Month: November 2020

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

For years, Google and Mozilla have battled to keep abusive or outright malicious browser extensions from infiltrating their official repositories. Now, Microsoft is taking up the fight.

Over the past several days, people in website forums have complained of the Google searches being redirected to oksearch[.]com when they use Edge. Often, the searches use cdn77[.]org for connectivity.

After discovering the redirections weren’t an isolated incident, participants in this Reddit discussion winnowed the list of suspects down to five. All of them are knockoffs of legitimate add-ons. That means that while the extensions bear the names of legitimate developers, they are, in fact, imposters with no relation.

Enlarge / A man glowers at an iPhone, just as ad firms are worried iOS users will when they discover how they are being tracked and that they can opt out of it. (credit: Jaap Arriens | NurPhoto | Getty Images)

Apple's plan to add a new privacy feature to iOS to limit "invasive, even creepy" tracking by third-party firms is nothing but an abuse of market power to stifle competition, Facebook—a third-party tracking firm extraordinaire—claims.

Apple in June announced that iOS 14 would make a change requiring app developers to notify users if their app collects a unique device code, known as an IDFA (ID for Advertisers), and require that collection to be an opt-in setting. After pushback from Facebook and other firms, however, Apple delayed implementation of the new policy and launched iOS 14 in September without enabling it. The company said instead the feature would be added "early next year" to give developers more time to update their apps accordingly.

Apple stands behind its plan to implement the new app tracking transparency (ATT) feature next year and plans to move forward with it, Jane Horvath, senior director of global privacy at Apple, said in a letter to eight civil, human, and digital rights groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Enlarge / The iPhone 12 mini. iOS 14.2.1 fixes an issue that affected the lock screen on this phone. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Yesterday, Apple released iOS 14.2.1 to fix bugs users have encountered on new iPhones since iOS 14.2 launched on November 5. Unlike many other iOS releases, this release was not accompanied by updates to all of the company's other operating systems.

The update fixes a bug that caused an unresponsive lock screen specifically on the iPhone 12 mini, and it addressed an issue that prevented MMS messages from coming in. Further, 14.2.1 fixes a problem with sound quality on connected hearing devices.

Here are Apple's release notes for iOS 14.2.1:

A page from a 15th-century medieval manuscript turns out to contain hidden text that is only visible under UV light. The discovery is due to the efforts of a team of undergraduate students at Rochester Institute of Technology, who built their own multispectral imaging system as part of a class project and managed to complete it despite the ongoing pandemic.

It's not unprecedented to uncover previously hidden texts on ancient manuscripts. In 2016, an international team of scientists developed a method for "virtually unrolling" a badly damaged ancient scroll found on the western shore of the Dead Sea, revealing the first few verses from the Book of Leviticus. Similarly, in 2019, we reported that German scientists used a combination of cutting-edge physics techniques to virtually "unfold" an ancient Egyptian papyrus, part of an extensive collection housed in the Berlin Egyptian Museum. Their analysis revealed that a seemingly blank patch on the papyrus actually contained characters written in what had become "invisible ink" after centuries of exposure to light.

And earlier this year, we reported on a new analysis using multispectral imaging showing that four Dead Sea Scroll fragments housed at the University of Manchester in the UK—previously presumed to be blank—had readable text written in carbon-based ink, along with parts of characters and ruled lines. One fragment in particular showed the remnants of four lines of text, consisting of about 15 letters. Only one word, Shabbat (Sabbath), was readable, but based on the analysis, Joan Taylor of King's College London thought the text related to the passages in Ezekiel 46:1-3.

Enlarge / Sega VR was manufactured, advertised, and pushed as Sega's next big thing, up until its unceremonious cancellation in 1994. Twenty-six years later, we finally get to see how it worked. (credit: Sega)

One of Sega's most mysterious products ever, the canceled Sega VR headset, finally emerged in a "playable" form on Friday thanks to a team of game history preservationists. It's a tale of a discovered ROM, a search for its source code, and efforts to not only rebuild the game but also adapt existing Genesis and Mega Drive emulators to translate virtual reality calls from today's PC headsets.

The story, as posted at the Video Game History Foundation's site, begins with a ROM discovery by Dylan Mansfield at Gaming Alexandria. The game in question, Nuclear Rush, was one of four games announced for Sega VR, a headset system designed to plug into standard Genesis and Mega Drive consoles.

Not quite 72Hz...

Gamers from that era likely heard about Sega VR, as the game publisher's PR push included plenty of mentions in gaming magazines, a public reveal at 1993's Summer CES, and even a segment on ABC's Nightline. But the ambitious device, slated to launch at a mere $199, was quietly canceled, and former Sega President Tom Kalinske eventually confirmed why: researchers found the device made a huge percentage of testers sick with headaches and dizziness.

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  Black wheels, wing mirrors, and a black spoiler are the only visual cues that you're looking at a Mazda 3 Turbo. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

Not everyone enjoys driving, and not every car is enjoyable to drive. And that's fine—and more reason to take the bus for those journeys that are more like a chore. But some of us do take pleasure from the act, and some car companies cater to that. And I don't mean unobtainable supercars, either; there are still mainstream OEMs building affordable cars that appeal to enthusiasts. Like Mazda, for example.

All it took was a couple of hours at the beginning of last year—half of it in Los Angeles' afternoon traffic—to realize that the new Mazda 3 stood out from the pack. It was the first car to use Mazda's new Skyactiv vehicle architecture, and despite Internet grumblings about the rear suspension design, it was a car that felt supple on the road, with a linearity between control input and car reaction that is all too rare in this day and age.

Driving the CX-30 crossover later that year proved it was no flash in the pan, a fact further confirmed when both the 3 and CX-30 were finalists for the 2019 World Car of the Year award (where they came in as runners-up to the Kia Telluride). But car enthusiasts can always find something to complain about, and one thing they've wanted from the Mazda 3 is more power. And so, for model year 2021, you can now get one with a turbo. It starts at $29,900, and it's called the Mazda 3 Turbo.