Month: October 2019

Enlarge (credit: Twitter)

If ever there was a surefire way to sour users against a two-factor authentication system that was already highly flawed, Twitter has found it. On Tuesday, the social media site said that it used phone numbers and email addresses provided for 2FA protection to tailor ads to users.

Twitter requires users to provide a valid phone number to be eligible for 2FA protection. A working cell phone number is mandatory even when users' 2FA protection is based solely on security keys or authenticator apps, which don't rely on phone numbers to work. Deleting a phone number from a user's Twitter settings immediately withdraws account from Twitter 2FA, as I confirmed just prior to publishing this post.

Security and privacy advocates have long grumbled about this requirement, which isn't a condition of using 2FA protection from Google, Github, and other top-ranked sites. On Tuesday, Twitter gave critics a new reason to complain. The site said it may have inadvertently used email addresses and phone numbers provided for 2FA and other security purposes to match users to marketing lists provided by advertisers. Twitter didn't say if the number of users affected by the blunder affected was in the hundreds or the millions or how long the improper targeting lasted.

Doom Eternal—the highly anticipated sequel to the hell-shooter series' 2016 reboot—has left our list of most anticipated games of 2019. On Tuesday morning, game publisher Bethesda announced that Doom Eternal needs another four months in the oven. That means it will launch on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 on March 20, 2020.

That list of supported platforms is missing a big name: Nintendo Switch. Tuesday's delay includes an additional, indefinite delay of the sequel's port to Nintendo's weaker console, thus breaking the developer's original promise that Switch buyers would get to rip and tear into Doom Eternal the same day as everyone else. "We will announce [the Switch port's] date in the future," the company's statement vaguely reads.

Publisher Bethesda took the opportunity to delay another related game out of November 2019, as well: Doom 64. This first-ever port of the 1997 shooter onto non-N64 platforms is still coming to PC and modern consoles, Bethesda says, but it too will launch on March 20, 2020. Now, at least, that port will become a free pre-order bonus for buyers of Doom Eternal. But we're not sure why Bethesda and id Software couldn't get Doom 64 ready by this holiday season to tide series fans over during the bigger game's delay. (In the meantime, if you own a legitimate copy of the N64 original, we suggest ripping its files and launching them on PC via the incredible Doom 64 EX mod.)

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

Today's Nobel Prize in physics was evenly split between two discoveries and, thus, unevenly split among the three honored. Typically when this happens, the two discoveries are at least somewhat related; that doesn't seem to be the case here, as the Prize Committee has recognized James Peebles for his contributions to theoretical cosmology and Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for the first clear discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a main sequence star.

The physics of the Big Bang

It's hard to find anything related to our current understanding of the Big Bang that doesn't have Peebles' fingerprints on it. He was at Princeton University (where he remains) when Arnold Penzias and Robert Wilson at nearby Bell Labs had identified the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that was produced in the aftermath of the Big Bang. Not fully aware of the importance of their discovery, Penzias and Wilson talked to the scientists at Princeton. As a result, Peebles was on a paper that described the theoretical underpinnings of the CMB published in the same issue as the write-up describing the CMB's discovery.

Peebles immediately went to work trying to understand the physics underlying different aspects of the Big Bang, showing how temperature and matter density influenced the production of helium in the Universe's earliest moments. Not being satisfied with that, he started considering how these conditions could influence the production of the Universe's first galaxies.