Month: January 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

More than a fifth of the passwords protecting network accounts at the US Department of the Interior—including Password1234, Password1234!, and ChangeItN0w!—were weak enough to be cracked using standard methods, a recently published security audit of the agency found.

The audit was performed by the department’s Inspector General, which obtained cryptographic hashes for 85,944 employee active directory (AD) accounts. Auditors then used a list of more than 1.5 billion words that included:

• Dictionaries from multiple languages
• US government terminology
• Pop culture references
• Publicly available password lists harvested from past data breaches across both public and private sectors
• Common keyboard patterns (e.g., “qwerty”).

The results weren’t encouraging. In all, the auditors cracked 18,174—or 21 percent—of the 85,944 cryptographic hashes they tested; 288 of the affected accounts had elevated privileges, and 362 of them belonged to senior government employees. In the first 90 minutes of testing, auditors cracked the hashes for 16 percent of the department’s user accounts.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a person talking to a secret robot therapist. (credit: Ars Technica)

On Friday, Koko co-founder Rob Morris announced on Twitter that his company ran an experiment to provide AI-written mental health counseling for 4,000 people without informing them first, The Verge reports. Critics have called the experiment deeply unethical because Koko did not obtain informed consent from people seeking counseling.

Koko is a nonprofit mental health platform that connects teens and adults who need mental health help to volunteers through messaging apps like Telegram and Discord.

On Discord, users sign into the Koko Cares server and send direct messages to a Koko bot that asks several multiple-choice questions (e.g., "What's the darkest thought you have about this?"). It then shares a person's concerns—written as a few sentences of text—anonymously with someone else on the server who can reply anonymously with a short message of their own.

Enlarge / RIP to a real one. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

The original Oculus Quest will stop receiving new feature updates and lose access to the company's existing social VR features, according to an email sent to many Quest users this week.

While Quest headset owners will still be able to use the device and all available apps, they will no longer be able to "create or join a party," according to the email. Access to Meta's Horizon Home features will also be cut off on March 5, the company wrote. And while Meta will no longer be "delivering new features" to Quest 1 users, the company says it will continue to provide "critical bug fixes and security patches until 2024."

The announcement comes less than four years after the Quest's initial launch as Meta's (then Oculus') first wireless headset with full six-degree-of-freedom head- and hand-tracking. That initial version of the Quest, which launched at $400, was succeeded by the $300 Quest 2 in late 2020.

Enlarge / A 77-inch QD-OLED was one of the new TVs announced at CES 2023. (credit: Samsung Display)

OLED TVs are the premium focal point of many modern-day home theaters, but they're still imperfect technology. As usual, last week's CES in Las Vegas featured a smattering of upcoming TVs, plenty of them OLED-based. We saw bigger sizes and increased competition among OLED panel makers; however, the most interesting development was claims of boosted peak brightness.

A dimmer screen has long been the weak point of OLED displays, especially compared to their cheaper LCD rivals. But while 2023's upcoming OLED TVs largely trumpet improved brightness capabilities and present potential for unprecedentedly rich highlights, it'll still be years before you want to put an OLED TV in your sun-filled living room.

OLED's brightness problem

If you listed the drawbacks of an OLED TV compared to an LCD one, they're typically price and dimness. Despite having inky, deep blacks, OLEDs are known to be noticeably dimmer than LCD displays. Dark blacks still help the screens deliver next-level contrast, and good OLED TVs can make highlights in HDR content pop dramatically. But less overall luminance makes it hard to enjoy the image on an OLED TV in a brightly lit room or positioned under a light.

Enlarge / The Surface Duo 2 running Android 12L. (credit: Microsoft)

Windows Central's Zac Bowden is the go-to reporter for any Microsoft Surface rumors, and his latest report is that Surface Duo 3 is dead, or at least, a device in the same mold as the Surface Duo 1 and 2 has been canceled. There might someday be a Microsoft device branded "Surface Duo 3," but the Surface Duo form factor—a dual-screen device with a 360-degree hinge—is dead. The report says Microsoft is now working on a "more traditional foldable design, with a 180-degree hinge, internal foldable screen and external cover display"—so in the same vein as a Galaxy Fold.

The Surface Duo line made for two of the most awkward Android devices on the market. Instead of the tall, skinny displays that Android phones typically use, both Surface Duos used short, fat displays, making the Duo line the widest smartphones on the market. The original Surface Duo was planned to run the canceled "Windows 10x" OS, which would have taken advantage of the unique screen aspect ratio. When that OS was canceled, the project was salvaged as an Android phone, but those short, fat displays led to a lot of bad Android app layouts, with the limited vertical screen space further reduced by Android's big headers and tab bars. It seems like Microsoft wanted to land on the same basic outline as a Moleskine notebook, but Android apps just aren't designed for that aspect ratio. Plus, even when folded up, being dramatically wider than any other smartphone on the market also made it a literal pain to try to hold with one hand.

After two near-identical versions, Microsoft seemed to have been coming around to the "way too wide" line of thinking. The report says the canceled Surface Duo 3 would have had "narrower and taller edge-to-edge displays," which would have put the phone in a more reasonable form factor.