Month: October 2017

Enlarge (credit: Otsuka America Pharmaceutical )

To protect patients, the Food and Drug Administration requires that direct-to-consumer drug advertisements present a fair balance of information about a drug’s potential benefits and its risks. As such, the ads seen on television or in magazines often contain an almost comically long list of possible side effects—from minor issues, like headaches or dry mouth, to serious problems, like memory loss, liver damage, or compulsive gambling.

On the surface, any such rundown might seem like a deterrent to trying a new drug. But, according to a new study, a laundry list of risks can make drugs appear less risky—the longer, the better, in fact.

In a series of experiments involving more than 3,000 participants, researchers found that when drug ads clumped severe risks alongside trivial ones, consumers viewed the drugs as less risky compared with when they just heard about the severe risks.

Enlarge / The cyber. (credit: Getty Images | Photographer is my life)

A high-ranking Department of Justice official took aim at encryption of consumer products today, saying that encryption creates "law-free zones" and should be scaled back by Apple and other tech companies. Instead of encryption that can't be broken, tech companies should implement "responsible encryption" that allows law enforcement to access data, he said.

"Warrant-proof encryption defeats the constitutional balance by elevating privacy above public safety," Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in a speech at the US Naval Academy today (transcript). "Encrypted communications that cannot be intercepted and locked devices that cannot be opened are law-free zones that permit criminals and terrorists to operate without detection by police and without accountability by judges and juries."

Rosenstein was nominated by President Donald Trump to be the DOJ's second-highest-ranking official, after Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He was confirmed by the Senate in April.

Enlarge / The Steve Jobs auditorium on Apple's new campus. The fake news story said Google employees would be moving into Apple's headquarters.

The Dow Jones newswire rattled markets on Tuesday by publishing a clearly fake story claiming that Google was buying Apple. The story claimed that Apple founder Steve Jobs put the purchase price—an absurdly small $9 billion—in his will.

Dow Jones blamed a "technical error" and quickly retracted the story.

"Please disregard the headlines that ran on Dow Jones Newswires between 9:34 am ET and 9:36 am ET," the news wire said in a statement.

Enlarge (credit: Felix Krause)

One of iOS' rougher edges are the popups it produces on a regular but seemingly random basis. These popups require users to enter their Apple ID before they can install or update an app or complete some other mundane task. The prompts have grown so common most people don't think twice about them.

Mobile app developer Felix Krause makes a compelling case that these popups represent a potential security hole through which attackers can steal user credentials. In a blog post published Tuesday, he showed side-by-side comparisons, pictured above, of an official popup produced by iOS and a proof-of-concept phishing popup. The lookalike popups require less than 30 lines of code and could be sneaked into an otherwise legitimate app that has already found its way into Apple's App Store.

The popups are a common part of the iOS experience for many users, this author included. They can present themselves at a variety of times, including when people want to make an in-app purchase, after they've recently installed an iOS update, or when an app gets stuck installing. The root of the problem is that many of Apple's official password prompts are indistinguishable from ones generated by apps. Most users respond by blindly trusting their password with either one.

Enlarge / You really are your own worst enemy. (credit: Ultra Ultra)

It’s awfully hard to make player death scary in games. I adored this spring’s Resident Evil 7, but it’s hard to maintain a sense of dread when you know in-game “death” just means restarting from a nearby checkpoint. The impermanence of death in games—this virtual save-and-reload immortality—doesn’t capture the terror of uncertainty and discontinuity that death provides us all at least once in our lives. It can’t.

ECHO, from developer Ultra Ultra, doesn’t try to make death itself scarier than your standard survival horror title. The nominally stealth-driven action game instead takes one of the usual coping mechanisms surrounding death and twists it against the player. This makes ECHO, intentionally or not, one of the more unsettling games I've played this year.

But ECHO doesn’t present itself as a Resident Evil-styled horror game. A good 20 minutes of conflict-free dialogue and world-building set the stage, as the game’s two main characters—professional gambler En and a sentient, bounty-hunting spaceship called London—go on and on about genetically engineered “Resourcefuls,” the regal "Palace" where the game takes place, and a couple of other proper nouns I’m probably forgetting. It’s all preamble to En being hunted through the stark white mega-structure filled with humanoid constructs out to kill her.

(credit: Bureau of Ocean Energy Management)

On Monday night, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt told a meeting of the Kentucky Farm Bureau that the federal government should end tax credits for the wind industry. Although the EPA doesn’t have control over tax incentives for renewable energy, the agency has considerable authority to hamper similar programs that boost renewables—most recently seen in Pruitt’s efforts to repeal the Clean Power Plan—and his comments reflect how energy policy is being approached in the nation’s environmental bureau.

"I’m not in Congress, and the state of Oklahoma has similar incentives, [but] I would do away with these incentives that we give to the wind industry. I would let them stand on their own and compete against coal and natural gas and other sources," Pruitt told the audience, with senator Mitch McConnell at his side. (Senate majority leader McConnell, notably, does have sway over federal tax incentives.)

Free market?

Pruitt added that he believed the US government should, “let utility companies make real-time market decisions on those kinds of things as opposed to being propped up with tax incentives and other types of credits that go through the federal and state level.”

Derek Starnes (right) told police that the hidden camera captured this still (taken from a video) of himself and his wife at their Airbnb rental. (credit: Longmont Key Police Department)

A man has been accused of hiding at least two cameras in his Airbnb rental in the well-to-do coastal town of Longmont Key, Florida, between Tampa and Sarasota.

A couple visiting from Indiana discovered the cameras—one in the bedroom and one in the living room—on September 1, just a day after arriving, and reported them to police. The husband, Derek Starnes, told a local ABC television affiliate that he is sure the bedroom camera recorded him naked.

"My wife and I are distressed by this situation," Starnes told the TV station. "I hope more victims will come forward."

Hollywood reboots are nothing new these days. In fact, they're so common that even a reboot of an oddball cult-classic barely turns heads (Twin Peaks shows that formula can succeed, right?). And anything from the back catalogue of an iconic creator like Steven Spielberg may be continually ripe for revisiting. Just this summer, Amblin Entertainment confirmed Spielberg's involvement with a new Animaniacs series, for instance.

So at first blush, Deadline detailing today that Spielberg's Amazing Stories (an anthology series that aired on NBC in the mid-'80s) is being explored for modern audiences seems ho-hum. But it's not NBC (which owns Amblin) or streaming contenders like Netflix and Amazon reportedly close to a deal—it's Apple.

"We love being at the forefront of Apple's investment in scripted programming," NBC Entertainment President Jennifer Salke told the site. "And I can't think of a better property than Spielberg's beloved Amazing Stories franchise."