Month: April 2018

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As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepared to face nearly half of the Senate today to explain what went wrong with his company's handling of personal data for millions of Facebook users, the Mozilla Foundation released a report that highlights the dangers posed to the entirety of the Internet ecosystem by the increasing concentration of control over how people experience the online world into the hands of companies like his.

Zuckerberg opened his remarks today by saying,"Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company" and he and others believed that the tools Facebook created were a force for good. "It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent those tools from being used for harm as well," he admitted. The danger that Facebook executives overlooked, however, is described clearly by the Mozilla Foundation report.

Mozilla Foundation executive director Mark Surman explained the harm done by Facebook's platform clearly in a blog post today, describing the process of creating the 2018 Internet Health Report. As he and foundation fellows were discussing how to discuss the topic of "fake news," he wrote, "I sketched out a list on a napkin to help order our thoughts:"

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Two Democratic US senators today proposed a "privacy bill of rights" that would prevent Facebook and other websites from sharing or selling sensitive information without a customer's opt-in consent.

The proposed law would protect customers' Web browsing and application usage history, private messages, and any sensitive personal data such as financial and health information.

"The avalanche of privacy violations by Facebook and other online companies has reached a critical threshold, and we need legislation that makes consent the law of the land," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in an announcement.

Enlarge / How "X-treme" is this game's "Early Access" period? Quite. (credit: Boss Key Productions)

For all the flak and attention Cliff "CliffyB" Bleszinski has garnered over the years, the developer has always at least put his name behind solid video games. His most recent self-admitted financial failure, Lawbreakers, at least did a fine job carrying Bleszinski's old-school, Unreal Tournament torch, in spite of its issues with difficulty curve and generic art.

But Bleszinski and his current studio, Boss Key Productions, made a sharp turn last week in pronouncing the figurative death of Lawbreakers while simultaneously hinting at a new project. Turns out, that new project was precisely the thing that crowded out Lawbreakers' continued development, and the game maker only waited four days to announce its new focus: Radical Heights, an '80s-themed PUBG clone.

Boss Key's Monday announcement included a promise that Radical Heights would enter "Xtreme" Early Access the following day, so we decided to wait and give the game a whirl before making any assumptions. It sure looked like a bandwagon cash-in, after all, but maybe it'd come with some CliffyB magic.

Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes. (credit: NBC Today)

As recently as 2015, the plucky blood-testing company Theranos had about 800 employees. But on Tuesday, that number fell to about two dozen or less, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of the Silicon Valley biotech company, announced the third, brutal round of layoffs today in an all-hands meeting at the company's Newark, California office. The carnage claimed at least 80 percent of the company’s approximately 125-employee workforce that had remained until now.

According to people familiar with the matter, the move is intended to save desperately needed cash and avert—or at least delay—bankruptcy. Though the company was once valued at $9 billion, it has seen its value plummet and funds dwindle after revelations that its highly touted blood-testing technology was faulty and company leaders misled partners, regulators, customers, and investors.

FCC

The FCC just dropped a major surprise on us. It has documentation of a Google-branded HDMI dongle that runs Android TV and comes with a remote! It almost looks like a next-gen Chromecast, and the documents, which were spotted by reddit user 513, show off pictures, specs, and even the manual.

The device is manufactured by "Shenzhen SEI Robotics Co. Ltd." with the model number "SN5B6AD," and it is identified as a "4K ATV Stick." Unless we're seeing an outrageous level of trademark infringement, this is a Google device, as it is covered in Google "G" logos and comes with the Google Assistant.

Enlarge (credit: Pablo Viojo / Flickr)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and FIDO Alliance today announced that a new spec, WebAuthn ("Web Authentication") had been promoted to the Candidate Recommendation stage, the penultimate stage in the Web standards process.

WebAuthn is a specification to allow browsers to expose hardware authentication devices—USB, Bluetooth, or NFC—to sites on the Web. These hardware devices enable users to prove their identity to sites without requiring usernames and passwords. The spec has been developed as a joint effort between FIDO, an industry body that's developing secure authentication systems, and W3C, the industry group that oversees development of Web standards.

With WebAuthn-enabled browsers and sites, users can sign in using both integrated biometric hardware (such as the fingerprint and facial-recognition systems that are widely deployed) and external authentication systems such as the popular YubiKey USB hardware. With WebAuthn, no user credentials ever leave the browser and no passwords are used, providing strong protection against phishing, man-in-the-middle attacks, and replay attacks.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Every now and then, Amazon will drop the price on a collection of its Fire TV media streamers, Fire tablets, and Kindle e-readers, and today is one of those days.

Many of these discounts require you to be a Prime subscriber, but if you're one of the millions who already pays Amazon for expedited shipping, you can grab a Fire HD 8, the cheap tablet to beat these days, for $55. Or pick up a Kindle Paperwhite—generally considered the best e-reader for most—for $80. That's good for $25 and $40 off, respectively.

All is not lost if you're not a Prime member, though, as deals on Amazon's Fire TV Stick and 4K Fire TV streamer aren't locked behind a subscription.

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One of the things you have to accept as a tech writer is being on the receiving end of a never-ending stream of PR pitches. Generally, they're ill-targeted or irrelevant to the topics I actually write about—for instance, anything with "blockchain" gets deleted immediately. Sometimes, though, a pitch email will be intriguing enough to warrant a reply other than "sorry, this isn't for Ars."

Those replies usually lead to an interesting conversation with an expert in a particular field, which is useful for informing our reporting. But the email that sparked this article was about a new navigation app, called Live Roads, that promises to be the first to feature an HD map and much greater accuracy than we're accustomed to in our cellphones.

Smartphone GPS is usually only accurate to about 4m (13 feet), so the idea of a smartphone navigation app capable of much more accurate spatial resolution piqued my interest enough to try it out. Then it got me wondering how the whole thing works.