Month: December 2021

Enlarge / Gov. Mike Parson at a press conference on May 29, 2019, in Jefferson City, Missouri. (credit: Getty Images | Jacob Moscovitch )

Missouri state government officials planned to publicly thank a journalist who discovered a security flaw until a drastic change in strategy resulted in the governor labeling the journalist a "hacker," while threatening both a lawsuit and prosecution.

As we wrote on October 14, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Josh Renaud identified a security flaw that exposed the Social Security numbers of teachers and other school employees in unencrypted form in the HTML source code of a publicly accessible website. Renaud and the Post-Dispatch handled the problem the way responsible security researchers do—by notifying the state of the security flaw and keeping it secret until after it was fixed.

Despite that, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson called Renaud a "hacker" and said the newspaper's reporting was nothing more than a "political vendetta" and "an attempt to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet." The Republican governor said further that his "administration has notified the Cole County prosecutor of this matter," that the Missouri State Highway Patrol's Digital Forensic Unit would investigate "all of those involved," and that state law "allows us to bring a civil suit to recover damages against all those involved."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

It's been a rough week for Microsoft's Edge browser in the court of public opinion as users grumbled about the addition of a controversial "buy now, pay later" financing feature and another layer of pop-up messages that tries to dissuade users from installing Google Chrome. But Microsoft isn't totally unresponsive to user criticism when it comes to Edge—the latest Dev channel Windows Insider build of Windows 11 restores a button in the Settings app for setting your default browser, something that existed in Windows 10 but is missing from the current stable version of Windows 11.

The change, originally spotted by developer Rafael Rivera, adds the default browser button to the top of the Settings app when you navigate to any browser in the "Default apps" section. The button automatically changes the default app for opening http, https, .htm, and .html files and links instead of making users change each of these associations manually (or relying on browser makers to build that capability into their browsers themselves).

For all the other file types that Microsoft Edge can handle, including PDFs, SVG files, and others, you'll still need to change those associations manually and one at a time. But this is already how the default browser button worked in Windows 10, so it at least represents a reversion to the pre-Windows 11 status quo rather than a new hurdle to jump over.

Enlarge / A 24-inch iMac used as display for a Windows 11-based Lenovo Thinkpad. (credit: Astropad)

Sometimes you just need more screen space. You can always buy a portable monitor, but what if you could just use the systems already in your home—whether they run Windows or macOS?

Luna Display is a product by Astropad that lets you turn an iPad into a wireless second display. The $130 offering uses a dongle and works with Windows PCs and Macs. Its "headless" mode turns the iPad into the main display for a Mac Mini or Mac Pro.

Luna Display's 5.1 update, announced this week, adds even more possibilities. The dongle can now be used with any Apple machine—not just an iPad—to provide a second display for your Windows PC or Mac.

Enlarge / Technology that can track stolen property can also be used to track property to steal. (credit: Getty Images)

When Apple debuted its new AirTag tracker earlier this year, part of our review focused on the privacy implications of the device. We called the device "a rare privacy misstep from Apple." This week, Canadian police announced that car thieves have been using AirTags to track vehicles they want to steal.

York Regional Police (which serves an area north of Toronto) revealed that it has investigated five incidents in the past three months in which thieves have hidden AirTags on vehicles parked in public. Later, the thieves tracked down their targets to steal the cars at their leisure.

Other Bluetooth-based trackers have been available for some time now, but the ubiquity of Apple devices (which communicate with AirTags via Apple's Find My app) means it's generally faster and more accurate to track something remotely via an AirTag than a rival device like a Tile. And while they undoubtedly make it easier for users to recover lost stuff, the tags are being exploited by criminals.

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  Rendering of Northrop Grumman's (as yet) unnamed low Earth orbit space station. [credit: Northrop Grumman ]

On Thursday afternoon, NASA announced that it had awarded three different teams, each involving multiple companies, more than $100 million apiece to support the design and early development of private space stations in low Earth orbit.

This represents a big step toward the space agency's plan to maintain a permanent presence in space even after the aging International Space Station, which can probably keep flying through 2028 or 2030, reaches the end of its life. NASA intends to become an "anchor tenant" by sending its astronauts to one or more private stations in orbit starting in the second half of the 2020s.

The total estimated award amount for all three funded Space Act Agreements is $415.6 million. The individual award amounts, with links to each concept, are: