Month: November 2017

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

Driverless cars are here.

Waymo, the Alphabet self-driving car company, now has cars driving on public roads in the Phoenix metropolitan area with no one in the driver's seat. Waymo CEO John Krafcik plans to announce the news today in a speech at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.

For the last year, Waymo has offered free taxi rides to ordinary people who live near the Phoenix suburb of Chandler. Until recently, the company's modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans had a Waymo employee in the driver's seat ready to take control if the car malfunctioned.

Enlarge / A voting machine is submitted to abuse in DEFCON's Voting Village in July. (credit: Sean Gallagher)

The outcome of the 2016 presidential election is history. But allegations of voter fraud, election interference by foreign governments, and intrusions into state electoral agencies' systems have since cast a pall over the system that determines who makes the laws and enforces them in the United States. Such problems will not disappear no matter what comes out of a presidential commission or a Congressional hearing.

"Amazon will not go out of business because one percent of its transactions are fraudulent," said David Jefferson, a visiting computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and chairman of the Verified Voting Foundation, a non-governmental organization working toward accuracy, integrity, and verifiability of elections. "That's not the case for elections."

Jefferson's words came during his talk at the latest edition of DEFCON, the annual infosec event. Election hacks naturally became something of an overarching theme within the Caesar's Palace convention center this summer. In fact, there was an entire room dedicated solely to testing the reliability of US electronic voting systems. Called "Voting Village," the space was filled with more than 25 pieces of electoral hardware—voting machines and other electronic election-management equipment—in various stages of deconstruction. Any curious conference attendee, no matter where they fell within the conference's wide technical skill spectrum, could contribute to the onslaught of software and hardware hacks targeting the machines in this de facto lab.

Enlarge / One artist’s concept of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, the next flyby target for NASA’s New Horizons mission. (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker)

A boy named Sue. A girl named Beulah. These are some of the unfortunate names a child can have today. But such children have nothing to complain about in comparison to a cold, dark rock that is 6.5 billion km from Earth. This object, no more than 30km long, has the most unfortunate of names—(486958) 2014 MU69.

And this just won't do. This large rock is about to become the second most famous object in the Kuiper Belt, which lies at the edge of the Solar System and is home to Pluto and a host of other similar sized dwarf planets and smaller objects. On January 1, 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by 2014 MU69, providing us with unprecedented information about smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt.

So NASA and the New Horizons science team need your help. They want to find a nickname for 2014 MU69 before the flyby, and they're holding a contest to do so. "We would like to use a more memorable nickname when we talk about our target body," wrote Mark Showalter, a SETI Institute scientist and member of the New Horizons science team, wrote about the contest.

Enlarge / A functional iPhone X, unlike the ones that went through recent stress testing. (credit: Samuel Axon)

In the past few days, some iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users reported a bug that autocorrects the single letter "i" to either "A," an exclamation point, or a symbol that resembles a question mark in a box. While the bug doesn't appear to affect all users, it's widespread enough for Apple to be working on a fix for it. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Apple plans to fix the problem in forthcoming iOS beta and public releases that should come sometime this week.

Apple originally claimed the bug was linked to the release of iOS 11.1. However, the Wall Street Journal report found that some devices running iOS 11.0.3 also experienced the problem. The patch to be released from Apple should fix the problem for any devices affected by the bug.

Apple did not comment on what could be causing the issue, but the Internet always has its theories. Some claim the bug stems from both an autocorrect problem and an emoji rendering issue. No matter the cause, it's a peculiar issue that can make any kind of text input slightly irksome. Incorrect characters are not sequestered to Apple apps and programs, either—any text can be affected, including tweets and Instagram captions.