Month: April 2018

Enlarge (credit: BLU)

Phone maker BLU is settling charges that it allowed a China-based partner to collect a mountain of customers' personal data—including full content of text messages, real-time locations, telephone numbers, contacts, and installed apps—despite promises it would keep such details private.

Under a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission announced Monday, BLU agreed to implement a "comprehensive data-security program" to prevent similar privacy leaks in the future. Both the company as a whole and co-owner and president Samuel Ohev-Zion are barred from misrepresenting the extent to which they protect the privacy and security of personal information. The company further will be subject to third-party assessments of its security program every two years for 20 years and must comply with record-keeping and compliance-monitoring requirements.

The settlement stems from research published in November 2016 by security firm Kryptowire. It found that BLU phones were transmitting a massive amount of private customer data to AdUps Technologies, a Shanghai-based provider of firmware that ran on the affected devices. Kryptowire said AdUps appeared to gather the data to help phone manufacturers and carriers track the behavior of their customers for advertising purposes.

Enlarge (credit: WhatsApp)

In the wake of a Washington Post report that alleged a "clash" over Facebook data practices, WhatsApp co-founder and Facebook board member Jan Koum confirmed that he is leaving the company, effective immediately.

"It's been almost a decade since Brian and I started WhatsApp, and it's been an amazing journey with some of the best people," Koum posted on his personal Facebook page on Monday. "But it is time for me to move on." His status included a Facebook "emotional" tag indicating that he is "sad."

Koum's post doesn't include an explanation of exactly why he's leaving other than "doing things I enjoy outside of technology." That leaves WaPo's Monday report as the loudest possible explanation available at the moment.

Enlarge / Image from Boeing's Watch US Fly website. (credit: Boeing)

Recently, Boeing created a website called "Watch US Fly" to promote its aerospace industry—a grab bag of everything from Chinese tariffs to President Trump's visit to the company's facilities in St. Louis. Among the most intriguing sections is one that promotes the company's Space Launch System rocket and argues that SpaceX's Falcon Heavy booster is "too small" for NASA's deep exploration program.

"The Falcon Heavy launch turned heads in February, but SpaceX's rocket is a smaller type of rocket that can't meet NASA's deep-space needs," the website states. "Once the Boeing-built SLS is operational, it will be the most powerful rocket ever built."

The Boeing site backs up this claim by quoting NASA's Bill Gerstenmaier, who talked about the differences between the SLS rocket and Falcon Heavy at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council meeting in March. Gerstenmaier, the chief of NASA's human spaceflight program, said the SLS had "unique capabilities" that the Falcon Heavy rocket does not have. However, as Ars reported at the time, Gerstenmaier actually struggled to explain why NASA needed the SLS rocket because the space agency has not yet built anything that will take advantage of those capabilities.

TCL

Chinese brand TCL has announced pricing for its new 6-Series Roku TVs, the follow-ups to last year's extremely popular P-Series. The 6-Series improves on last year's in terms of picture quality and comes in both 55-inch and 65-inch sizes—last year's models only came in a 55-inch configuration.

The 55-inch model is currently priced at $649.99, and the 65-inch model comes in at $999.99. That's in line with what last year's TVs cost. As we've previously reported, the main improvement (apart from the larger size) in play here is an expanded number of full-array local dimming zones. Last year's P-Series had 72 zones, whereas this year's 55-inch 6-Series TV has 96 zones, and the 65-inch has 120 zones.

US National Archives and Records Administration

Try as I might, I'm not perfect. My goal is to get every detail in every story right, but sometimes a post gets through with a factual error. Such was the case last night, in a story about Russia's new floating nuclear power plant. Some background research led me to believe that it was the first of its kind.

A couple of Ars readers, thankfully, disabused me of that notion quickly (one cool thing about writing for Ars is you always know that you're writing for a bunch of people who are dramatically smarter than yourself). Though such a power system is quite rare, there has been another floating nuclear plant that we can point to as an example: a US Army barge called the Sturgis, which was installed in Panama during the Vietnam War.

Last week, Canonical released Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the lastest long-term support version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ars is working on a full review of the release, code-named "Bionic Beaver." But I wanted to share some first impressions of the desktop, which is a major advance over the last LTS version.

Canonical made a bit of a U-turn in its interface plans while developing the last interim release of Ubuntu (17.10, code-named "Artful Aardvark")—dropping development of its homegrown Unity interface and application launcher (as well as development of an Ubuntu phone), saying goodbye to the Ambiance interface theme of old, and embracing the GNOME 3.28 desktop instead. Also significant is the integration of Snapcraft's "snap" format—a universal containerized installer format for packaged applications on all Linux platforms—into Ubuntu's application store.

Enlarge / Did I pick a picture of a clock because the update was released late or because the update's biggest feature is Timeline? The world may never know. (credit: John Loach / Flickr)

After some delays, the newest major update to Windows 10, the April 2018 Update, has just scraped into April. It's available to download right now and will start distribution on Windows Update on May 8th.

Even with its extended development period—a blue screen of death crash was discovered late in the process, forcing Microsoft to delay the release by a few weeks—the new release feels very similar to its predecessor. While the last couple of updates have tried to push new directions—virtual and augmented reality in the Fall Creators Update, 3D graphics in the Creators Update—with Microsoft trying to promote them as being themed collections of features gathered together, the new update doesn't have any particular overarching theme. Instead, it's a bunch of improvements to various parts of Windows, along with one particularly notable new feature.

That big new feature is one that we thought we were going to get in the Fall Creators Update: Timeline. Timeline adds a new dimension to the Windows task switcher (the one shown when you press Win+Tab or click the "Task view" button on the taskbar): specifically, time. The default view when you first enter the switcher is the same as it ever was, showing all the windows you have open so that you can instantly pick between them. But it now has a scrollbar. Scroll the screen down and you'll see historic documents, browser tabs, and applications.

Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting

More Human Than Human comes along at a time when perhaps no reminder is necessary: leaving life to bots—whether that means machine learning, artificial intelligence, genuine human-like androids, etc.—might get messy for us humans. Westworld gives us one version of a sentient-machine uprising every Sunday, and news cycles like those involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook provide gentler reminders that creating increasingly intelligent tech platforms can lead to unwanted manipulation and consequences right now.

But the new documentary (which debuted at South by Southwest and plays at the acclaimed Hot Docs festival in Toronto this week) doesn’t set out to paint a picture of some futuristic hellscape. Instead, it wants viewers to pause for a second to consider the forever promise of technology. “We grew up in the shadow of the space program, really believing that tech was going to make our lives better,” co-director Tommy Pallotta told Ars. “For five decades, we’ve seen this promise that tech would create more leisure time for us [and] that it’ll make all our lives better. It’s kind of insane we’re still sold the same promise, but what do we really have to show for it?”