Month: November 2021

Enlarge / The "Unable to activate Face ID" message that appears after swapping displays. (credit: iFixit)

Apple says it will back off its plan to break Face ID on independently repaired iPhones. The company's often contentious relationship with the repair community was tested again when "unauthorized" iPhone 13 screen replacements started resulting in broken Face ID systems. A new report from The Verge says that Apple "will release a software update that doesn't require you to transfer the microcontroller to keep Face ID working after a screen swap."

Screen replacements are the most common smartphone repairs. Apple included a new microcontroller in the iPhone 13's display that pairs each screen with other components in the phone. As iFixit reported, if a third-party repair shop replaced the iPhone 13 display, Apple would disable the phone's Face ID system.

The repair community has started calling this part-dependency trend "serialization." Basically, each protected component reports a serial number to the OS, and the software keeps track of which serial numbers the device is supposed to have. If you swap out a part, one of the serial numbers will change, and the OS will know about it. In the case of third-party iPhone 13 screen replacements, the phone would say, "Unable to activate Face ID on this iPhone."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

More than 1,000 Android users have been infected with newly discovered malware that surreptitiously records audio and video in real time, downloads files, and performs a variety of other creepy surveillance activities.

In all, researchers uncovered 23 apps that covertly installed spyware that researchers from security firm Zimperium are calling PhoneSpy. The malware offers a full-featured array of capabilities that, besides eavesdropping and document theft, also includes transmitting GPS location data, modifying Wi-Fi connections, and performing overlay attacks for harvesting passwords to Facebook, Instagram, Google, and the Kakao Talk messaging application.

“These malicious Android apps are designed to run silently in the background, constantly spying on their victims without raising any suspicion,” Zimperium researcher Aazim Yaswant wrote. “We believe the malicious actors responsible for PhoneSpy have gathered significant amounts of personal and corporate information on their victims, including private communications and photos.”

Enlarge / Sorry to anyone who expected Steam Deck to launch by the end of 2021. (credit: Aurich Lawson vs DC Comics)

The Steam Deck, Valve's first "Switch-like" portable PC, has officially been delayed from its original December 2021 launch window. The company's Wednesday announcement confirmed that all orders have been "bumped two months," which means the SteamOS device will reach customers no earlier than February 2022.

"We’re sorry about this—we did our best to work around the global supply chain issues, but due to material shortages, components aren’t reaching our manufacturing facilities in time for us to meet our initial launch dates," the company wrote in an update on the Steam Deck's official store page. Though Valve's statement doesn't say which materials caused the delay, it's likely that the global chip shortage is to blame.

Valve says it still plans to fulfill purchases for all three Steam Deck models in the order they were received. The company has already updated the system's Steam store page to inform customers of new shipment estimates, and Ars Technica can confirm that a previous "Q4 2021" order is now listed as coming in "Q1 2022."

Enlarge / Gigi Sohn testifies during a Senate committee hearing on June 21, 2012. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong )

Senate Republicans are planning a strong fight against President Biden's nomination of consumer advocate Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission. "I will do everything in my power to convince colleagues on both sides of the aisle to reject this extreme nominee," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) wrote in a Twitter thread yesterday.

Sohn has a longtime career in government policy, having co-founded consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge in 2001. In 2013, then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler chose Sohn to serve as a counselor, and the FCC proceeded to adopt Title II common-carrier and net neutrality regulations for Internet service providers—rules that were later overturned during the Trump administration. Since leaving the FCC, Sohn has continued to push for strict regulations to protect telecom consumers.

"For over thirty years, Gigi has worked to defend and preserve the fundamental competition and innovation policies that have made broadband Internet access more ubiquitous, competitive, affordable, open, and protective of user privacy," the White House said in its announcement of Sohn's nomination on October 26.

The dribbling of tea down the side of a teapot while pouring—known as the teapot effect—is a minor annoyance for regular tea drinkers. But for physicists around the world, it has posed a knotty theoretical problem spanning decades of research, garnering an Ig Nobel Prize along the way. We thought researchers had finally closed the book on the mystery of the teapot effect in 2019, when Dutch physicists came up with a quantitative model to accurately predict the precise flow rate for how much (or how little) a teapot will dribble as it pours.

But apparently there was still more work to be done to fill a few holes in the theory, and physicists at the Vienna University of Technology (TU-Wien) and University College London took them on. The researchers say they've finally developed a complete theoretical description for the teapot effect that captures the complex interplay of inertial, viscous, and capillary forces that collectively serve to redirect the flow of liquid when certain conditions are met. Gravity, however, proved to be less relevant; all it does is determine the flow's direction. That means you'd still get the teapot effect on the Moon, according to the authors, but not if you poured tea on board the International Space Station.

The researchers presented their theoretical calculations in a paper published in the September issue of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. And now they have announced the results of experiments they conducted to test their theoretical model. Spoiler alert: the model passed with flying colors. And while it might seem to be a trivial conundrum, the insights gained could help us better control fluid flow in, say, microfluidic devices.

Enlarge / Former Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes goes through security after arriving for court at the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building on September 17, 2021, in San Jose, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Around 2016, Theranos’ fourth lab director, Kingshuk Das, noticed a problem. He was analyzing data from the company’s diagnostic devices when he saw results from tests for prostate-specific antigen, or PSA. PSA is used to detect prostate cancer in men, and except in rare cases, it’s not present in women’s blood. Except, here it was, appearing in women’s test results.

Das took his PSA findings to CEO Elizabeth Holmes. “Females should generally not have PSA detectable,” Das told the jury in Holmes' criminal trial yesterday. 

Yet Holmes refused to believe that Theranos’ proprietary devices could be at fault. She suggested that some of the patients whose blood was tested instead had a rare type of breast cancer, pointing to “an article or two” that showed it was possible, Das recalled. Holmes' explanation, he told jurors, “seemed implausible.”