Month: January 2021

Enlarge / Former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum addresses an audience on March 20, 2019 in Miami Gardens, Florida. Gillum's campaign was targeted by racist robocalls in 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Saul Martinez )

A neo-Nazi, white-supremacist robocaller who spread "xenophobic fearmongering" and "racist attacks on political candidates" has been ordered to pay a $9.9 million fine for violating the Truth in Caller ID Act, a US law that prohibits manipulation of caller ID numbers with the intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value. The Federal Communications Commission finalized the fine against Scott Rhodes of Idaho yesterday, nearly one year after the FCC first proposed the penalty.

"This individual made thousands of spoofed robocalls targeting specific communities with harmful pre-recorded messages," the FCC said in an announcement. "The robocalls included xenophobic fearmongering (including to a victim's family), racist attacks on political candidates, an apparent attempt to influence the jury in a domestic terrorism case, and threatening language toward a local journalist. The caller used an online calling platform to intentionally manipulate caller ID information so that the calls he was making appeared to come from local numbers—a technique called 'neighbor spoofing.'"

Rhodes made "4,959 unlawful spoofed robocalls between May 2018 and December 2018," with several different calling sprees that "targeted voters in districts during political campaigns or residents in communities that had experienced major news events relating to or involving public controversies," the FCC's forfeiture order said.

Enlarge / You see Facebook, Facebook sees you... (credit: Chris Jackson | Getty Images)

Millions of Facebook users in Illinois will be receiving about $340 each as Facebook settles a case alleging it broke state law when it collected facial recognition data on users without their consent. The judge hearing the case in federal court in California approved the final settlement on Thursday, six years after legal proceedings began.

"This is money that's coming directly out of Facebook's own pocket," US District Judge James Donato said, according to the Chicago Tribune. "The violations here did not extract a penny from the pockets of the victims. But this is real money that Facebook is paying to compensate them for the tangible privacy harms that they suffered."

Three different Illinois residents filed suit against Facebook in 2015 and claimed that the service's "tag suggestions" feature, which uses facial recognition to suggest other users to tag in photos, violated their rights under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The suits were eventually rolled together into a single class-action complaint and transferred to federal court in California.

Enlarge / Nuro makes small electric vehicles for hauling cargo. They are designed to be street-legal but have no room for passengers. (credit: Nuro)

Until this week, the federal government's car safety regulations were based on two assumptions that probably seemed self-evident when they were written: that every car will have people inside, and that one of those people will be the driver. To protect the safety of the driver and possible passengers, the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) requires that every car have seatbelts and airbags. It also sets minimum standards for everything from windshield strength to crash test performance.

In the coming years, these assumptions will be increasingly out of date. So on Thursday, as the Trump administration is coming to a close, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published a new version of the FMVSS that recognizes that some cars don't have drivers—and some vehicles don't have anyone inside at all.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of these new rules will be Nuro, a startup that is building delivery robots designed to operate on streets rather than sidewalks. In a statement to Ars, Nuro hailed the rules as a "significant advancement that will help Nuro commercialize our self-driving delivery vehicles."

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  This is the $44,900 Mini John Cooper Works GP, a stripped-out, lowered, 301hp hot hatch. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

To some people, John Cooper is best known for the racing cars bearing his name that showed F1 and Indianapolis that the engine should go behind the driver. He taught that lesson back in 1960, and 61 years later it remains as true as ever. But more will associate his name with little front-wheel drive Minis, which he tuned in addition to building successful single-seaters.

The Mini Cooper was a budget bijou performance car, a good 16 years before VW thought up the Golf GTI, beloved by rally drivers and celluloid bank robbers alike. These days, there's an entire John Cooper Works lineup at Mini, with hot versions of the various vehicles that now make up the Mini range. And this is the hottest of them all, the $44,900 2021 Mini John Cooper Works GP.

Limited to just 3,000 cars, the JCW GP is the most extreme Mini you can buy that isn't a Dakar off-road racer. Its track has been widened, pushing the wheels farther apart from each other—hence the naked carbon fiber-reinforced plastic wing arch extensions with vents that you could lose a finger inside.

Enlarge / Uberwachung, Symbolbild, Datensicherheit, Datenhoheit (credit: Westend61 | Getty Images)

Lawmakers and law enforcement agencies around the world, including in the United States, have increasingly called for backdoors in the encryption schemes that protect your data, arguing that national security is at stake. But new research indicates governments already have methods and tools that, for better or worse, let them access locked smartphones thanks to weaknesses in the security schemes of Android and iOS.

Cryptographers at Johns Hopkins University used publicly available documentation from Apple and Google as well as their own analysis to assess the robustness of Android and iOS encryption. They also studied more than a decade's worth of reports about which of these mobile security features law enforcement and criminals have previously bypassed, or can currently, using special hacking tools. The researchers have dug into the current mobile privacy state of affairs and provided technical recommendations for how the two major mobile operating systems can continue to improve their protections.

“It just really shocked me, because I came into this project thinking that these phones are really protecting user data well,” says Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green, who oversaw the research. “Now I’ve come out of the project thinking almost nothing is protected as much as it could be. So why do we need a backdoor for law enforcement when the protections that these phones actually offer are so bad?”

Enlarge / This is the 16-inch MacBook Pro as it's being sold now. According to today's report, the new one will generally look quite similar. (credit: Samuel Axon)

According to a report in Bloomberg, Apple plans to launch new versions of its MacBook Pro laptops "around the middle of the year," and these machines will feature speed and display enhancements, as well as a return of the MagSafe charging design seen in MacBook computers several generations ago.

Citing "a person with knowledge of the plans," the Bloomberg story claims that Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro will get a 14-inch successor, just as the 15-inch MacBook Pro became a 16-inch model when the screen bezel was reduced to allow more screen real estate in a similarly sized chassis.

Both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro are slated for the middle of the year and will incorporate Apple's custom silicon. The company first introduced its own silicon with the M1 chip included in November refreshes of the low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini. The new machines described today would have a successor to Apple's M1 chip with more CPU cores and "enhanced graphics."