Month: June 2023

Enlarge / Boxes of Johnson & Johnson's Janssen COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination site in Florida. (credit: Getty | Paul Hennessy)

The Food and Drug Administration has withdrawn authorization for Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine, ending its short-lived but troubled existence amid the pandemic.

In a letter last week, the FDA's top vaccine regulator, Peter Marks, wrote to Janssen Biotech—the Johnson & Johnson-owned, Belgium-based company responsible for the vaccine—saying that the agency was revoking authorization. Marks opened the letter by noting that the withdrawal was at the request of the company.

According to Marks, Janssen's May 22 letter informed the FDA that:

Enlarge (credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Dell Technologies' Australia subsidiary misled online shoppers into thinking that adding a monitor to their purchase would get them a discount on the display, even though doing so sometimes resulted in customers paying a higher price for the monitor than if they had bought it on its own. That's according to a declaration by the Australian Federal Court on Monday. The deceptive practices happened on Dell's Australian website, but they serve as a reminder to shoppers everywhere that a strikethrough line or sale stamp on an online retailer doesn't always mean you're getting a bargain.

On June 5, the Federal Court said Dell Australia was guilty of making "false or misleading representations with respect to the price" of monitors that its website encouraged shoppers to add to their purchase. The purchases were made from August 2019 to the middle of December 2021.

The website would display the add-on price alongside a higher price that had a strikethrough line, suggesting that the monitor was typically sold at the price with the line going through it but that customers would get a discount if they added it to their cart at purchase. (The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, or ACCC, posted a screenshot example here.) However, the strikethrough prices weren't actually representative of what Dell was charging for the monitors for most of the time before the purported discount.

Enlarge / CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 05: Apple CEO Tim Cook stands next to the new Apple Vision Pro headset that is displayed during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 05, 2023 in Cupertino, California. Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off the annual WWDC23 developer conference with the announcement of the new Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

A few hours after Apple's long-awaited Vision Pro reveal yesterday, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (who managed to report on most of the device's major features months before it launched) noticed something odd: none of Apple's promotional videos or any of the footage from the show floor actually showed Apple CEO Tim Cook or any other Apple executive wearing the new product they had just announced.

The entire presentation encapsulated everything that has changed about Apple product events since the Steve Jobs era—a shift away from onstage speeches to pre-recorded videos, a shift that began earlier in the Cook era and was accelerated by the pandemic. We're way past the iPod in the pocket, or the MacBook Air in the manila envelope—the closest we got was this shot of Cook smiling next to a slick-looking demo unit on a stand, taken after the presentation was over.

But I've noticed something else in the last 24 hours, as initial hands-on impressions have been published by various outlets (ours is coming soon). There are, as far as I can find, no actual photos or videos of any writer or YouTuber wearing the thing they are writing or YouTubing about. (At least one writer has said that this was a precondition for getting hands-on time.)

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Following up on Google's rollout of passkey support for consumer Google accounts in May, Google has now extended password-less login to Google Workspace business accounts. Google calls the Workspace rollout an "Open Beta" and says "more than 9 million organizations can allow their users to sign in to Google Workspace and Google Cloud accounts using passkeys instead of passwords."

If you have not heard, passkeys are a new password replacement, with backing from Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Instead of presenting a password text box when logging in, passkey support—which needs to be built into your browser and OS—would have your machine swap public-private keypairs with the website using the "WebAuthn" standard, and you're logged in. Most Passkey implementations make a portable device, typically your phone, a requirement for logging in, even if you're using a PC. Usually you'll pull out your phone and unlock it, sort of like app-based 2FA or SMS.

The core concept is a reasonable evolution of the password. In the early days, passwords were supposed to be human-memorable, and you would manually type it into the text box. Then, password managers came along, and the best practice was generating a random string and pasting it into the website's text box, as a sort of hack for the old "type it in" system. Passkeys remove the text box entirely, and the browser sends that "random string" without the human intermediary. Passkeys improve password security because you can never write them down, they can't be reused across sites, and they are a lot harder to phish compared to passwords, because the browser decides which passkeys belong to which sites.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of an anime-style woman that also functions as a working QR code. If you have trouble reading it, try positioning your camera farther away from the image. (credit: nhciao / Stable Diffusion)

On Tuesday, a Reddit user named "nhciao" posted a series of artistic QR codes created using the Stable Diffusion AI image-synthesis model that can still be read as functional QR codes by smartphone camera apps. The functional pieces reflect artistic styles in anime and Asian art.

QR codes, short for Quick Response codes, are two-dimensional barcodes initially designed for the automotive industry in Japan. These codes have since found wide-ranging applications in various fields including advertising, product tracking, and digital payments, thanks to their ability to store a substantial amount of data. When scanned using a smartphone or a dedicated QR code scanner, the encoded information (which can be text, a website URL, or other data) is quickly accessed and displayed.

In this case, despite the presence of intricate AI-generated designs and patterns in the images created by nhciao, we've found that smartphone camera apps on both iPhone and Android are still able to read these as functional QR codes. If you have trouble reading them, try backing your camera farther away from the images.

Microsoft will face new restrictions on what it can do with this young player's info. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

Microsoft will pay $20 million to settle an FTC complaint that its Xbox platform illegally collected and retained information about children without their parents' consent, in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

According to the FTC complaint in the matter, Microsoft's Xbox account sign-up process asked children under 13 for their name, date of birth, email address, and phone number, all before parents got involved in the sign-up process.

The complaint also alleges that Microsoft did not specifically notify parents that information such as uploaded photos and gameplay data associated with their player ID would be collected and potentially shared with third parties. Instead Microsoft included these specifics in a Privacy Statement, which the FTC says was akin to "sending parents off on what amounted to a DIY errand."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

Fiber-to-the-home Internet service is the clear favorite of US broadband users, but unfortunately most people in the US have no access to the technology, the American Customer Satisfaction Index said today.

"Across the entire customer experience, fiber service shows a strong advantage—from data transfer speed and service reliability to touchpoints like call centers and websites," Forrest Morgeson, ACSI director of research emeritus and a marketing professor at Michigan State University, said in a press release announcing the ACSI's latest research. "That said, with well over half of US households lacking access to fiber internet, availability remains a sticking point. As such, non-fiber ISP services remain an attractive option for many customers and should not be overlooked by providers."

One reason that customers like fiber is that it offers higher upload speeds than cable and other technologies. But cable companies dominate the US broadband market. According to data from Leichtman Research Group, the top US cable companies had 76.2 million broadband subscribers by the end of Q1 2023. The top wireline phone companies had 30.8 million Internet subscribers including both fiber and slower DSL.