Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Shervin Pishevar, seen here in 2014, has asked Benchmark to drop its lawsuit against Uber's former CEO, Travis Kalanick. (credit: TechCrunch)

Some of Uber’s top investors appear to be engaged in a civil war, underscoring the deep chaos that has sown behind the scenes.

Just a day after Benchmark Capital Partners sued former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, another faction (of unknown size) led by investors Shervin Pishevar has asked that Benchmark call off its lawsuit, resign its board seat, and sell a substantial portion of its holdings in the ridesharing company.

According to Pishevar, Benchmark’s lawsuit has "held the company hostage to a public relations disaster." In a letter, the investor even warned that an "escalation of this fratricidal course" would "interfere with fundraising" and the ongoing search for a new chief executive at Uber.

Enlarge / An example of a frightening image, in this case a child with measles, which may convince some that vaccines have frightening side effects. (credit: Greene, Charles Lyman)

Striking at a myth with facts may only shore it up, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that three main intervention strategies for combating anti-vaccine lies and falsehoods were ineffective at changing minds. But perhaps more concerning, they found that over-time exposure to the interventions strengthened participants’ belief in those lies and falsehoods, researchers recently reported in PLOS One. The researchers speculate that the mere repetition of a myth during the process of debunking may be enough to entrench the myth in a believer’s mind.

“People tend to mistake repetition for truth, a phenomenon known as the 'illusory truth' effect,” the authors, led by Sara Pluviano at the University of Edinburgh, note. And when those myths are built into a framework of beliefs and world views—a cognitive consistency perspective—it becomes even harder to knock them out.

Enlarge / Part of a booby-trapped Microsoft Word document that was sent to multiple hotels. Once infected, computers would attempt to compromise other computers connected to the same network. (credit: FireEye)

A Russian government-sponsored group accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee last year has likely been infecting other targets of interest with the help of a potent Windows exploit developed by, and later stolen from, the National Security Agency, researchers said Friday.

Eternal Blue, as the exploit is code-named, is one of scores of advanced NSA attacks that have been released over the past year by a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. It was published in April in the group's most damaging release to date. Its ability to spread from computer to computer without any user action was the engine that allowed the WCry ransomware worm, which appropriated the leaked exploit, to shut down computers worldwide in May. Eternal Blue also played a role in the spread of NotPetya, a follow-on worm that caused major disruptions in June.

Now, researchers at security firm FireEye say they're moderately confident the Russian hacking group known as Fancy Bear, APT 28, and other names has also used Eternal Blue, this time in a campaign that targeted people of interest as they connected to hotel Wi-Fi networks. In July, the campaign started using Eternal Blue to spread from computer to computer inside various staff and guest networks, company researchers Lindsay Smith and Ben Read wrote in a blog post. While the researchers didn't directly observe those attacks being used to infect guest computers connected to the network, they said a related campaign from last year used the control of hotel Wi-Fi services to obtain login credentials from guest devices.

Enlarge / Issue ads like this one from 2012 used to be commonplace in the DC metro. (credit: outtacontext)

The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday sued the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the government agency that operates the capital region's subway system and its primary bus network. The ACLU argues that the transit agency's policies for accepting advertisements on its subway stations, trains, and buses violate the First Amendment by discriminating against controversial and non-mainstream viewpoints.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are ideologically diverse: the ACLU itself, an abortion provider, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and alt-right-Internet-troll-to-the-point-Twitter-actually-banned-him Milo Yiannopoulos.

The inclusion of an alt-right figure like Yiannopoulos helps to demonstrate the ACLU's point that WMATA's policy squelches free-speech rights across the political spectrum. But Yiannopoulos' inclusion has also raised the hackles of some on the political left, who see associating with the controversial author as beyond the pale. Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney who has represented whistleblower Chelsea Manning, posted a statement calling Yiannopoulos "vile" and attacking the ACLU for defending his First Amendment rights.

Enlarge / The Generation Identity crowdfunded ship C-Star broke down off Libya's coast this morning. (credit: Sea-Eye)

A right-wing "European identity" group called Generation Identity crowdfunded enough to hire a ship in order to intercept refugees from North Africa trying to reach Europe. But as the effort cast off in July, Patreon cancelled an account being used to fund the efforts. And today, the group's ship lost propulsion off the coast of Libya. The ship that arrived to provide assistance was one operated by Sea-Eye, a non-governmental organization coincidentally working to rescue refugees in distress on the Mediterranean.

The C-Star is a 42-year old research and survey ship operated by Marine Global Services Ltd. and registered in the land-locked nation of Mongolia. The vessel was hired in July by the anti-refugee organization using funds from a Patreon campaign called "Defend Europe" that started in May. Through sites such Patreon and WeSearchr, the group collected funds for its "rescue mission":

It’s a mission to save Europe, stop illegal immigration and save lives on the sea. We want to expose doings of the NGOs, disrupt the human traffickers and support the Libyan Coastguard with informations [sic]. To do that we need your help to get our ship in the Mediterranean Sea.

The group promoted their cause and fundraising campaign with the assistance of Canadian right-wing YouTube personality Lauren Southern. Southern had accompanied Generation Identity on a prior mission at-seas, when the group used a small boat to intercept a rescue ship operated by Doctors Without Borders and the French refugee rescue charity SOS Mediterranee (Generation Identity fired flares at it). Southern said that the group's goal was to get more boats and to use nets and other tools to foul the propellers of "migrant boats."

Enlarge / Lida Ajer modern human tooth (left top) with its corresponding scanned image (left bottom) compared to an orangutan tooth (right) (credit: Tanya Smith and Rokus Awe Due)

In the Padang Highlands of western Sumatra, a large island in Indonesia, there is a small cave called Lida Ajer with a long history of offering up clues about human history. Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugene Dubois first excavated the cave before 1890, and Lida Ajer has turned up plenty of preserved animal remains since, including teeth that were identified as human in 1948.

It’s only now that the cave has been carefully and thoroughly dated, providing a new line of evidence that our species was in the region more than 60,000 years ago. That’s 20,000 years older than the previous oldest skeletal evidence of humans in the area. But these new dates line up with existing genetic evidence, as well as with reconstructions of the climate and sea levels at the time.

In a paper published in Nature this week, Kira Westaway of Macquarie University in Australia and her colleagues report what they found when they revisited the discoveries of Lida Ajer. They re-examined the teeth, pointing to all the evidence that the teeth did indeed belong to anatomically modern humans, rather than orangutans or other primates. And they carefully dated the cave site to establish how old the teeth were likely to be.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Jenner Images)

American Internet users are telling the Federal Communications Commission that mobile broadband is not a full replacement for fast home Internet service. This week, the FCC kicked off its annual analysis of broadband deployment and signaled that it might determine that smartphone access is a proper substitute for cable or fiber Internet. In doing so, the FCC could conclude that broadband is already being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, and thus the commission could take fewer steps to promote deployment and competition.

There have been over 300 new comments filed since we wrote about this two days ago, almost universally lambasting the FCC's suggestion that Americans might not need fast home Internet service and could make do with mobile broadband only. Mobile is hindered by data caps, limits on tethering, and reliability problems that make it fall short of a wired Internet connection, people told the FCC.

The FCC's own analysis acknowledged that mobile broadband needs to be judged differently. The commission proposed a mobile broadband speed standard of 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream, less than half as fast as the FCC's home broadband speed standard of 25Mbps/3Mbps.

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Amazon is using everything at its disposal to take on the grocery and food delivery business. The online retailer purchased Whole Foods Market in June for $13.7 billion, announced new meal-prep boxes that challenge Blue Apron in July, and now it's turning to the military for its next move. According to a CNBC report, Amazon wants to use military food technology to create prepared meals that don't need to be refrigerated. This would allow the company to store and ship more food more efficiently and to offer ready-to-eat, (hopefully) tasty meals at a lower price.

Amazon could debut ready-to-eat meals like beef stew and vegetable frittata as soon as next year. These kinds of prepared meals would be delivered through Amazon Fresh, the online retailer's grocery delivery service. Amazon is still figuring out how these meals would be made, but it's reportedly looking into MATS technology, or microwave assisted thermal sterilization. This food-prep process takes sealed food packages and puts them into pressurized water, heating them with microwaves. It's different from the traditional way of processing foods with a pressure cooker, and researchers claim it better retains the food's natural flavor and texture.

MATS technology was developed at Washington State University as a way to improve the quality of military rations. MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) provide just enough calories to fuel military personnel, but they aren't exactly the most mouth-watering things to eat. In addition to feeding troops, MREs were also designed to be efficiently transported and stored. That's a concept that Amazon likely loves because if it can find a way to maximize the efficiency of its shipping and storing processes, it can deliver more prepared meals to customers and make more money.