that might be as small as 14nm that are buried under other structures that you also want to image.

The answer, it seems, is a form of X-ray tomography.