Month: November 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Some of Twitter's top privacy and security executives resigned this week amid worries that Elon Musk's rapid changes may cause violations of the company's recent settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.

"The privacy staffers said they were most concerned by the rapid rollout of new features without the full security reviews that the FTC consent decree requires," The Washington Post reported in a story about the departures today.

Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner confirmed leaving the company in a tweet. Chief Privacy Officer Damien Kieran and Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty also resigned, according to news reports.

Enlarge / On the left, the full Hubble image. On the right, different images of the gravitationally lensed object. (credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Wenlei Chen, Patrick Kelly)

Over the last few decades, we've gotten much better at observing supernovae as they're happening. Orbiting telescopes can now pick up the high-energy photons emitted and figure out their source, allowing other telescopes to make rapid observations. And some automated survey telescopes have imaged the same parts of the sky night after night, allowing image analysis software to recognize new sources of light.

(credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Wenlei Chen, Patrick Kelly)

But sometimes, luck still plays a role. So it is with a Hubble image from 2010, where the image happened to also capture a supernova. But, because of gravitational lensing, the single event showed up at three different locations within Hubble's field of view. Thanks to the quirks of how this lensing works, all three of the locations captured different times after the star's explosion, allowing researchers to piece together the time course following the supernova, even though it had been observed over a decade earlier.

I’ll need that in triplicate

The new work is based on a search of the Hubble archives for old images that happen to capture transient events: something that's present in some images of a location but not others. In this case, the researchers were searching specifically for events that had been gravitationally lensed. These occur when a massive foreground object distorts space in a way that creates a lensing effect, bending the path of light originating behind the lens from Earth's perspective.

Enlarge / Microsoft's Surface Pro 9. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Let's talk about the Surface Pro 9.

Which Surface Pro 9? Not the version with 5G, which comes with a Qualcomm-made Microsoft SQ3 Arm processor and the typical shortcomings of an Arm Windows device (relatively low performance, continued app compatibility issues)—but the vanilla, plain-old Surface Pro 9, the Intel-based one that follows-up a decade's worth of numbered Surface Pro models.

Aside from that name confusion, the regular Surface Pro 9 isn't designed to surprise. It (mostly) improves performance while (mostly) keeping everything that worked about prior models intact. It won't win over anyone who didn't already like the Surface, but for anyone who loves their 3- to 5-year-old Surface tablet, it ought to be a pretty safe upgrade.

Enlarge / A class-action lawsuit claims that Apple products, like the iPad mini, are sold almost exclusively by Amazon itself on its own marketplace, harming customers' ability to pay less in a competitive market. (credit: Getty Images)

In early 2018, there were more than 600 companies you could buy Apple products from on Amazon's marketplace, including independent refurbishers, usually at lower prices than Apple's own. By July 2019, there were only seven, and a class-action lawsuit says that was the result of an unlawful agreement between the tech giants.

The lawsuit (PDF) was filed Wednesday in federal court in Seattle by law firm Hagens Berman on behalf of Steven Floyd. Floyd is a Pennsylvania man who bought an iPad on Amazon for $320 in early 2021 and was denied "a lower price which would have been the case in a normal competitive market," the suit alleges.

Hagens Berman should be a familiar name to Apple's counsel and close watchers of the company's legal history. The firm sued Apple over scratched iPod nano cases in 2005 and ebook price-fixing in 2011 and brokered a settlement for smaller iOS developers in the App Store in 2021. Hagens Berman was also involved in a complicated lawsuit involving iOS touchscreen patents that involved Apple accusing the firm of secretly leaning on an "extra attorney."

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Like many Twitter users, Elon Musk isn’t sure if any of his new ideas for Twitter are going to work, but unlike his many critics, he thinks that’s a reasonable expectation, given his predicament. In the past two weeks, he has taken on the enormous task of not just reimagining what Twitter can be to its users, but also of restructuring the entire business, including slashing the staff in half and pivoting to paid subscriptions. Musk tweeted yesterday to explain that he expects the year will end with Twitter still a mess: “Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works and change what doesn’t.”

Among critics doubting that Musk can handle this enormous task is Chris Sacca, an early Twitter investor who tweeted out a long thread in which he fretted that Musk is "straight-up alone right now and winging this." Sacca said in the thread that rather than surround himself with sycophants, what Musk needs to succeed at Twitter are more people around him to “speak some truth to power and complement his bold and ambitious instincts with desperately needed nuance.”

Now, Bloomberg reports that there’s finally a “glimmer of internal stability” at Twitter, as key leaders have emerged to help Musk steer Twitter’s products, content moderation, and advertising efforts. These include some longtime Twitter insiders who can possibly lend that nuance and provide some pushback that Sacca says Musk should be seeking.