Month: May 2021

Enlarge (credit: Bernd Wolter / EyeEm)

It's now well-established that bats can develop a mental picture of their environment using echolocation. But we're still figuring out what that means—how bats take the echoes of their own vocalizations and use them to figure out the locations of objects.

In a paper released today, researchers provide evidence that bats engage in echolocation in part because they're born with an innate sense of the speed of sound. How did the researchers study this phenomenon? By raising bats in a helium-rich atmosphere, where the lower-density air produces an increase in the speed of sound.

Putting the location in echo

Echolocation is rather simple in principle. A bat produces sound, which bounces off objects in their environment and then returns to the bat's ears. For more distant objects, the sound takes longer to return to the bat, providing a sense of relative distance.

Microsoft rings yet another bell in the dirge for Flash—the KB that removes it from Windows 10 will become mandatory this July. (credit: Adobe)

Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, and even Adobe itself have all deprecated Adobe Flash technology, which reached end of life on January 1 of this year. This July, Microsoft is taking things one step further—KB4577586, aka Update for Removal of Adobe Flash Player, will become mandatory for all versions of Windows 10.

The update in question won't remove third-party installations of the Flash player—only versions that have been bundled with Windows itself. The change seems unlikely to significantly impact most people—Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari each ended Flash support by January 1, 2021.

Although Internet Explorer 11 (and the IE mode in Microsoft Edge) supports direct installation of downloaded Flash players as a plug-in, the Adobe Flash Player itself has a built-in "kill-switch" causing it to refuse to play Flash content if the system date is later than January 12, 2021.

Enlarge / Joe Biden speaks at a rally in Georgia on April 29, 2021. (credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

In the next few weeks, President Joe Biden is expected to choose a new director for the US Patent and Trademark Office. In recent days, I've talked to a dozen people who are deeply involved in the patent system. During these conversations, three names came up over and over again as leading candidates.

One is patent lawyer Ellisen Turner. Over an 18-year career, Turner has represented a wide range of clients, from big tech companies to companies that do little more than collect patent licensing revenue. Included in this latter category is a firm that might sound familiar to long-time Ars readers: Intellectual Ventures. Back in 2014, my colleague Joe Mullin described Intellectual Ventures as the "world's biggest troll." Instead of developing products to sell to customers, Intellectual Ventures has mostly focused on accumulating a massive patent portfolio and then threatening to sue companies that refuse to license its patents.

Another leading candidate is Jannie Lau, a patent attorney who spent 11 years as the general counsel (and before that, associate general counsel) at InterDigital. This is another company that makes almost all its money from patent-licensing fees—97 percent in 2020. While some critics have labeled InterDigital a patent troll, a spokesman for the company told me that the label doesn't fit. He said the firm employs hundreds of engineers who have helped to develop some key technical standards, especially in the wireless industry.

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Thousands of Amazon employees, including those who developed private-label goods for the e-commerce giant, enjoyed years of access to sensitive third-party seller data, according to a new report.

An internal audit in 2015 traced the issue to lax security protocols, including the use of a tool called “spoofer access,” which allowed Amazon employees to view and edit accounts as sellers. The employees had access to profile information, inventory levels, product pricing, and even the ability to cancel orders. The audit, obtained by Politico, says that spoofer access was available to employees from around the world and persisted until at least 2018. 

At least one employee used the security lapses to their advantage. “We identified one Vendor Manager who inappropriately reviewed a Seller’s on-hand inventory to improve the likelihood and timing of the Vendor Manager winning buy-box,” the audit said. The "buy box" is the main “Buy” button that appears on a product page on Amazon. Various sellers compete for opportunities to “win” the buy box, giving them access to easy sales by making it more likely that orders will be fulfilled from their inventory.