Month: September 2017

Enlarge / A monitor displays Equifax Inc. signage on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Friday, Sept. 15, 2017. (credit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Friday, Equifax announced that two top executives would be retiring in the aftermath of the company’s massive security breach that affected 143 million Americans.

According to a press release, the company said that its Chief Information Officer, David Webb, and Chief Security Officer, Susan Mauldin, would be leaving the company immediately and were being replaced by internal staff. Mark Rohrwasser, who has lead Equifax’s international IT operations, is the company’s new interim CIO. Russ Ayres, who had been a vice president for IT at Equifax, has been named as the company’s new interim CSO.

The notorious breach was accomplished by exploiting a Web application vulnerability that had been patched in early March 2017.

Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Last week, my colleague Tim Lee explained why Lyft is going to be like Android, licensing and partnering with others rather than doing everything in-house. On Friday, Reuters reported on a notable deal that adds more weight to that analysis. 

According to an unnamed source "familiar with the talks," Alphabet is in the frame as a potential investor. Lyft has already been working with Alphabet-owned Waymo for some months, but this deal would give the ride sharing service a big infusion of cash.

It has been a few good weeks for the pink-hued transportation service. Last week it also partnered with Drive.ai, which, like Waymo, is working on autonomous vehicle technology. At the end of August, it also announced an expansion into another 32 states, giving it access to almost the entire population. The relative lack of fuss that has accompanied all of this is in stark contrast to the lawsuits and boardroom intrigue now synonymous with rival Uber.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list has discounts on a slew of Dell and Lenovo laptops, including a Dell Inspiron 15 5000 series notebook with a Core i7-7500U chip and 512GB SSD for $580. We also have a roundup of your options to buy Apple's new iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus.

You can find the rest of the deals below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Enlarge / The speaker goes where? (credit: Babypod)

As the person who is responsible for covering the annual Nobel Prizes in the sciences, it's always good to get a warning that they're about to be awarded. For me, that warning is provided by the Annals of Improbable Research, which has spent the last 27 years hosting its First-Annual Ig Nobel Prizes.

Complete with a ceremony that features a mini-opera and a Nobel Prize winner who's tasked with sweeping paper airplanes off the stage, the awarding is an act of inspired lunacy that's matched only by the prize-winning research itself. As is typical, this year's winners are a mix of scientists being goofy, taking scientific methods to unconventional problems, and real scientific questions that have... unconventional consequences. Without further ado, let's get to them.

Obstetrics: Whose idea was this anyway? Presumably, one of the three Spanish researchers being honored came up with the question that nobody else was asking: would a fetus enjoy music more if it was played in the nearby vagina? To find out, the team played music against the mother's abdomen and from a speaker inserted in her vagina and compared those to vibrations in the vagina. Though there was no discussion of the mother's facial expression during the vibrations, the fetus only responded to intravaginal music, though it had to be older and better developed to do so. Naturally, the team patented an intravaginal speaker and has a product on the market.

Enlarge (credit: Verizon)

Verizon is disconnecting another 8,500 rural customers from its wireless network, saying that roaming charges have made certain customer accounts unprofitable for the carrier.

The 8,500 customers have 19,000 lines and live in 13 states (Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wisconsin), a Verizon Wireless spokesperson told Ars today. They received notices of disconnection this month and will lose access to Verizon service on October 17.

"These customers live outside of areas where Verizon operates our own network," Verizon said. "Many of the affected consumer lines use a substantial amount of data while roaming on other providers’ networks and the roaming costs generated by these lines exceed what these consumers pay us each month."

Enlarge (credit: Adam Berry/Getty Images)

We reported back in May that the Justice Department had commenced a criminal investigation into Uber's use of a software tool that helped drivers evade picking up local officials in places where the service had not been approved.

Portland, Oregon, was one of the cities we mentioned where Uber employed the so-called "Greyball" tool. The city has now released a scathing report detailing that Uber evaded picking up 16 local officials for a ride before April 2015, when the service finally won approval by Portland regulators.

The Greyball software employs a dozen data points on a new user in a given market, including whether a rider's Uber app is opened repeatedly in or around municipal offices, which credit card is linked to the account, and any publicly available information about the new user on social media. If the data suggests the new user is a regulator in a market where Uber is not permitted, the company would present that user with false information about where Uber rides are. This includes showing ghost cars or no cars in the area.