Technology

Yesterday I took an hour-long break from answering emails and staring at boxed-in faces in video calls to follow an abandoned dirt road near Bears Ears, Utah, in a dusty pink twilight. At first hopelessly straight, the road soon twisted and banked through low hills and scrubbed out vegetation. The horizon, speckled with plateaus, sat below a cloudless sky stamped with a perfect view of the Milky Way. Outside, in reality, it was early afternoon under thick San Francisco fog, and I hadn't left the confines of my crowded house in days.

A security vulnerability in LTE can be exploited to sign up for subscriptions or paid website services at someone else's expense, new research suggests.

According to researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the flaw exists in the 4G mobile communication standard and permits smartphone user impersonation, which could allow attackers to "start a subscription at the expense of others or publish secret company documents under someone else's identity."

What's a VPN and Why Should I Use It?

Before I talk about free VPNs, I first have to talk about what VPNs are, why you should use them, and how they work.

Every time you type something into your browser, it's converted into a query. Your browser sends this query to a DNS server which then sifts through its archives until it finds the appropriate resource. If it fails to find the appropriate resource, it passes the query to the next DNS server and repeats this process until it finds the appropriate resource.

Now:

On March 23, 2018, a glitch in Tesla's Autopilot technology contributed to the death of Walter Huang in Mountain View, California. As Huang's Model X approached a left exit on US Highway 101, the software apparently got the lane lines mixed up. The car steered to the left, putting itself in the space between the diverging lanes. Seconds later, it crashed into a concrete lane divider at 70 miles per hour. Huang was taken to the hospital but died soon afterward.

Google is working on a wireless local file sharing feature for Android along the same lines as Apple's Airdrop. While it isn't out yet, XDA's Mishaal Rahman got an early version of it up and running on a few devices, as it's currently dormant in versions of Google Play Services that are out in the wild.

The town of Rotterdam, New York, has only 45 police officers, but technology extends their reach. Each day a department computer logs the license plates of around 10,000 vehicles moving through and around town, using software plugged into a network of cameras at major intersections and commercial areas.

“Let’s say for instance you had a bank robbed,” says Jeffrey Collins, a lieutenant who supervises the department’s uniform division. “You can look back and see every car that passed.” Officers can search back in time for a specific plate, and also by color, make, and model of car.

London’s police department said Friday that it would begin using facial recognition technology in the city to identify people off the street in real time with video cameras, adopting a level of surveillance that is rare outside of China.

A leaked draft of a white paper has revealed that the European Commission is considering a temporary ban on the use of facial recognition technologies in public areas for up to five years.

A temporary ban would give regulators the time they need to figure out how to prevent facial recognition from being abused by both governments and businesses. However, exceptions to the ban could be made for security projects as well as for research and development.

Bluetooth SIG, the industry group that maintains the Bluetooth wireless communications standard used in numerous devices, announced a major update to the standard called Bluetooth LE Audio this week.

Bluetooth SIG previously introduced Bluetooth LE with a focus on power efficiency, but that emphasized improvements for low-bandwidth devices. Even though audio is one of the most common uses of Bluetooth, it still faces some frustrating bottlenecks and pitfalls. Bluetooth LE Audio brings improvements specifically oriented toward audio devices.

The world’s first portable ground station for sending and receiving secure quantum communications is up and running. The station has successfully connected to China’s Quantum Space Satellite, nicknamed Mozi, which was launched in August 2016.

Ji-Gang Ren at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and colleagues used the mobile station to send a secure data transmission from Jinan in north-eastern China.