Month: April 2021

Enlarge / Northwestern University scientists have developed the first mechanical simulation of a rat whisker inside its follicle, to better understand how that sensory input is communicated to the brain. (credit: Niccirf/Getty Images)

Rats, cats, and many other mammals have whiskers, which they typically use to sense their surrounding environment, akin to the sense of touch. But scientists have yet to precisely determine the means by which whiskers communicate that sense of touch to the brain. Now an interdisciplinary team at Northwestern University has come up with a new model to help predict how a rat's whiskers activate different sensory cells to do just that, according to a new paper published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. Such work could one day enable scientists to build artificial whiskers as tactile sensors in robotics as well as shed further light on human touch.

"The sense of touch is incredibly important to nearly everything we do in the world, yet it is very difficult to study touch using hands," said co-author Mitra Hartmann, a biomedical engineer at Northwestern's Center for Robotics and Biosystems. "Whiskers provide a simplified model to understand the complex, mysterious nature of touch."

That's why there is such a long history of studying whiskers (vibrissae) in mammals: rats, cats, tree squirrels, manatees, harbor seals, sea otters, pole cats, shrews, tammar wallabies, sea lions, and naked mole-rats all share strikingly similar basic whisker anatomies, according to various prior studies. The current study focused on rats. Rats have about 30 large whiskers and dozens of smaller ones, part of a complex "scanning sensorimotor system" that enables the rat to perform such diverse tasks as texture analysis, active touch for path finding, pattern recognition, and object location, just by scanning the terrain with its whiskers.

Enlarge / The new lawsuit from Xinuos echoes the still-ongoing SCO vs IBM lawsuit in some key aspects, while adding new and heavy-duty anti-trust allegations alongside. (credit: Spencer Platt via Getty Images)

Yesterday, UnixWare/OpenServer vendor Xinuos filed a lawsuit in the US Virgin Islands, alleging theft of intellectual property and monopolistic market collusion against joint defendants IBM and Red Hat.

If this sounds like a familiar, well-worn tale, it should. Xinuos is the company that purchased the remnants of the SCO Group in 2011. The SCO Group, in turn, is a company most famous not for its actual products but for its litigation against IBM and Linux. That litigation began in 2003—partially funded by a very different Microsoft, only five years after the leak of the Halloween documents in which Microsoft acknowledged the "long-term viability" of open source software and discussed strategies to choke it out of the market.

The substance of the original lawsuit is SCO's claim that IBM pulled proprietary code out of SCO Unix and inserted it into the Linux kernel. The subsequent 18 years have not been kind to SCO, which first filed for bankruptcy in 2007 and then eventually sold off its intellectual property (but not its litigation rights) to Xinuos, then named UnXis, in 2011.

Cortana on an iPhone. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's Cortana app for iOS and Android will soon shut down, the company has announced on a support page. This effectively puts a nail in Cortana's coffin for consumer use cases, at least as far as competing directly with Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa goes.

Here's what the announcement says:

We will soon be ending support for the Cortana app on Android and iOS, as Cortana continues its evolution as a productivity assistant.

As of March 31, 2021, the Cortana content you created—such as reminders and lists—will no longer function in the Cortana mobile app, but can still be accessed through Cortana in Windows. Also, Cortana reminders, lists, and tasks are automatically synced to the Microsoft To Do app, which you can download to your phone for free.

After March 31, 2021, the Cortana mobile app on your phone will no longer be supported.

This is no surprise. Microsoft had already begun deprecating Cortana on mobile in certain markets, and the writing seemed to be on the wall when the company announced that many of Cortana's consumer-focused skills would be getting the axe about a year ago.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

A Supreme Court ruling today in favor of Facebook limits the reach of a 1991 US law that bans certain kinds of robocalls and texts. The court found that the anti-robocall law only applies to systems that have the ability to generate random or sequential phone numbers. Systems that lack that capability are thus not considered autodialers under the law, even if they can store numbers and send calls and texts automatically.

Advocates say the ruling will make it harder to block automated calls and texts, potentially unleashing a "flood" of new robocalls.

The ruling "nullifies one of the most important protections against unwanted robocalls: the Telephone Consumer Protection Act's (TCPA) prohibition against autodialed calls and texts to cellphones without the called party's consent," said the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), which had filed a brief in the case.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Federal prosecutors have indicted a Kansas man for allegedly logging into a computer system at a public water system and tampering with the process for cleaning and disinfecting customers’ drinking water.

An indictment filed in US District Court for the District of Kansas said Wyatt A. Travnichek, 22, of Ellsworth County, Kansas, was an employee from January 2018 to January 2019 at the Ellsworth County Rural Water District No. 1. Also known as the Post Rock Water District, the facility serves more than 1,500 retail customers and 10 wholesale customers in eight Kansas counties. Part of Wyatt’s responsibilities included remotely logging in to the water district’s computer system to monitor the plant after hours.

Logging in with harmful intent

In late March 2019, Wednesday’s indictment said, Post Rock experienced a remote intrusion to its computer system that resulted in the shutdown of the facility’s processes for ensuring water is safe to drink.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

While we've heard rumblings for months that the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) will return in some form following its 2020 meltdown and cancellation, a leak has clarified what the online-only 2021 version could look like—and has prompted its creators to confirm some of the leak's details.

"E3's 2021 digital show is a free event for all attendees," the expo's official Twitter account posted on Thursday (and apparently not as an April Fool's prank). "We're excited to fill you in on all the real news for the event very soon."

Details about the leaked pitch document, obtained by Video Games Chronicle, were actually reposted by E3's Twitter account, suggesting they may very well be accurate. VGC reports that this pitch has been handed to game publishers by E3 organizer the Electronic Software Association to excite potential partners about biz-dev minutiae like "B2B, B2M, and B2C objectives"—but also to insist that "E3 2021 is not an in-person event turned virtual."

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster includes a nifty $10 discount for Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury, bringing the Switch game down to $50 at Amazon and Best Buy. This is the first significant deal we've seen on the 3D platformer, which only launched in February.

For the unfamiliar, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury contains two separate games. The first is the latest in Nintendo's long line of excellent Wii U games it has touched up and re-released for the Switch's wider audience. As our review notes, it remains a charming and inventive platformer that straddles the line between the free-form movement of 3D Mario games and the more linear level design of the series' 2D origins. It also supports drop-in, drop-out co-op with up to four players.

Bowser's Fury, meanwhile, is an all-new, roughly four-hour expansion of sorts that takes the feel of 3D World and applies it to an open-world environment, wherein Mario can hop from island to island and complete different platforming challenges almost at will. While our review found it to get somewhat repetitive over time, the game is fresh and perhaps a peek at where the franchise may be headed going forward.

Enlarge / Cable lobbyist Michael Powell speaks at a conference in September 2015. (credit: Getty Images | Larry Busacca )

President Biden's plan to expand broadband access and lower prices is, predictably, facing bitter opposition from cable companies that want to maintain the status quo.

NCTA–The Internet & Television Association, which represents Comcast, Charter, Cox, and other cable companies, argued that Biden's plan is "a serious wrong turn." NCTA is particularly mad that Biden wants to expand municipal broadband networks that could fill gaps where there's no high-speed broadband from private ISPs and lower prices by providing competition to cable companies that usually dominate their regional territories.

"The White House has elected to go big on broadband infrastructure, but it risks taking a serious wrong turn in discarding decades of successful policy by suggesting that the government is better suited than private-sector technologists to build and operate the Internet," NCTA CEO Michael Powell wrote in a statement.