Month: June 2019

Enlarge / Cheesy graphic from stem-cell documentary "The Healthcare Revolution." (credit: Healthcare Revolution)

Around a dozen prominent stem-cell experts said this week that they have been duped into appearing in a documentary series some described as an infomercial for the unproven and dangerous stem-cell treatments peddled by clinics now facing federal charges.

The researchers said they had originally agreed to do interviews for the project believing it was for a sober, educational documentary on legitimate stem-cell research—which holds medical potential but is still largely unproven to benefit patients. Just days before the documentary’s intended release of June 17, however, researchers say they were horrified to learn that the 10-part series, titled The Healthcare Revolution, hypes dubious stem-cell treatments as miracle cures and gives false hope to desperate patients. The revelation was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

The researchers soon after discovered that the series was partially funded by the Cell Surgical Network, a for-profit chain of clinics currently facing federal charges for selling stem-cell treatments without approval from the Food and Drug Administration and failing to adhere to safety regulations. Hundreds of such questionable clinics have popped up around the country in recent years.

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  Apple Senior VP Craig Federighi unveiling iOS 13's dark mode at WWDC earlier this month. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Sure, some users will appreciate iOS 13's dark mode, but features that relate to privacy, quality of life, and user advocacy are likely to be the ones that make the biggest difference for people when Apple's new iPhone, iPad, and iPod software arrives later this year.

To that point, uninstalling an app to which you have a paid subscription in iOS 13's latest beta release will lead to a prompt to potentially unsubscribe from that app. This might be a good idea because odds are decent that if you're deleting the app, you're not planning to use the related service anymore.

Of course, that won't always be the case: you could just be removing the app temporarily, you could still plan to use it on another device, or you could even just wish to keep supporting the developer who made it. The prompt just says "Manage Subscription," which is what copywriters might call a soft call-to-action—it's not telling you to unsubscribe, it's just making it an option.

Enlarge / Reddit user MiloWee uploaded a video of this allegedly sleeping Tesla driver. (credit: MiloWee / Reddit)

In the last week, two different people have captured video of Tesla vehicles traveling down a freeway with an apparently sleeping driver behind the wheel.

Both incidents happened in California. Last week, local television stations in Los Angeles aired footage from viewer Shawn Miladinovich of a Tesla vehicle driving on LA's 405 freeway. The driver "was just fully sleeping, eyes were shut, hands nowhere near the steering wheel," said Miladinovich, who was a passenger in a nearby car, in an interview with NBC Channel 4.

Miladinovich said he saw the vehicle twice, about 30 minutes apart, as both cars traveled along the 405 freeway. The driver appeared to be asleep both times. He wrote down the vehicle's license plate number and called the information in to 911, but the California Highway Patrol had not reacted by the time the vehicles went their separate ways.

Yesterday on Twitter, Samsung's US support team reminded everyone to regularly—and manually—virus-scan their televisions.

Samsung's team followed this up with a short video showing someone in a conference room going 16 button-presses deep into the system menu of a Samsung QLED TV to activate the television's built-in virus-scan, which is apparently "McAfee Security for TV."

Welcome to the future. You can't have a jetpack, but here's some third-party antivirus for your television. Enjoy!

Unsurprisingly, Samsung got immediate pushback on these tweets and almost as immediately deleted them.

Enlarge (credit: JIP)

The Linux and FreeBSD operating systems contain newly discovered vulnerabilities that make it easy for hackers to remotely crash servers and disrupt communications, researchers have warned. OS distributors are advising users to install patches when available or to make system settings that lower the chances of successful exploits.

The most severe of the vulnerabilities, dubbed SACK Panic, can be exploited by sending a specially crafted sequence of TCP Selective ACKnowledgements to a vulnerable computer or server. The system will respond by crashing, or in the parlance of engineers, entering a kernel panic. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11477, results in a remote denial of service (DoS).

A second vulnerability also works by sending a series of malicious SACKs that consumes computing resources of the vulnerable system. Exploits most commonly work by fragmenting a queue reserved for retransmitting TCP packets. In some OS versions, attackers can cause what’s known as an “expensive linked-list walk for subsequent SACKs.” This can result in additional fragmentation, which has been dubbed “SACK slowness.” Exploitation of this vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11478, drastically degrades system performance and may eventually cause a complete DoS.

Enlarge / A photo of Philip Arps that was taken from a Facebook page. (credit: Facebook photo)

A New Zealand court today sentenced a man to 21 months in prison for sharing a video of the white-supremacist terrorist attacks that killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch.

As we noted in previous coverage, New Zealand and many other countries don't have US-style free-speech protections. After the mosque shootings on March 15, New Zealand's chief censor determined that a 17-minute video livestreamed during the shooting is objectionable under the country's law.

"It's illegal to have a copy of the video or document, or to share these with others," the New Zealand government explained.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a deal on Nintendo's Switch Pro Controller, which is down to $50. That's good for a $15-20 discount off its usual going rate and tied for the lowest we've seen the gamepad at reputable retailers.

Whether it's worth jumping on this deal depends on how often you keep the Switch docked and hooked up to a TV. The Switch's built-in "Joy-Con" controllers are still perfectly fine for most use cases, and if you're on the road, the hassle of trying to keep the Switch propped up just to use the Switch Pro pad probably isn't worth it. Much of the Switch's appeal is in its portability, after all.

But if you don't just treat your Switch like a big 3DS, the Switch Pro Controller brings substantial upgrades in comfort and responsiveness, particularly over the course of longer play sessions. The face buttons, triggers, and joysticks are bigger and have more give, there's an actual d-pad, and the whole thing should be sized appropriately for all but the smallest hands. (Those joysticks are also laid out asymmetrically, a la an Xbox controller, which the Dealmaster has always found to feel more natural than the layout on Sony's DualShock 4 pad.) Nintendo rates the controller's rechargeable battery as lasting an excellent 40 hours on a charge, and that estimate isn't far off in practice.