Month: August 2019

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A security consultant who took to Twitter to call out inappropriate comments made by a Southwest Airline flight attendant received a surprising response when the airline’s official Twitter account included her flight number in its reply while the flight had yet to take off.

The consultant, peeved that the airline tracked down her real-world identity and then broadcast her location, sent a follow-up saying the number amounted to personally identifiable information that the airline was obligated to keep private. The airline’s response: flight numbers aren’t PII. The conversation started out with a tweets like this one, reporting that an attendant on the flight she was boarding was making jokes some passengers found to be offensive:

Forgive me because I don’t often fly this airline, but are there boundaries around jokes made by FAs or is that totally at their discretion?@SouthwestAir

— Jackie (@find_evil) August 8, 2019

A Southwest representative using the name Emilia responded with this:

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  Cody Wilson (far right) sits in the front row for his first court appearance related to charges of sexual assault against a female minor. [credit: Nathan Mattise ]

AUSTIN—This morning, almost one year after an initial warrant for his arrest went out, Cody Wilson stood stoically in front of Judge Brad Urrutia in the 450th Criminal District Court in Travis County as cameras and a packed gallery watched. The founder and former director of firearms technology company Defense Distributed soon pleaded guilty to lesser charges stemming from an August 2018 incident with a female minor.

Prior to appearing in court, Wilson and his attorneys, F. Andino Reynal and Joseph Turner, bargained with the state of Texas to amend charges against the 3D-printed gun activist. Instead of sexual assault, Wilson stood accused of injury to a child, a lesser felony than what he originally faced. His guilty plea this morning now comes with a recommended seven-year probation period during which Wilson must register as a sex offender.

What brought Wilson to court today

According to court documents, authorities believed Wilson solicited the underage girl from a website called SugarDaddyMeet.com and eventually engaged in sexual acts with her on August 15, 2018. News of the arrest warrant for Wilson broke about a month late as he was out of the country in Taiwan. He seemed to be evading authorities by posing as a US college student, but authorities in the US and Taipei eventually collaborated to apprehend Wilson and bring him back to the US.

Enlarge / ESPN feels its audiences don't want to see Apex Legends scenes like this "given the swirl of that moment."

Some of the biggest corporations in the United States are scaling back their display of violent games in the wake of recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.

As reported by Vice, employees at Walmart stores are reporting receipt of a notice to "remove signing and displays referencing violence." These directions include turning off "any video game display consoles that show a demo of violent games" and "remov[ing] any [signs] referencing combat or third-person shooter video games." Employees are also instructed to "cancel any events promoting combat style or third-person shooter games that may be scheduled in Electronics."

The memo also says "movies displaying violence" and "hunting season videos" should not be displayed in stores for the time being.

Enlarge / Views of Fincha Habera from outside and from inside. One might speculate on how often its Middle Stone Age residents forgot to duck on the way in or out. (credit: Gotz Ossendorf)

Life at high elevations is tough, as the lower air pressure makes it hard for the body to get enough oxygen into the bloodstream. The weather is often cold but can shift without warning. And if you want to stay very long, you’ve got to find food in an environment where plants and animals are relatively scarce. But around 47,000 years ago, people apparently lived (at least for a while) in a rock shelter 3,469 meters (11,400 feet) above sea level in Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains.

Archaeologists found hundreds of stone tools, thousands of discarded animal bones, and ancient hearths buried in layers of sediment on the floor of Fincha Habera rock shelter. According to radiocarbon dates from charcoal and burnt bone, the first people lived up here between 47,000 and 31,000 years ago. The site is one of the earliest examples we have of people living at high elevations, instead of just venturing up to collect stone or forage.

Until recently, paleoanthropologists thought that people didn’t tackle the challenges of life at high elevations—in places like the Tibetan Plateau, the Peruvian Altiplano, or the Ethiopian mountains—until pretty late in our species’ world takeover. High places are difficult, so it made sense that people would have put the effort off as long as possible, until they found a really compelling reason. This find, along with others, suggests ancient people (and likely our hominin cousins) were much more capable than we’ve sometimes realized.

Enlarge / American Airlines Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft with registration N818AL landing at Athens International Airport. (credit: Nur Photo | Getty Images)

Late one night last September, security researcher Ruben Santamarta sat in his home office in Madrid and partook in some creative googling, searching for technical documents related to his years-long obsession: the cybersecurity of airplanes. He was surprised to discover a fully unprotected server on Boeing's network, seemingly full of code designed to run on the company's giant 737 and 787 passenger jets, left publicly accessible and open to anyone who found it. So he downloaded everything he could see.

Now, nearly a year later, Santamarta claims that leaked code has led him to something unprecedented: security flaws in one of the 787 Dreamliner's components, deep in the plane's multi-tiered network. He suggests that for a hacker, exploiting those bugs could represent one step in a multi­stage attack that starts in the plane’s in-flight entertainment system and extends to highly protected, safety-critical systems like flight controls and sensors.

Boeing flatly denies that such an attack is possible, and it rejects his claim of having discovered a potential path to pull it off. Santa­marta himself admits that he doesn't have a full enough picture of the aircraft—or access to a $250 million jet—to confirm his claims. But he and other avionics cybersecurity researchers who have reviewed his findings argue that while a full-on cyberattack on a plane's most sensitive systems remains far from a material threat, the flaws uncovered in the 787's code nonetheless represent a troubling lack of attention to cybersecurity from Boeing. They also say that the company's responses have not been altogether reassuring, given the critical importance of keeping commercial airplanes safe from hackers.

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  The Samsung Galaxy Home is Samsung's long-rumored Bixby smart speaker. [credit: Samsung ]

Happy one-year anniversary, I guess, to the Samsung Galaxy Home, which was announced a year ago today. The Bixby speaker was announced at the Note 9 launch in 2018, we just had the Note 10 launch in 2019, and the event came and went without a ship date or even a mention for Samsung's smart speaker. The Galaxy Home was supposed to be Samsung's answer to the Amazon Echo and Google Home—a smart speaker with a voice assistant inside, but the development is taking forever.

The Galaxy Home's absence at Samsung's latest event didn't go unnoticed by the media. Samsung confirmed to The Verge the device isn't cancelled, saying “We’re continuing to refine and enhance the Galaxy Home prior to launch, and look forward to sharing more with Galaxy fans soon.”

Samsung's whole assistant push with Bixby always seemed questionable, as it puts Samsung in the position of having to be an ecosystem creator, something it has not typically done. Assistants need to be on a wide range of hardware form factors and integrate with a software ecosystem. The Google Assistant connects to a huge range of Google apps and services and has the backing of Google Search, while Apple's Siri connects to iCloud and syncs across Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and Apple TVs. Amazon doesn't quite have the wide range of services that the operating system vendors have, but there are still things like Prime Video, Amazon Music, and more. And Amazon was first to market, which has given it a sizable "Skill" app store, a lead on hardware, and integration with third-party devices.