Month: September 2018

Enlarge / An Emirates Airbus A380 (credit: Getty | NurPhoto)

Emirates Airline has confirmed that “about 10 passengers” have fallen ill from an unidentified illness on flight 203, direct from Dubai to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, where the plane is currently being held under quarantine.

The Airbus A380 arrived shortly after 9am ET this morning, carrying 521 passengers, according to the New York City mayor’s office. Local media outlets initially reported that around 100 passengers reported feeling ill. Images of the plane shared by media and Twitter users show it in a standing area, away from any terminal, surrounded by ambulances and police.

Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the Port Authority policy were reportedly responding to the incident.

Enlarge (credit: Raymundo Jacquez III)

In May 2018, Oakland joined a growing number of California cities and counties that are currently passing meaningful surveillance oversight laws.

The new law requires that the Privacy Advisory Commission be notified if the city is spending money or seeking outside grant money to be spent on any hardware or software that could potentially impact privacy. Notably, Oakland's law specifically includes provisions that forbid non-disclosure agreements and protect whistleblowers.

Oakland has been at the forefront of local efforts to pass pro-privacy measures for many years now. Back in 2013, after a controversial measure to approve federal grant money to construct a "Domain Awareness Center," the city created the PAC. This body, composed of volunteer commissioners from each city council district, acts as a privacy check on the city when any municipal entity (typically the police department) wants to acquire a technology that may impinge on individual privacy.

Enlarge / This is how a Chrome 57 displays https://www.xn--80ak6aa92e.com/. Note the https://www.apple.com in the address bar.

Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), the online addresses that make up such an important part of the Web and browsers we use, are problematic things. Their complex structure is routinely exploited by bad actors who create phishing sites that superficially appear to be legitimate but are in fact malicious. Sometimes the tricks are as simple as creating a long domain name that's too wide to be shown in a mobile browser; other times, such as in the above picture, more nefarious techniques are used.

It's for this reason that a number of Chrome developers want to come up with something new. But what that new thing should be is harder to say.

Browsers are already taking a number of steps to try to tame URLs and make them less prone to malicious use. Chrome's use of "Not Secure" labels instead of showing the protocol name (http or https) replaces a piece of jargon with something that anyone can understand. Most browsers these days use color to highlight the actual domain name (printed in black type) from the rest of the URL (printed in grey type); Apple's Safari goes a step further, with its address bar suppressing the entire URL except for the domain name, revealing the full text only when the address box is clicked. Microsoft's Edge (and before it, Internet Explorer) dropped support for URLs with embedded usernames and passwords, because their legitimate uses were overwhelmed by malicious ones.