Month: January 2019

Enlarge / Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Nate Cardozo speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 at Brooklyn Cruise Terminal on May 9, 2016 in New York City. (credit: Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

At a time when Facebook has been under increased public scrutiny like never before, the company is now hiring at least one of its fiercest antagonists.

On Tuesday, Facebook acknowledged that it had hired three veteran privacy law activists, including Nate Cardozo, an attorney formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has been very publicly critical of the company in recent years.

In 2015, Cardozo once wrote in an op-ed that Facebook's "business model depends on our collective confusion and apathy about privacy."

Enlarge / A person uses an iPad for a FaceTime conversation, on January 29, 2019 in Rome. (credit: VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images)

A Houston attorney has sued Apple over the recently disclosed FaceTime bug, which can allow third parties to surreptitiously listen to FaceTime calls via an iPhone microphone.

In a lawsuit filed Monday evening in Harris County District Court, Larry Williams claimed the company was negligent when it allowed the microphone to be used in this way.

"Plaintiff was undergoing a private deposition with a client when this defective product breach allowed for the recording of a private deposition," he wrote.

• 

  The new Gmail. It's very white. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Google is pushing a big redesign to the mobile Gmail app on Android and iOS. The update was announced yesterday, and after spending some time with the new app, we're going to comb through the finer details and see what has changed between New Gmail and Old Gmail.

For now the release is only out on Android, but like the old Gmail design, it should look identical on iOS. If you're on Android, you want Gmail version 9.x (the old design is Gmail 8). If the Play Store isn't serving you the update and you're into sideloading, APKMirror has a safe download. The iOS version is still wending its way through the App Store approval process and should be out sometime this week.

The new design is a good match for the new desktop Gmail design that came out in April, along with all the other apps using the "Google Material Theme" design language. Everything is really white—an homage to the Google homepage—and everything uses rounded corners. The horizontal line dividers are gone, leaving nothing but white space to separate your messages. Control iconography is changed to Google's new outline style, and while message text remains in the Roboto font, everything else now uses Product Sans (the same typeface as the Google logo).

• 

  This is the all-new Mazda 3, which uses the company's new Skyactiv-Vehicle architecture. [credit: Mazda ]

LOS ANGELES—I'll admit it, I always look forward to the launch of a new Mazda. Other brands might give you ten minutes of Cliff's Notes on the car before throwing you the keys and pointing you at the nearest twisty ribbon of tarmac; by contrast, the Hiroshima-based OEM's events always feel more like a grad school seminar. (I think that's a good thing, but that's probably why I have this job.)

In this regard, the launch of the brand-new Mazda 3 did not disappoint. The car is a clean-sheet design, the first to use the all-new Skyactiv-Vehicle architecture. And before we got to try it out in a mix of LA traffic and the Angeles Crest Highway, the engineers and designers responsible gave us plenty of insight into how they went about updating Mazda's best-selling car. The result is a refreshingly human-centered vehicle from an OEM that continues to live up to Jinba Ittai—its internal philosophy of making a car and its driver feel as one.

As with previous generations, the new Mazda 3—which goes on sale in March—will be available as a sedan (starting at $21,000) or a five-door hatchback (starting at $23,600). Eventually, you'll be able to option one with Mazda's clever new Skyactiv-X spark-controlled compression ignition engine, but at launch all US cars will come equipped with the same 2.5L four-cylinder Skyactiv-G power unit. There is a choice between front- and all-wheel drive, though, and at least some cars will even be available with a manual transmission.

• 

  This is the all-new Mazda 3, which uses the company's new Skyactiv-Vehicle architecture. [credit: Mazda ]

LOS ANGELES—I'll admit it, I always look forward to the launch of a new Mazda. Other brands might give you ten minutes of Cliff's Notes on the car before throwing you the keys and pointing you at the nearest twisty ribbon of tarmac; by contrast, the Hiroshima-based OEM's events always feel more like a grad school seminar. (I think that's a good thing, but that's probably why I have this job.)

In this regard, the launch of the brand-new Mazda 3 did not disappoint. The car is a clean-sheet design, the first to use the all-new Skyactiv-Vehicle architecture. And before we got to try it out in a mix of LA traffic and the Angeles Crest Highway, the engineers and designers responsible gave us plenty of insight into how they went about updating Mazda's best-selling car. The result is a refreshingly human-centered vehicle from an OEM that continues to live up to Jinba Ittai—its internal philosophy of making a car and its driver feel as one.

As with previous generations, the new Mazda 3—which goes on sale in March—will be available as a sedan (starting at $21,000) or a five-door hatchback (starting at $23,600). Eventually, you'll be able to option one with Mazda's clever new Skyactiv-X spark-controlled compression ignition engine, but at launch all US cars will come equipped with the same 2.5L four-cylinder Skyactiv-G power unit. There is a choice between front- and all-wheel drive, though, and at least some cars will even be available with a manual transmission.

Enlarge (credit: Roure et al. 2019)

Archaeologists found microscopic traces of conifer resin and plant oils on bone fragments from skulls scattered just inside the walls of Le Cailar, a 2,500-year-old walled settlement near the Rhone River in southern France. That suggests that the heads had been embalmed with resin and plant oil before being displayed at the settlement, a practice described in ancient Roman texts and portrayed in sculptures at other Celtic sites across southern France. According to those texts and sculptures, it’s likely that the skulls belonged to defeated enemies.

“The head of the most famous enemy”

The fragments of at least a hundred human skulls lay buried in an open area just inside the town’s walls. They were mingled with weapons, coins, and broken pottery in a layer dating to 300 to 200 BCE, when the town was an Iron Age Celtic community. Many of the bones bear the telltale cut marks of decapitation but also evidence of the work that went into preparing these grisly trophies for display.

On some of the skulls, bone had been chipped, cut, or scraped away to widen the foramen magnum—the hole at the back of the skull where the spinal cord enters—probably to remove the brain. Scrape marks on the undersides of some of the skulls’ lower jaws suggest that ancient embalmers may also have removed the tongues.

Enlarge (credit: Roure et al. 2019)

Archaeologists found microscopic traces of conifer resin and plant oils on bone fragments from skulls scattered just inside the walls of Le Cailar, a 2,500-year-old walled settlement near the Rhone River in southern France. That suggests that the heads had been embalmed with resin and plant oil before being displayed at the settlement, a practice described in ancient Roman texts and portrayed in sculptures at other Celtic sites across southern France. According to those texts and sculptures, it’s likely that the skulls belonged to defeated enemies.

“The head of the most famous enemy”

The fragments of at least a hundred human skulls lay buried in an open area just inside the town’s walls. They were mingled with weapons, coins, and broken pottery in a layer dating to 300 to 200 BCE, when the town was an Iron Age Celtic community. Many of the bones bear the telltale cut marks of decapitation but also evidence of the work that went into preparing these grisly trophies for display.

On some of the skulls, bone had been chipped, cut, or scraped away to widen the foramen magnum—the hole at the back of the skull where the spinal cord enters—probably to remove the brain. Scrape marks on the undersides of some of the skulls’ lower jaws suggest that ancient embalmers may also have removed the tongues.