Airline tracks Twitter user’s real-world ID, publishes her flight number

Southwest Airlines finally relents, after first insisting flight numbers aren’t PII.

Airline tracks Twitter user’s real-world ID, publishes her flight number

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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:

A Southwest representative using the name Emilia responded with this:

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Huawei unveils Harmony OS for smart TVs, watches, and pretty much everything but phones (for now)

Shortly after the US government got into a fight with Chinese electronics giant Huawei, rumors started floating that the company would stop using Google’s Android software on its phones and switch to its own operating system. That’s not lik…

Shortly after the US government got into a fight with Chinese electronics giant Huawei, rumors started floating that the company would stop using Google’s Android software on its phones and switch to its own operating system. That’s not likely to happen anytime soon… but Huawei has been developing its own operating system for the past few […]

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Quartz Canyon: Intel plant Workstation-NUC mit dedizierter Grafik

Hinter Quartz Canyon, so der Codename des nächsten Mini-PCs von Intel, verbirgt sich eine Workstation-NUC: Das kompakte System hat acht CPU-Kerne sowie zwei Thunderbolt-3-Ports und nimmt PCIe-Grafikkarten auf. (Intel NUC, Prozessor)

Hinter Quartz Canyon, so der Codename des nächsten Mini-PCs von Intel, verbirgt sich eine Workstation-NUC: Das kompakte System hat acht CPU-Kerne sowie zwei Thunderbolt-3-Ports und nimmt PCIe-Grafikkarten auf. (Intel NUC, Prozessor)

Cody Wilson pleads guilty to lesser charge, will register as sex offender

Founder of Defense Distributed finally appeared in court after his arrest last fall.

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.

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Walmart, ESPN pull violent game marketing following shootings

Moves reflect temporary view of increased audience sensitivity.

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

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.

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Förderung: Bürgermeister raten, FTTH nach Bestellung nicht abzunehmen

Erst hatte die Regierung über 15 Jahre lang keine ambitionierten Ziele für FTTH, nun soll eine breite Förderung das Problem schnell lösen. Doch das führt zu volkswirtschaftlichem Unsinn. (Vectoring, Open Access)

Erst hatte die Regierung über 15 Jahre lang keine ambitionierten Ziele für FTTH, nun soll eine breite Förderung das Problem schnell lösen. Doch das führt zu volkswirtschaftlichem Unsinn. (Vectoring, Open Access)

Chuwi MiniBook 8 inch laptop gets active stylus stretch goal (crowdfunding)

The Chuwi MiniBook is a tiny laptop with a touchscreen display and a 360-degree hinge that lets you flip the screen around for use in tablet mode. It’s up for pre-order from Indiegogo for $428 and up during a crowdfunding campaign that’s al…

The Chuwi MiniBook is a tiny laptop with a touchscreen display and a 360-degree hinge that lets you flip the screen around for use in tablet mode. It’s up for pre-order from Indiegogo for $428 and up during a crowdfunding campaign that’s already raised more than $600,000. Now Chuwi is throwing in two new stretch […]

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The first people to live at high elevations snacked on giant mole rats

The site is the earliest evidence so far of people living at high elevations.

Photo of rock shelter entrance from outside, and from inside with a person bending over to show how low it is.

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.

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A Boeing code leak exposes security flaws deep in a 787’s guts

Boeing’s response to this glaring security lapse has not been reassuring.

American Airlines Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft with registration N818AL landing at Athens International Airport.

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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Samsung’s Bixby speaker, announced one year ago today, still hasn’t launched

It’s not cancelled yet, says Samsung, but there’s still no launch date.

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.

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