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AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. (credit: AT&T)

US politicians have been urging tech companies to weaken the security of smartphones and other products by inserting encryption backdoors that let the government access personal data.

Numerous tech companies—including Apple—have come out strongly against the idea, saying that encryption backdoors would expose the personal data of ordinary consumers, not just terrorists.

But tech company leaders aren’t all joining the fight against the deliberate weakening of encryption. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said this week that AT&T, Apple, and other tech companies shouldn’t have any say in the debate.

Functional MRI scans show areas in the brains of poor children with normal connectivity highlighted in red and blue, and weakened connectivity shown in green. The areas in green are among several areas -- detailed in other brain scans—where connections are weakened in children raised in poverty. (credit: Deanna Barch)

Growing up poor is known to leave lasting impressions, from squashing IQ potential to increasing risks of depression. Now, as part of an effort to connect the dots between those outcomes and identify the developmental differences behind them, researchers have found that poverty actually seems to change the way the brain wires up.

Compared to kids in higher socioeconomic brackets, impoverished little ones were more likely to have altered functional connections between parts of the brain. Specifically, the changes affected the connections from areas involved in memory and stress responses to those linked to emotional control. The finding, appearing in The American Journal of Psychiatry, suggests that poor kids may have trouble regulating their own emotional responses, which may help explain poverty’s well-established link to depression and other negative mood disorders.

“My take-home message is that poverty gets under the skin,” lead author Deanna Barch, a psychologist and a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Ars. If people weren’t already energized to start addressing poverty and its myriad, deep-seated effects, this should be a fresh call to action, she said.

From tonight's episode of The 100, "Wanheda: Part One." (credit: Cate Cameron/The CW)

You can be forgiven for not being caught up with The CW’s dystopian-future series The 100. Based on a decent but neglected young adult (YA) book series, the series took some time to find its footing. But then, last season, the story of 100 teenagers dumped from an orbital space station onto a toxic, abandoned Earth morphed into something altogether more interesting and complex. Violent and fascinating, the show is full of cultural clashes, compelling alliances, and a relentless, uncompromising worldview. This show may not have been on your radar before, but with the third season starting tonight, it deserves to become a priority.

Breathless propulsion

In the series, a small fraction of humanity has survived after a nuclear apocalypse, and the titular Hundred are one hundred (very attractive) criminal teens sent from the Ark space station to investigate whether Earth is now hospitable to human life. Led by Clarke, the show’s protagonist, and a variety of other teenage misfits, the Hundred quickly discover that the Ark residents are not the only people who survived the bombs.

Eliza Taylor as Clarke Griffin in The 100. (credit: The CW)

Far from empty, Earth is populated by numerous tribes and factions with complicated inter-relationships and a unifying wariness of each other. Some of the show’s most surprising and compelling twists arise due to clashes between communities with distinct cultures and vastly different levels of technology. Sky People (former Ark residents) have education and tech know-how but are perpetually at a loss for resources; Grounders live in a bow-and-arrow paradigm; the residents of Mount Weather, who feature throughout season two, are both highly sophisticated and dangerously weak.

(credit: Photograph by ChipperMist)

Overall, we've been pretty happy just to have the ability to play select Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One since Microsoft first rolled out the feature back in November. Digital Foundry has spent the past few months putting this backward compatibility through its technical paces, though, and the site's findings are a decidedly mixed bag.

While the Xbox One's system-level forced vsync eliminates the screen tearing common to many Xbox 360 games, that benefit "sometimes comes with a penalty of lower frame rates," as the site puts it. This problem is especially apparent in gameplay scenes with lots of moving on-screen characters; all that action puts additional stress on the tri-core CPU in the Xbox 360 and even more stress on an Xbox One trying to emulate that difficult chip architecture.

This means siginficant frame rate dips in the most hectic parts of games like Gears of War, Mass Effect, and Halo Reach. Those frame rate drops lead to noticable problems with the controls as well, as Digital Foundry says the system misses certain controller inputs amid the dropped frames during intense firefights and driving sections.

(credit: New Line Cinema)

Lots of economic theory is based on the idea that humans will naturally seek to maximize their profits, but is that really the case? The field of behavioral economics involves a variety of attempts to find out. Things like game theory are used to create simplified economic systems in which people's behavior can be tracked.

A number of results indicate that some people do in fact behave as selfish, profit-maximizing individuals. But many others behave more altruistically, forging cooperative relationships in order to obtain greater benefits.

Or so it appeared. A group of Oxford researchers has now published a study in which they looked a bit more carefully at the people who were taking these tests, discovering that they'd be just as altruistic toward a computer. And that's probably because most of them simply don't understand the rules of the game they're playing.

This house in Atlanta is attracting angry mobile phone users who think their lost phones are here. (credit: Fusion)

It's a network data mystery that needs to be solved, and fast. For the past year, Atlanta couple Christina Lee and Michael Saba have fielded visits from angry strangers—and sometimes police officers—who insist that lost phones are in the couple's house. Sometimes the situation escalates into more than accusations. One time police spent an hour searching the home, looking for a lost teenage girl whose phone they had tracked to the house.

Over at Fusion, Kashmir Hill reports on this unusual problem that currently has no solution. The lost phones are associated with a variety of carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Boost Mobile. And there are no agencies, including the FCC, who are responsible for dealing with this kind of issue. So Lee and Saba are stuck receiving pissed off visitors at all hours of the day and night. They've registered their Wi-Fi router's MAC address with Skyhook, a company that provides geolocation data for apps, but that hasn't helped. Filing a complaint with local police hasn't fixed the situation either.

Without more information on the phones and the location apps they used, it's hard to say for sure what might be causing this. Security analyst Ken Weston told Fusion that it sounded like a problem with cell tower triangulation. That's what caused a similar problem for a Las Vegas man last year, whose home was mistakenly identified by Sprint as the location for several lost phones. In the report, iPhone forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski suggested it might be a flaw in Wi-Fi map data. It's possible that most carriers are licensing the same Wi-Fi maps for geolocation, "and could have had bad data in the database, either someone using the same MAC address at a different location or just bad GPS data."

(credit: AMX)

A company that supplies audio-visual and building control equipment to the US Army, the White House, and other security-conscious organizations built a deliberately concealed backdoor into dozens of its products that could possibly be used to hack or spy on users, security researchers said.

Members of Austria-based security firm SEC Consult said they discovered the backdoor after analyzing the AMX NX-1200, a programmable device used to control AV and building systems. The researchers first became suspicious after encountering a function called "setUpSubtleUserAccount" that added an highly privileged account with a hard-coded password to the list of users authorized to log in. Unlike most other accounts, this one had the ability to capture data packets flowing between the device and the network it's connected to.

"Someone with knowledge of the backdoor could completely reconfigure and take over the device and due to the highest privileges also start sniffing attacks within the network segment," SEC Consult researcher Johannes Greil told Ars. "We did not see any personal data on the device itself, besides other user accounts which could be cracked for further attacks."