Month: August 2022

Halloween might be the furthest thing on people's minds in the dog days of August, but a new first look teaser for Netflix's new anthology series, Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities—plus the release of several simultaneously gorgeous and horrific images—are putting us in a much more frisson-seeking frame of mind. Nobody does horror quite like del Toro and this anthology very much looks worthy of his reputation.

The series was first announced in 2018 and features eight episodes written and directed by filmmakers handpicked by del Toro. "In this anthology we gave ownership of each episode to the directors," he says in the first look teaser. "Each of the episodes has a whole world. They present you with different delights. Some are savory, some are sweet. You get a surprise from each of the bites."

The list of directors includes Jennifer Kent, who directed 2014's phenomenal The Babadook; her episode, "The Murmuring," is based on an original story by del Toro and features Babadook star, Essie Davis (aka Miss Fisher). "Dreams in the Witch House," based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story, is directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Lords of Dogtown, Twilight).

Enlarge / Former president Donald Trump, right, listens to Deborah Birx, former coronavirus response coordinator, as she speaks during a news conference in the White House in Washington, DC, on Thursday, April 23, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

This December, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will finally regain control of national COVID-19 hospital data—which the agency abruptly lost early in the pandemic to an inexperienced private company with ties to then-President Donald Trump.

As SARS-CoV-2 raged in the summer of 2020, the Trump administration was busy sabotaging the once-premier public health agency. The administration's meddling included stripping the CDC of its power to collect critical data on COVID-19 patients and pandemic resources in hospitals around the country.

According to multiple investigative reports at the time, then-White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Deborah Birx was frustrated by the CDC's slow and somewhat messy process of collecting and tidying the data submitted by thousands of hospitals. The data included stats on admissions, patient demographics, bed availability, ventilator use, discharges, and personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies.

Enlarge (credit: INDRANIL MUKHERJEE / Contributor | AFP via Getty Images)

To help combat caste-based discrimination, the Indian government saves spots at the best Indian universities for lower-caste students, who often take that opportunity and turn it into a tech job in Silicon Valley. In the US, discrimination laws don’t specifically protect citizens based on caste, though that is changing. Reuters reports that, out of all the Big Tech companies relying on India’s skilled workers, Apple has been most explicit about preventing discrimination by caste among its US employees.

Reported this week for the first time publicly, Apple updated its employee conduct policy in 2020 to “explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of caste,” the same way it prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, and ancestry.

The decision came after “the first US employment lawsuit about alleged casteism” was filed in June 2020 by a California employment regulator defending a low-caste engineer working at Cisco Systems. The engineer alleged that two of his Cisco bosses were higher-caste and impeded his advancement opportunities at the tech company.

Enlarge / Signal's security-minded messaging app is dealing with a third-party phishing attempt that exposed a small number of users' phone numbers. (credit: Getty Images)

A successful phishing attack at SMS services company Twilio may have exposed the phone numbers of roughly 1,900 users of the secure messaging app Signal—but that's about the extent of the breach, says Signal, noting that no further user data could be accessed.

In a Twitter thread and support document, Signal states that a recent successful (and deeply resourced) phishing attack on Twilio allowed access to the phone numbers linked with 1,900 users. That's "a very small percentage of Signal's total users," Signal writes, and all 1,900 affected users will be notified (via SMS) to re-register their devices. Signal, like many app companies, uses Twilio to send SMS verification codes to users registering their Signal app.

With momentary access to Twilio's customer support console, attackers could have potentially used the verification codes sent by Twilio to activate Signal on another device and thereby send or receive new Signal messages. Or an attacker could confirm that these 1,900 phone numbers were actually registered to Signal devices.

Enlarge / Researchers manipulated light with liquid crystals to create a sculpted laser beam capable of producing this photorealistic image of a cat. (credit: P.F. Silva & S.R. Muniz, 2022)

Every cat owner knows how their feline companions delight in chasing a tiny pinpoint of light from a simple laser pointer. Now, Brazilian physicists have figured out how to trap and bend laser light into intricate shapes, producing the impressive photorealistic image of a cat pictured above. Among other potential applications, their method—described in a recent paper posted to the physics arXiv—could prove useful for building better optical traps to create clouds of ultra-cold atoms for a variety of quantum experiments.

The ability to produce and precisely control the shape of laser beams with high fidelity is vital for many segments of research and industry, according to co-authors Pedro Silva and Sergio Muniz of the University of Sao Paolo. They group most wavefront engineering approaches into two basic categories.

The first includes such approaches as digital micro mirrors (DMDs) and acoustic optical modulators (AOMs), which are easy to implement and boast a fast response for near real-time feedback control. But they have a limited ability to control the phase of the light field and can't create certain kinds of structured light. They are also prone to speckle, diffraction, or other distortions.

Enlarge / Apple's HQ, as seen in Apple Maps. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple is looking into significantly ramping up its ads business, according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, and has already internally explored adding ads to the iPhone's Maps app, with other potential expansions also on the horizon.

The shift may be driven in part by a recent change within the company's reporting structure: Gurman wrote in his email newsletter this week that Apple advertising VP Todd Teresi began reporting directly to Apple services head Eddie Cue a few months back. He also wrote that Teresi plans to increase Apple's advertising revenue from $4 billion annually to billions in the double digits.

As Gurman notes, advertising is already a part of Apple's strategy, but it's limited in scope and to certain places. The most traditional advertisements you'll see in an Apple-made app are the ones in the Stocks and News apps. There, you'll see display ads just like those you see on news websites—both outside of stories and inside of them.

Enlarge (credit: spukkato | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

In 2018, Google was first confronted by media reports investigating why crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs)—often religious, non-medical organizations that do not provide abortion services or referrals for abortion services—frequently dominate Google Maps search results for “abortion clinics.” Now, four years later, the tech company seems to be making some moves to potentially change the quality of these sorts of search results.

In response to a Bloomberg report that “Google Maps routinely misleads people looking for abortion providers,” Google says it is “actively” seeking to improve the relevancy of search results of categories of businesses like “abortion clinics.” It seems that currently, search results based on business categories aren’t as relevant as the similar business results displayed following searches for specific business names.

The question being aimed at Google is whether its ongoing practice of displaying CPCs in results for abortion clinics qualifies as spreading health misinformation. Women claiming they were misled by Google Maps say the CPCs they visited went to extremes to dissuade them from seeking an abortion. That included relaying “misinformation about the abortion procedure, including risk to life, risk of breast cancer, risk to mental health, risk to future fertility, and fetal pain.”