Month: January 2021

Enlarge (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The highest state court in Massachusetts has rejected Uber's efforts to force a blind man's discrimination claims to be settled in arbitration. In the process, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court raised the bar for technology companies trying to impose one-sided terms of service on users without providing clear notice that they were doing so.

When Christopher Kauders signed up for an Uber account several years ago, he had to fill out three screens of information. The third screen was titled "link payment" and offered users various ways to pay for Uber rides. Below these options was a message that stated that "by creating an Uber account, you agree to the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy."

Users could click on a link to view these legal documents, but the app didn't require users to do so. At no point was Kauders required to click an "I agree" button.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Although it had to share headlines with a deadly pandemic and hotly contested presidential campaign, America’s ongoing struggle against racism was also a major story in 2020. And that includes over at the peer-to-peer car-sharing company Turo. "To be honest with you, we've had some really incredibly vocal and charismatic Black leaders within Turo who shared with us some really insightful data about the lack of access to capital, the average black American, and how that community, generally speaking, is really at a disadvantage in terms of accessing capital compared to any other community in the US," explained Turo CEO Andre Haddad.

Which is why Turo created a pilot program called the Seed Initiative. The company has teamed up with microloan provider Kiva to provide interest-free loans of up to $15,000 to fund Black entrepreneurs in 14 US cities so that they can use the platform to start car rental businesses. Successful applicants can crowdfund up to $7,500 on Kiva, which Turo will match dollar for dollar.

"I've always been enamored by the impact that our platform has on anyone who becomes a host [the term for someone who loans out vehicles on Turo]—the fact that they can start turning the car away from just being a depreciating cost center into an asset that generates cash and helps pay for itself," Haddad said. "But in order to be able to participate and create that economic value, you have first to have a car. And unfortunately, there are lots of people who just can't afford to even buy a car, and therefore can't even access the marketplace," he told me recently by phone.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

If you’re using an Android device—or in some cases an iPhone—the Telegram messenger makes it easy for hackers to find your precise location when you enable a feature that allows users who are geographically close to you. The researcher who discovered the disclosure vulnerability and privately reported it to Telegram developers said he has expressed no plans to fix it.

The problem stems from a feature called People Nearby. By default, it’s turned off. When users enable it, their geographic distance is shown to other people who have it turned on and are in (or are spoofing) the same geographic region. When People Nearby is used as designed, it’s a useful feature with few if any privacy concerns. After all, a notification that someone is 1 kilometer or 600 meters away still leaves stalkers guessing where, precisely, you are.

Stalking made simple

Independent researcher Ahmed Hassan, however, has shown how the feature can be abused to divulge exactly where you are. Using readily available software and a rooted Android device, he’s able to spoof the location his device reports to Telegram servers. By using just three different locations and measuring the corresponding distance reported by People Nearby, he’s able to pinpoint a user’s precise location.

Enlarge / A user in Singaapore holding the TraceTogether device that can be used for COVID-19 contact tracing in lieu of a smartphone app. (credit: Roslan Rahman | AFP | Getty Images)

The government of Singapore said this week it has used data gathered for COVID-19 mitigation purposes in criminal investigations, sparking privacy concerns about contact tracing both in Singapore and elsewhere in the world.

Singapore's contract-tracing app, TraceTogether, has been adopted by nearly 80 percent of the country's population, according to The Guardian, and Singaporeans are required to use it to enter certain gathering places such as shopping malls.

TraceTogether's privacy statement originally read, "Data will only be used for Covid-19 contact tracing," but it was updated this week to add, "Authorised Police officers may invoke Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) powers to request users to upload their TraceTogether data for criminal investigations. The Singapore Police Force is empowered under the CPC to obtain any data, including TraceTogether data, for criminal investigations," The Register reports.

Enlarge / Large flock of jackdaws in silhouette flying in the evening sky over the trees. (credit: iStock / Getty Images Plus)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: why flocks of jackdaws will change their flying patterns depending on whether they are returning to roost, or banding together to drive away predators.

Flocks of wild jackdaws will change their flying patterns depending on whether they are returning to roost or banding together to drive away predators, according to research originally slated to be presented at the 2020 APS March Meeting, which was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. The work builds upon earlier findings published in a November 2019 paper in Nature Communications. This could one day lead to the development of autonomous robotic swarms capable of changing their interaction rules to perform different tasks in response to environmental cues.

Co-author Nicholas Ouellette (no relation), a physicist-turned-environmental engineer at Stanford University, has long been fascinated by biological swarms after noting how flocks of starlings in flight formed unusual patterns that, to his physicist's eye, looked a lot like turbulence. He thought there must be underlying mechanisms behind the formation of those patterns—possibly even a set of universal laws that could apply to collective behavior across different species.

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  The OnePlus Nord N100. [credit: OnePlus ]

OnePlus is finally bringing its new, cheaper "Nord" line to the US over the next two weeks, complete with actual US prices. The most interesting is the OnePlus Nord N100, a $180 phone that comes with a 90Hz display, a pretty incredible price point considering some companies still sell $1100 smartphones that only have 60Hz displays.

That 90Hz display for a super low price sounds neat but comes with a lot of caveats. First of all, this is a 720p 90Hz display, second, it's an LCD instead of the usual OLED. But hey, for $180 you have to make some sacrifices in the name of speed.

The full N100 specs are a 6.52-inch, 1600×720 90Hz LCD, a Snapdragon 460 (That's an 11nm, eight-core SoC with four 1.8GHz Cortex-A73 CPUs and four 1.8GHz A53s), 4GB of RAM, 64GB of UFS 2.1 storage, and a nice-sized 5000mah battery. The phone has a rear capacitive fingerprint reader, a USB-C port, a headphone jack, a MicroSD slot, and stereo speakers. Sadly there's no NFC, and with an LCD, you won't be getting an always-on display mode. Also at this price point, you can also forget about fancy extras like water resistance or wireless charging.

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

Last year was the most significant yet in Waymo’s 11-year effort to develop a driverless car.

The Google sister company raised $3.2 billion, signed deals with several partners and launched the world’s first truly driverless taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona.

Even so, the widespread rollout of fully autonomous vehicles remains slow, staggered, and costly.

Recently, indie developer Bernard Schilling published a new fork of the DOSBox classic-gaming emulator. If you're not familiar with DOSBox, it's a way to play classic MS-DOS games from the 1980s and 1990s on a modern Windows, Mac, or Linux PC. DOSBox Pure is an attempt to simplify and eliminate some of the donkeywork involved in actually loading and playing games in DOSBox itself.

DOSBox Pure isn’t a standalone app

For those among us who aren't already intimately familiar with retrogaming—even those of us who lived through the period when those games were new—it isn't necessarily the most welcoming scene to get into. Although DOSBox Pure is specifically trying to alleviate that, it falls afoul of the same nest of expectations of what "everybody already knows," and I found it rather frustrating digging all the way to the bottom of "what is and how can I make it work."

The very first thing you'll need to know is that DOSBox Pure itself runs underneath the broader RetroArch application. RetroArch, in its own words, is "a frontend for emulators, game engines, and media players." DOSBox Pure is a "core" for RetroArch—meaning, when properly installed, it serves as one of the engines that RetroArch can use to run an older game.

Enlarge / A Comcast van in Sunnyvale, California, in November 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Andrei Stanescu)

Dozens of state lawmakers from Massachusetts urged Comcast to halt enforcement of its 1.2TB monthly data cap, saying the cap hurts low-income people during the pandemic and is unnecessary because of Comcast's healthy network capacity.

"Network capacity is not an issue for Comcast or a valid excuse to charge customers more," 71 state lawmakers wrote in the letter last week, one day before Comcast brought its data cap to Massachusetts and other states where it wasn't already enforced. "Comcast itself claims it has plenty of capacity across its network, including areas where no caps are currently imposed... It is inconceivable that Comcast would choose to impose this 'cap and fee' plan during a pandemic, when many Massachusetts residents are forced to work and attend school from home via the Internet."

The letter said the lawmakers "strongly urge Comcast to discontinue this plan, and to reconsider any future attempts at imposing a data cap or any perversion of the principles of net neutrality in Massachusetts." The lawmakers also pointed out a statement by Comcast executive Tony Werner, who said the increased broadband traffic caused by the pandemic "has all been within the capability of the network."