Category: Technology

A Baltimore judge has overturned the conviction of Adnan Syed, reports The Associated Press. The 41-year-old had been serving a life sentence for the 1999 murder of his former girlfriend Hae Min Lee. In 2014, his case attracted international interest after it was chronicled by former Baltimore Sun reporter Sarah Koenig in the first season of the hit podcast Serial.

Koenig spent more than a year investigating the specifics of Syed’s case, focusing in particular on the conduct of his lawyer, Cristina Gutierrez. In 2019, Maryland’s highest court found Gutierrez had failed to properly investigate an alibi witness but voted against granting Syed’s request for a retrial. However, prosecutors recently recommended that a judge grant him a new trial, noting the state had lost “confidence in the integrity of the conviction.” With Monday’s decision, the state has 30 days to decide whether to move forward with a new trial or drop the case entirely.

“This is not a podcast for me,” said Young Lee, the brother of Hae Min Lee, during Monday’s hearing. He said his family felt “betrayed” and “blindsided” by the state’s motion to vacate Syed’s conviction. “Whenever I think it’s over, and it’s ended, it always comes back,” he added.

Following the decision, Serialannounced it would air a new episode on Tuesday morning. In the years since its widely successful first season, Serial has produced a series of spinoffs, including S-Town and The Trojan Horse Affair. More broadly, it’s safe to say the true crime genre and podcasting more generally have never been more popular – even if the series was never quite able to replicate the success of its first season. 

One good thing that came out of the pandemic is that more people picked up cycling. In the first three months of 2021, American consumer spending on bikes and cycling accessories increased by 34 percent year on year to $8.2 billion. However, the pandemic also saw more die and suffer injuries while biking. According to the National Safety Council, 1,260 cyclists were killed in 2020, a 16 percent increase from 2019.

It’s a problem that Ford thinks technology can address. On Monday, the automaker announced it’s working with Commsignia, PSS, Ohio State University, T-Mobile and Tome Software to explore how a smartphone app could warn drivers of pedestrians and cyclists they may not see. As someone sharing the road with a car, you would install the company’s software on your phone. With the help of Bluetooth Low Energy, vehicles with Ford’s Sync infotainment system would see you as “beacons.” If the car then determines there’s the potential for a crash, it will warn the driver using audiovisual cues.

According to Ford, its approach has a few advantages. One is that Bluetooth LE is nearly ubiquitous. The technology has been part of the Bluetooth protocol since 2009, meaning every modern smartphone has access to it. If you own a Ford vehicle, you won’t need to bring your car to a dealership for a hardware upgrade since the Sync system features Bluetooth compatibility. The other advantage of using Bluetooth LE is that your car won’t need to see pedestrians and cyclists before it can warn you. Ford and T-Mobile are also working on a version of the app that uses 5G instead of Bluetooth LE.

In practice, the company’s approach is reminiscent of the COVID exposure notification apps some countries and states deployed at the beginning of the pandemic. As you may recall, those also used Bluetooth LE. However, despite backing from Apple and Google, they were never effective due to low usage. In Canada, for instance, the federal COVID Alert app was only downloaded 6.9 million times and logged 63,117 positive tests. Put another way, nowhere near enough Canadians downloaded the software to make it an effective contact tracing tool. Ford’s app is likely to experience some of the same issues. 

As an avid cyclist, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen riding their bikes at night without an LED light to make themselves visible to traffic. On the other hand, statistics suggest motorists have been driving more aggressively in recent years, leading to the aforementioned increase in cyclist deaths as well as vehicle crashes. Any kind of intervention would be welcome, but Ford’s app isn’t likely to be a meaningful solution if it ever comes to market. While the Bluetooth LE solution to COVID had only one uphill climb, apps like Ford’s have two: adoption by cyclists and adoption by automakers.

The James Webb Space Telescope is still snapping its first pictures of Solar System planets, and the latest batch could be particularly useful. NASA and the ESA have shared early images of Mars, taken on September 5th, that promise new insights into the planet’s atmosphere. Data from the near-infrared camera (NIRCam) is already offering a few surprises. For starters, the giant Hellas Basin is oddly darker than nearby areas at the hottest time of the day, NASA’s Giuliano Liuzzi and Space.comnoted — higher air pressure at the basin’s lower altitude has suppressed thermal emissions.

The JWST imagery also gave space agencies an opportunity to share Mars’ near-infrared atmospheric composition using the telescope’s onboard spectrograph array. The spectroscopic ‘map’ (pictured at middle) shows the planet absorbing carbon dioxide at several different wavelengths, and also shows the presences of carbon monoxide and water. A future research paper will provide more detail about the Martian air’s chemistry.

It was particularly tricky to record the images. Mars is one of the brightest objects the James Webb telescope can see — a problem for an observatory designed to study the most distant objects in the universe. Researchers countered this by capturing very short exposures and using special techniques to analyze the findings.

This is only the initial wave of pictures and data. It will take more observations to reveal more about Mars. However, the spectral info already hints at more information about the planet’s materials. Liuzzi also thinks JWST studies could settle disputes over the presence of methane on Mars, potentially signalling that the Red Planet harbored life in its distant past.

Uber believes it has identified the team behind last week’s hack, and the name will sound all too familiar. In an update on the breach, Uber said the perpetrator was affiliated with Lapsus$, the hacking group that has targeted tech firms like Microsoft, Samsung and T-Mobile. The same intruder might also have been responsible for the Rockstar hack that leaked Grand Theft Auto VI, Uber said.

It’s also clearer just how the culprit may have accessed Uber’s internal systems. The attacker likely bought the contractor’s login details on the dark web after they’d been exposed through a malware-infected computer. Two-factor authentication initially prevented the hacker from getting in, but the contractor accepted an authentication request — that was enough to help the invader compromise employee accounts and, in turn, abuse company apps like Google Workspace and Slack.

As before, Uber stressed that the hacker didn’t access public-facing systems or user accounts. The codebase also remains untouched. While those responsible did compromise Uber’s bug bounty program, any vulnerability reports involved have been “remediated.” Uber contained the hack by limiting compromised accounts, temporarily disabling tools and resetting access to services. There’s also extra monitoring for unusual activity.

The incident update suggests the damage to Uber is relatively limited. However, it also indicates that Lapsus$ is still hacking high-profile targets despite arrests. It also underscores major tech companies’ continued vulnerability to hacks. In this case, one wrong move by a contractor was all it took to disrupt Uber’s operations.

The Treasury Department is keenly aware that crypto scams and hacks remain serious problems, and it’s pressuring the rest of the US government to respond. As The Washington Postnotes, the Treasury has issued a report calling on other federal regulators to further crack down on scams and other illegal crypto activity. Officials want agencies to “expand and increase” investigations and enforcement, issue clearer guidance and help crypto users understand both risks and the reporting tools at their disposal.

In all cases, the Treasury asked for more coordination between government divisions. The department also asked for greater transparency on illegal activity to help spot trends in scams and other crimes.

The tougher stance is necessary given the dangers, according to the report. While proponents argue crypto can democratize financial services by making them more affordable and accessible, the Treasury found that there wasn’t much evidence to support the claim. If anything, the department found that low-income households were particularly vulnerable to ripoffs — 29 percent of crypto investors had an annual income below $50,000, according to Federal Reserve Board data.

It’s not clear that the findings will lead to decisive action. The Treasury didn’t outline a concrete strategy for battling crypto scams and security breaches, and regulators have their own sometimes-conflicting views of how to govern digital assets. The Securities Exchange Commission sees most crypto tokens as securities it can monitor, while the Commodity Futures Trading Commission unsurprisingly wants to treat tokens as commodities. Although the bureaus might not be fighting, this report doesn’t do much to establish common ground.

That purported Grand Theft Auto VI leak appears to be real. Rockstar Games has confirmed the authenticity of the leak in a tweet, noting that a hacker stole confidential data including “early development footage” of the next Grand Theft Auto title. The firm didn’t foresee any long-term damage to development or live services like GTA Online, but was “extremely disappointed” that details of the future game were shared in this manner,

Rockstar promised another update “soon,” and that creation of GTA VI would continue “as planned.” The game producer didn’t share more. However, Windows Centralnotes parent company Take Two has asked original leak host GTAForums to pull content, which reportedly includes Bully 2 plans and might include code for multiple GTA titles. The hacker’s original Telegram channel has disappeared.

The leak is unprecedented and included 90 videos of a very early build of GTA VI. The clips appear to validate rumors from July that hinted at a return to Vice City (aka Miami) as well as a Bonnie and Clyde-like pair of male and female protagonists. There also appears to be a slew of functional upgrades ranging from improved animations to a robbery system.

The GTA VI material might not do much damage, as the finished product is likely to be much more polished. However, there is a concern that any code for GTA Online could make it easier for hackers to exploit vulnerabilities and otherwise sour the game for other players.

Kiwi Farms, a forum that’s long been accused of fostering targeted online and real-world harassment campaigns, says that someone hacked its proxy service and website. As noted by cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont, it told users in a Telegram message that all avatars had been changed to the logo of another website (said to be another purported “free speech” forum) and that “each node on the forum index was deleted one at a time.”

While Kiwi Farms apparently has backups and none of the forum data has been permanently deleted, users’ personal information may have been compromised. Founder Joshua Moon told users to assume that their email and password information has been obtained, as well as the IP address of any device they’ve used to access Kiwi Farms in the last month.

“I do not know for sure if any user information was leaked. In my access logs, they attempted to download all user records at once,” Moon wrote in a statement on the Kiwi Farms website. “This caused an error and no output was returned. I shut everything off soon after. If they scraped information through some other mechanism, I cannot say with any confidence either way.”

The hacker is said to have used an injected script to gather data from users’ systems. Moon said they accessed his admin account as a result of this method. Moon added that he would restore the site from a backup, but noted that the process (as well as reviewing Kiwi Farms’ security procedures) would take some time. However, he noted on Telegram today that he had to leave for a week to deal with a family emergency. Some Kiwi Farms users are turning on Moon over the incident.

Earlier this month, Kiwi Farms was effectively forced off of the open web following an effort to take down the forum. Streamer and political commentator Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti, a prominent target of a harassment campaign that allegedly stemmed from the website, started the movement to bring down Kiwi Farms. While Moon was later able to bring the forum back online through other means.

Cloudflare, a DDoS protection company, kicked Kiwi Farms off its service due to a significant increase in targeted threats originating on the site. That seems to have played a role in this weekend’s hack. “Cloudflare not only provided DDoS protection, they also accounted for many popular exploits like this,” Moon wrote. 

Voyager and Lockheed Martin have found a partner to design astronaut facilities for their space station. Hilton will develop suites and sleeping quarters for Starlab, CNBC reports. Under the partnership, Hilton and Voyager will also look at marketing opportunities related to Starlab and trips to what may be one of the first space hotels.

NASA has granted contracts to four private companies who are building private space stations ahead of the agency’s planned decommissioning of the International Space Station at the end of the decade. Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman are also working on space stations. Voyager’s operating company Nanoracks received the largest contract, which was valued at $160 million.

Voyager and Lockheed Martin hope to have the first Starlab up and running by 2027. I wonder how many Hilton Honors points it will cost for a trip there.

Apple released its latest iPhone lineup last week. While many folks were excited to get their hands on a new device, their elation may have been tempered by some problems with the camera system. It seems that several prominent third-party apps have compatibility issues with the iPhone 14 Pro’s rear camera unit. Users have reported problems including shaking, rattling and mechanical noises emanating from the device when using apps like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, as 9to5 Mac reports. It seems there are problems with autofocus and focus too.

Along with sharing reports of the problems on the likes of Reddit and Twitter, some have been sharing videos that show the issues. One appears to depict a grinding sound coming from an iPhone 14 Pro when Snapchat is open. Another shows a similar issue while TikTok accesses the rear cameras.

Given that these issues only appear to be present when third-party apps are in use, rather than Apple’s own Camera app, a software issue may be to blame, as 9to5 Mac points out. In particular, the apps may not be playing nicely with the iPhone 14 Pro’s optical image stabilization, which seems to be the cause of the rattling. It’s not yet clear whether the problems are on Apple’s end or with the third-party apps. Engadget has contacted Apple, TikTok, Snap and Meta for comment.

CD Projekt Red has managed to catch lightning in a bottle twice. With nearly 80,000 concurrent Steam players at the moment, Cyberpunk 2077 is enjoying a resurgence in popularity. While it’s a far cry from the more than one million people that played the game on PC following its troubled launch, it’s still more interest than the game has seen in more than a year.

You don’t have to look far to find a reason for the spike. On September 13th, the game’s anime spinoff, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, premiered on Netflix to critical acclaim, earning praise for its story, worldbuilding and animation. The series has one of the highest audience scores for a Netflix production. And after watching Edgerunners, many people are giving Cyberpunk 2077 a second chance or picking it up for the first time.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because a similar situation played out after the debut of The Witcher. In 2019, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, thanks to the popularity of its Netflix counterpart, was briefly more popular than it was after its 2015 release. It will be interesting to see if Cyberpunk 2077 can maintain its current momentum. At least on PC and current-generation consoles, the RPG is a different game than it was in 2020. Cyberpunk 2077’s recent 1.5 and 1.6 updates addressed many of the lingering bugs and stability issues that plagued the game at launch. CD Projekt Red also recently released official modding tools and announced that Phantom Liberty, the game’s first major expansion, would arrive in 2023.