Month: October 2017

The "Sword of Damocles" head-mounted display, the original augmented reality headset, circa 1968. Augmented reality has gotten a lot more mobile in the past decade. (credit: Ivan Sutherland)

Apple CEO Tim Cook believes augmented reality's rise will be as "dramatic" as that of the App Store, but he doesn't believe AR glasses or similar wearables are ready for the market yet, according to a sit-down interview with The Independent. Much of Cook's interview focused on the prospects of augmented reality and Apple's justification for making it a focus in both iOS and the iPhone 8.

He said this to The Independent:

Think back to 2008, when the App Store went live. There was the initial round of apps, and people looked at them and said, "this is not anything, mobile apps are not going to take off." And then, step by step, things start to move. And it is sort of a curve, it was just exponential–and now you couldn't imagine your life without apps. Your health is on one app, your financials, your shopping, your news, your entertainment–it's everything. AR is like that. It will be that dramatic.

iOS 11, the latest software release for iPhones and iPads, included ARKit, a framework for developing augmented reality applications around the iPhone's robust suite of sensors and cameras. It doesn't enable anything that has never been done before in AR, but it is intended to greatly increase ease of development of AR applications for one of the most robust software markets in the world—the iOS App Store.

Enlarge / Fastest to hack, maybe? (credit: T-Mobile USA)

A bug disclosed and patched last week by T-Mobile in a Web application interface allowed anyone to query account information by simply providing a phone number. That includes customer e-mail addresses, device identification data, and even the answers to account security questions. The bug, which was patched after T-Mobile was contacted by Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai on behalf of an anonymous security researcher, was apparently also exploited by others, giving them access to information that could be used to hijack customers' accounts and move them to new phones. Attackers could potentially gain access to other accounts protected by SMS-based "two factor" authentication simply by acquiring a T-Mobile SIM card.

The weakness of the application interface in question, which hosted on wsg.T-Mobile.com, had become so well known to cybercriminals that someone even created a tutorial video on YouTube showing how to exploit it, as Franceschi-Bicchierai reported. One source told him that the bug had been used in attempts to take over "desirable social media accounts."

To hijack a targeted individual's social media accounts and other communications linked to a particular phone number, attackers first used the vulnerable API to pull essential account data from T-Mobile's systems. Attackers could then use that data to call into T-Mobile customer support while posing as the customer and convince the support team to send them a replacement SIM card for their device. Using the new SIM, they could take over the phone service of the targeted number and reset the targeted social media and other accounts that used the phone for two-factor authentication or account recovery by SMS message.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Wednesday morning, Stat published a piece on the quaint, old-school pharmacy that hand-delivers prescription medications to our hardworking Congress members on the Hill each day.

While the piece was focused on the history and workings of the pharmacy, the Internet zeroed in on one eye-popping section:

Mike Kim, the reserved pharmacist-turned-owner of the pharmacy, said he has gotten used to knowing the most sensitive details about some of the most famous people in Washington.

“At first it’s cool, and then you realize, I’m filling some drugs that are for some pretty serious health problems as well. And these are the people that are running the country,” Kim said, listing treatments for conditions like diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

“It makes you kind of sit back and say, ‘Wow, they’re making the highest laws of the land and they might not even remember what happened yesterday.’”

The section clearly suggests that some members of Congress have Alzheimer’s or some other medical condition that may impair their ability to function in their jobs.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of the potentially ringed dwarf planet Haumea. (credit: IAA-CSIC/UHU)

Thanks largely to the improvements in our instrumentation, we've started to get a picture of what the far reaches of our Solar System look like. Beyond the orbit of the outermost planet, there is a large collection of icy dwarf planets called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs. Pluto may have been the founding member of the TNOs, but there are now more than 1,200 known bodies in the list; only 270 of those have even been observed well enough to have their orbits characterized. It's a safe bet that there will be some surprises among them.

In a paper being released today, researchers are reporting on one such surprise, courtesy of the dwarf planet Haumea: it's got a ring. The observations that spotted the ring also suggest that Haumea is larger than we thought it was, which means that gravity hasn't yet pulled it into a stable, rounded shape. Awkwardly, this means that Haumea may not fit the definition of dwarf planet set down by astronomers.

Meet the dwarf

Haumea, named after a Hawaiian goddess, has a closest approach to the Sun of 35 Astronomical Units (AU, the typical distance between the Earth and Sun). For context, Neptune is typically about 30 AU. Due to its highly elliptical orbit, Haumea is over 50 AU at its farthest distance from the Sun. At those distances, not a lot of sunlight reaches it, so most observations of the dwarf planet involve just a few smeary pixels. But we have observed it enough to know that it's consistently associated with two smaller smears of pixels, its moons Hi'iaka and Namaka. The moons' orbits told us something about Haumea's mass.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

A recent study linking a component of vaccines to signs of autism in mice is set for retraction after scientists thoroughly demolished the study’s design, methods, and analysis—and then, for good measure, spotted faked data.

The original study, led by Christopher Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic of the University of British Columbia, suggested that aluminum in vaccines can alter immune responses and trigger the development of autism. (Aluminum adjuvants are used in some vaccines to boost protective immune responses.) The study is just the latest in a long line of publications from the researchers who appear unwavering in their effort to reveal supposed neurotoxic effects of aluminum in vaccines even though dozens of studies have found no evidence of such toxicity.

This isn’t the first time their work has drawn sharp criticism and a retraction; in fact, the researchers have been roundly criticized by peers, experts, and even the World Health Organization. In 2012, the WHO made the unusual effort to specifically call out two of Shaw and Tomljenovic’s publications, calling them “seriously flawed.” The WHO laid out specific failings of the work and noted an assessment by the Food and Drug Administration that reinforced the safety of aluminum in vaccines, which is backed by clinical trial and epidemiological evidence.

Update: Earlier this week on October 11, we reviewed the new Google Home Mini—the company's entry point into its voice-controlled home assistant ecosystem. After some early users noted the device recording more than it should, Google has officially disabled its center touch point forever (in what seems like a minor disaster). As such, we've added this note to our original review, which otherwise appears unchanged below.

Ron Amadeo

How much can you slice away from a Google Home and have it still be good? That was the question asked of Google's hardware team when it created the Google Home Mini, a device that slashes the $129 Google Home down to a mere $50. The result is a smaller, cheaper, simpler device that still has all the Google Assistant smarts of its bigger brother without a speaker system capable of pumping out decent-sounding music. If you've ever wondered if this voice command stuff would work in your house and need a test device, Google is hoping you'll take a gamble on this cheap little device.