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(credit: GotCredit)

In a scenario that's growing increasingly common, the chief technologist of the US Federal Trade Commission recently lost control of her smartphone after someone posing as her walked into a mobile phone store and hijacked her number.

Details of the incident were provided by the FTC's Lorrie Cranor in a blog post published Tuesday morning with the headline "Your mobile phone account could be hijacked by an identity thief." In it, Cranor wrote:

A few weeks ago an unknown person walked into a mobile phone store, claimed to be me, asked to upgrade my mobile phones, and walked out with two brand new iPhones assigned to my telephone numbers. My phones immediately stopped receiving calls, and I was left with a large bill and the anxiety and fear of financial injury that spring from identity theft. This post describes my experiences as a victim of ID theft, explains the growing problem of phone account hijacking, and suggests ways consumers and mobile phone carriers can help combat these scams.

My Experiences as a Victim of ID Theft

One evening my mobile phone stopped working mid call. After discovering that another phone on my account also had no signal, I called my mobile carrier on a landline phone. The customer service representative explained that my account had been updated to include new iPhones, and in the process the SIM cards in my Android phones had been deactivated. She assumed it was a mistake, and told me to take my phones to one of my mobile carrier’s retail stores.

The store replaced my SIM cards and got my phones working again. A store employee explained that a thief claiming to be me had gone into a phone store and “upgraded” my two phones to the most expensive iPhone models available and transferred my phone numbers to the new iPhones.

I called my mobile carrier’s fraud department and reported what happened. The representative agreed to remove the charges, but blamed the theft on me. When I asked how the store authenticated the thief, he told me that employees of stores owned by the mobile carrier would have asked for the account holder’s photo ID and the last four digits of their social security number, but if the theft occurred at another retailer, that might not have happened.

I logged in to my online account, changed the password, and added an extra security PIN recommended by the fraud department. I then logged on to the Federal Trade Commission’s identitytheft.gov website to report the theft and learn how to protect myself. Identitytheft.gov is a one-stop resource for identity theft victims. It includes step-by-step instructions and sample letters to guide victims through the recovery process. Following the Identitytheft.gov checklist, I placed a fraud alert and obtained a free credit report. I also prepared an identity theft complaint affidavit, which I later printed and took with me to my local police station when I filed a police report.

The FTC chief technologist went on to invoke federal law to force the unnamed carrier to provide the paperwork filed by the identity thief who hijacked her account. Cranor discovered that the thief used a fake ID that showed Cranor's name and the thief's photo. The thief acquired the iPhones at a retail store in Ohio hundreds of miles from Cranor's home and charged them to Cranor's account on an installment plan.

US Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets stack up for refueling over Afghanistan in 2010. Canada is looking to the latest Super Hornet as a way to put off buying F-35s. (credit: US Air Force)

While campaigning for office, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised that his government would never buy the controversial, increasingly expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter for his country's air force. That declaration came despite the previous administration's commitment to purchase 65 of those planes from Lockheed Martin. Now, however, it appears Trudeau's government has found a way to fulfill his campaign promise and avoid any potential legal headaches that would result from Canada dropping its commitment with Lockheed. Trudeau's solution? Buy more fighters from Boeing now, delay an F-35 decision 'til later.

At last week's CANSEC defense trade show in Ottawa, Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said that the Canadian Air Force's aging CF-18 Hornet fighter fleet would present a "growing capability gap" over the next decade that would make it difficult for Canada to meet its commitment to NATO. "This I find unacceptable, and it's one thing that we plan to fix," Sajjan said.

And as Defense News reports, the fix Sajjan and the Trudeau government will implement was proposed by Boeing. Instead of waiting for the F-35 to become available, Canada would buy a new version of Boeing's F/A-18 Super Hornet—and thus push the need to make a decision on an F-35 purchase into the late 2020s. The "interim" acquisition plan was reportedly presented to the Canadian government by Boeing with a very warm reception.

As usual, next week's Electronic Entertainment Expo will be home to dozens of new game announcements from the industry's biggest publishers. This week, though, is when a lot of those announcements actually leak out publicly before their official, splashy reveals at the show. There's only one problem: amid the credible rumors about upcoming games are a bunch of completely wild guesses from a hyped-up gaming public.

How do you separate the reliable information from the uninformed conjecture? That's what we're here for! Below, we take a look at some of the most interesting E3 rumors floating around and analyze the available evidence to determine just how likely these murmurings are. (This list doesn't include the many games at the show that have already been announced or shown previously.) Take a look, and keep an eye out when we cover all the official announcements from the E3 show floor next week.

The Rumor: Watch Dogs 2

The trabecular meshwork (between the cornea and iris) helps fluid move from the eye into a drainage system, as shown by the red arrows. (credit: U of Miami Atomic Force Microscopy Lab)

Your eye may seem like a fairly static object, but it actually has an elaborate plumbing system. Tissues inside it constantly produce fluid (termed "aqueous humor") that then has to be drained to keep things in balance.

Like our man-made plumbing systems, the ones in our eyes can get backed up. When more fluid is produced than can be drained, pressure can build up in the eye, producing a condition called glaucoma. Over time, this can cause damage to sensitive eye tissue. Of the 60 million people around the globe thought to suffer from glaucoma, 7 million are blind as a result.

There are drugs and surgical means of reducing the pressure within the eye, but none is consistently effective. Now, some researchers in Iowa have found what might be an alternative approach: get the eye to repair the drainage system. They key to doing this? Stem cells.

(credit: Ron Amadeo)

BlackBerry is reportedly having some issues in its transition to Android. A report from CNET quotes a "high-level executive" at AT&T as saying "The BlackBerry Priv is really struggling."

The carrier exec gave CNET a big list of reasons why the Priv was failing. Both companies expected to see demand for an Android phone with a physical keyboard, but that demand never materialized. BlackBerry apparently has a problem appealing to the general public, with the report saying that "most of the buyers were BlackBerry loyalists." Those die-hard BlackBerry users struggled to adapt to Android, which the executive says led to the higher returns.

Blackberry's Q4 results came out in April, and they show lagging performance, too. The company sold 600,000 handsets for the quarter, which was short of Wall Street's expected 850,000 units.