Author: Tech Support

    • In an year of breaches, data leaks, and reports of starvation deaths due to faulty implementation, India's Aadhaar had its constitutional status upheld in 2018 (Aria Thaker/Quartz)

    Aria Thaker / Quartz: In an year of breaches, data leaks, and reports of starvation deaths due to faulty implementation, India’s Aadhaar had its constitutional status upheld in 2018  —  After almost a decade since its launch, India’s controversial biometric identity programme, Aadhaar, finally got a measure … In an year of breaches, data leaks,

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    Finding Bugs in Bluetooth

    [Jiska Classen] and [Dennis Mantz] created a tool called Internal Blue that aims to be a Swiss-army knife for playing around with Bluetooth at a lower level. The ground for their tool is based in three functions that are common to all Broadcom Bluetooth chipsets: one that lets you read arbitrary memory, on that lets

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    • Inside Uber's serious incident team for US where ~130 investigators deal with reports of crashes, physical altercations, sexual misconduct, theft, and stalking (Shannon Bond/Financial Times)

    Shannon Bond / Financial Times: Inside Uber’s serious incident team for US where ~130 investigators deal with reports of crashes, physical altercations, sexual misconduct, theft, and stalking  —  There is space for scores of people in a section of Uber’s office in downtown Phoenix but on a recent weekday morning only a handful … Inside

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    RFID Doing More than ID

    RFID is a workhorse in industrial, commercial, and consumer markets. Passive tags, like work badges and key fobs, need a base station but not the tags. Sensors are a big market and putting sensors in places that are hard to reach, hostile, or mobile is a costly proposition. That price could drop, and the sensors

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    • Big players in autonomous driving like Uber, Tesla, and Waymo had a disappointing 2018, but several startups with a "minimum viable product" made good progress (Timothy B. Lee/Ars Technica)

    Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica: Big players in autonomous driving like Uber, Tesla, and Waymo had a disappointing 2018, but several startups with a “minimum viable product” made good progress  —  Big companies struggled but small ones moved forward.  —  As 2018 dawned, expectations for self-driving vehicles were sky-high: Big players in autonomous driving

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    • How Amazon is opening tiny stores, adding local language descriptors, and accepting cash payments to target the 800M people living outside India's big cities (Eric Bellman/Wall Street Journal)

    Eric Bellman / Wall Street Journal: How Amazon is opening tiny stores, adding local language descriptors, and accepting cash payments to target the 800M people living outside India’s big cities  —  The retailer is targeting hundreds of millions of new online shoppers in India’s countryside by adding Hindi and videos … How Amazon is opening

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    • In a formerly undisclosed memo from March, a top FTC enforcement official said Facebook wasn't at fault for Cambridge Analytica's abuses; FTC says probe ongoing (New York Times)

    New York Times: In a formerly undisclosed memo from March, a top FTC enforcement official said Facebook wasn’t at fault for Cambridge Analytica’s abuses; FTC says probe ongoing  —  Last spring, soon after Facebook acknowledged that the data of tens of millions of its users had improperly been obtained … In a formerly undisclosed memo

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    • AI image processing for computer vision, facial recognition, image generation, and other applications saw marked improvements in 2018 (Andrew Tarantola/Engadget)

    Andrew Tarantola / Engadget: AI image processing for computer vision, facial recognition, image generation, and other applications saw marked improvements in 2018  —  Computer scientists have spent more than two decades teaching, training and developing machines to see the world around them. AI image processing for computer vision, facial recognition, image generation, and other applications

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    • Lawrence Roberts, who helped design the Arpanet and oversaw its implementation in 1969, dies at 81 (Katie Hafner/New York Times)

    Katie Hafner / New York Times: Lawrence Roberts, who helped design the Arpanet and oversaw its implementation in 1969, dies at 81  —  In late 1966, a 29-year-old computer scientist drew a series of abstract figures on tracing paper and a quadrille pad.  Some resembled a game of cat’s cradle; others looked like heavenly constellations

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    • Inside digital music piracy and sharing in the 2000s via P2P networks like Napster, LimeWire, Gnutella, as well as IRC and internet music service Audiogalaxy (Abhimanyu Ghoshal/The Next Web)

    Abhimanyu Ghoshal / The Next Web: Inside digital music piracy and sharing in the 2000s via P2P networks like Napster, LimeWire, Gnutella, as well as IRC and internet music service Audiogalaxy  —  A couple of decades ago – well before a $10 monthly fee would unlock access to virtually every song ever recorded through streaming

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    • RBC Capital Markets: 41% of US consumers now own a smart speaker, compared to 21.5% in 2017; the growth was mostly driven by Alexa and Google Home devices (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

    Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: RBC Capital Markets: 41% of US consumers now own a smart speaker, compared to 21.5% in 2017; the growth was mostly driven by Alexa and Google Home devices  —  We already know Alexa had a good Christmas – the app shot to the top of the App Store over the holidays,

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    • Privacy International: popular Android apps like TripAdvisor, Kayak, Indeed, MyFitnessPal share data with Facebook without user consent, possibly violating GDPR (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)

    Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times: Privacy International: popular Android apps like TripAdvisor, Kayak, Indeed, MyFitnessPal share data with Facebook without user consent, possibly violating GDPR  —  Some of the most popular apps for Android smartphones, including Skyscanner, TripAdvisor and MyFitnessPal … Privacy International: popular Android apps like TripAdvisor, Kayak, Indeed, MyFitnessPal share data with Facebook

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    • The biggest challenges for US tech firms in 2019: GDPR-like privacy protections, large security breaches becoming routine, and anti-government employee protests (Susan Fowler/New York Times)

    Susan Fowler / New York Times: The biggest challenges for US tech firms in 2019: GDPR-like privacy protections, large security breaches becoming routine, and anti-government employee protests  —  How privacy, security and employee protests will shape the year ahead for Silicon Valley.  —  Ms. Fowler is an editor in the Opinion section. The biggest challenges

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