Author: Megan Geuss

In May 2015, the US Department of Education announced that it would sunset its old e-signature system for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and replace it with a new system to authenticate FAFSA information. But the new system is apparently causing confusion and frustration among students.

Students who want to apply for most federal and state financial aid for higher education in the US must fill out a FAFSA by midnight March 2 (that's tonight, if you're a teen or if you have a teen applying to college). But filling out the form is not an easy process for students or their parents, who must also be registered with the Department of Education if the student can be claimed as a dependent.

The change that the Department of Education implemented was a seemingly small one, but it’s created some friction that wasn’t there before, the Los Angeles Times reported. Previously, students and parents had to apply for a Federal Student Aid PIN with their social security number to access their FAFSA online. If they later forgot their PIN, they had to recover it by reentering a social security number as well as a corresponding name and date of birth. Now, students and parents must create a Federal Student Aid ID (FSA ID), which allows users to access their FAFSA information through a user name and password. The setup of a FSA ID also requires that students and parents have social security numbers as well as a valid e-mail addresses.

A Google autonomous vehicle struck a bus in California on Valentine’s Day, according to an incident report (PDF) published by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) on Monday. Google Automotive, the branch of Alphabet that handles self-driving car research, filed the incident report in accordance with California law.

No one was hurt, Google says.

According to the report, the vehicle was in autonomous mode and in the far right lane of a main thoroughfare in the California city of Mountain View. As it approached a red light, the car automatically signaled that it would make a right turn. Cars in the same lane ahead of the autonomous vehicle were waiting at the red light to proceed straight, so the autonomous vehicle got to the right of the lane to pass those other cars, but it sensed some sandbags around a storm drain in the road, and it stopped.

Earlier this week, the Indiana legislature added an amendment to a bill that would have made it illegal for manufacturers to sell cars directly to consumers, a practice that electric vehicle company Tesla employs. But on Thursday that amendment was taken out of the bill, all but assuring Tesla’s continued operation in Indiana for the foreseeable future.

The direct-to-consumer business model has been the basis of Tesla’s operations, but it has rankled other car manufacturers and the dealers they sell through. Dealers, for their part, have fought back in several states like Texas, Arizona, and New Jersey, and over the years they've won legal barriers to keep Tesla from selling cars direct from the manufacturer.

The battle in Indiana was interesting because Tesla was honed in on GM, which recently released an electric vehicle that could be competitive with Tesla's forthcoming Model 3. Tesla accused GM of pushing the bill through the state’s legislature in a letter to its customers shared with Ars. However, Tesla could not provide solid proof of GM’s involvement.

The New York Times is reporting that Obama administration officials are close to agreeing on new rules that would allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to share surveillance information more freely with other federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, without scrubbing Americans’ identifying information first.

In 2008, President George W. Bush put forth an executive order that said such a change to the rules governing sharing between agencies could occur when procedures had been put in place. When the Obama administration took over, it started "quietly developing a framework” to carry out the proposed change in 2009, according to the Times.

For the past decade, the NSA has collected massive amounts of phone metadata, e-mail, and other information from a variety of sources—sometimes directly from the companies that make such communication possible, sometimes through overseas taps on lines that connect to data centers outside of the US. Currently when an agency wants information on a foreign citizen, it requests that data from the NSA, and the NSA theoretically scrubs it of any incidental references to American citizens who are not being targeted. This process is known as “minimization.”

In a paper released Thursday, a group of scientists published the results of 13 flyovers performed during the recent Aliso Canyon natural gas leak. They conclude that the well leak had effectively doubled the methane (CH₄) emission rate of the Los Angeles Basin.

The researchers, who hailed from Scientific Aviation, UC Davis, UC Irvine, CU Boulder, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also concluded that the natural gas leak was the second-biggest failure of its kind in US history. The biggest happened in 2004 in Moss Bluff, Texas, when an underground natural gas storage facility collapsed.

Depressingly, the researchers suggested that the environmental impact from the Aliso Canyon leak would be much more damaging than the Moss Bluff collapse because "an explosion and subsequent fire during the Moss Bluff release combusted most of the leaked CH₄, immediately forming CO₂.” Carbon dioxide sticks around in the atmosphere longer than methane does, but methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas in the short-term.

What was the best way to steal cash from an ATM in 2015? Skimming still remains king, but a survey of 87 members of the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) says that card trapping and transaction reversal fraud are on the rise around the world.

In November 2015, ATMIA internally published a survey (PDF) describing the state of ATM hacking in the previous year, from how ATMs were attacked to how much money was lost from the attacks. The results showed that ATM operators were wising up to skimming operations, in which devices are placed in or on the ATM to capture card information so the skimmer can reuse the card numbers later. This caused "a deflection of crime from traditional electronic skimming towards more physical and less sophisticated forms of attack, especially card trapping and Transaction Reversal Fraud.”

Fourteen percent of respondents said they saw an increase in card skimming hacks, but 28 percent of respondents said they actually saw skimming operations decrease. Still, credit card skimming outpaces other techniques for committing ATM fraud overall. Of those instances of skimming, 73 percent involved skimmers placed within the ATM, and 27 percent involved skimmers placed on the verification device of the bank access door.

Deadline reported today that Disney had tapped Ava DuVernay, director of Oscar-winning Selma, to direct two science fiction scripts: A Wrinkle In Time and Intelligent Life. The script for A Wrinkle In Time will be written by Jennifer Lee, the writer and co-director of Disney’s animated blockbuster Frozen.

A Wrinkle In Time is the better-known of the two projects, being beloved by children since its publication in 1962. Author Madeleine L’Engle centered the book around Meg Murry, a 13-year-old girl who sets out with her brothers and her friend Calvin to find her father, a government scientist who has gone missing. The children travel through time using a “tesseract” and find Meg’s father on another planet. A Wrinkle In Time is just the first in a series of novels called the Time Quintet. The first book was adapted for TV in 2001 and distributed in the US by Disney in 2004, but it received largely negative reviews.

Intelligent Life will also have science fiction elements to it. According to Deadline, that movie is about "a UN worker in a department designed to represent mankind if there was ever contact with aliens, who falls for a mystery woman who turns out to be one.”

Tesla recently sent a letter to “Tesla Owners and Enthusiasts” living in the Indiana area asking for their help to defeat a piece of legislation introduced by state lawmakers that would prevent auto manufacturers from selling cars directly to their customers. Tesla has almost exclusively sold vehicles to customers through direct vehicle sales, and it says if the bill is signed into law it would revoke Tesla’s permission to sell vehicles from its existing storefront in Indianapolis.

The bill seeks to prohibit manufacturers from holding a dealer license after December 31, 2017. Tesla currently holds such a license, although it does not contract with a third-party dealer.

In its letter to its customers, Tesla urged them to contact their representatives and the senators on the Commerce and Technology Committee, which will hold a hearing on the bill on Thursday, February 25, to express their displeasure at the new bill. "Despite having a lawfully granted license to sell Tesla vehicles directly since 2014 at the Fashion Mall at Keystone; despite contributing over $42 million to the state through the purchase of parts and components from Indiana suppliers; and despite plans underway to construct a 26,000 square foot Tesla Service facility that will employ approximately a dozen Indiana residents and serve our customers, GM is pushing the Senate Committee to shut out Tesla,” Tesla wrote.

On Monday, AT&T and Intel announced that they’d be partnering to test consumer drones on AT&T’s LTE network, specifically accounting for a drone’s relatively high altitude (AT&T is testing connectivity up to 500 ft high, in accordance with federal rules). The companies will also try to minimize any potential signal interference.

The two companies said they’d be showing off Intel drones at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Intel noted that the two companies would “test and define” how drones connected to an LTE network. AT&T said that such testing would allow better real-time camera footage to be streamed from the drone.

This week a management consulting company called The Strawhecker Group (TSG) released the results of a study that found that only 37 percent of US retailers were ready to process chip-embedded credit and debit cards. The slow adoption of chip-embedded cards leaves merchants open to accepting liability for fraud perpetrated with traditional, less-secure magnetic stripe cards.

The US officially migrated over to the so-called EMV standard (eponymous for Europay, Mastercard, and Visa, the companies that developed the standard) in October 2015, and at that late date, it was one of the last countries to make the shift. The upgrade in technology has forced card issuers to send out new, chip-embedded cards to users (which still have magnetic stripes to complete transactions on now-"legacy" magnetic stripe terminals). It also required merchants to upgrade their terminals to be able to accept the new credit cards. Credit card networks like Visa and MasterCard instituted a liability shift in October to get merchants to speed things up on their end—either upgrade your terminals or you’re liable for any fraud that happens with a card that could have made a transaction using the chip technology.

The liability shift was in the works for years, with President Obama even signing an initiative called “BuySecure” to speed the adoption of EMV in the US. But despite that high-visibility endorsement, the major card networks have failed to get many mom and pop stores to understand what they have to do to be compliant, and even big-name retailers have struggled to find a cost-effective way to roll out new terminals. Part of the problem, too, has been that big terminal manufacturers weren’t ready to roll out EMV-compliant terminals on October 1. (Startups like Square even offered to cover any liability its customers might incur between the October 1 deadline and whenever the new terminals arrived.)