TMO Link

Sometimes, an author can get away with writing about anything if it’s done with charm and grace. In this case Wired’s Jason Kehe decided to try living with a flip phone for eight months to see what he might learn. The story is not so much about the awkward disconnectedness of it all, but rather the remarkable social and technical impact.

Frankly, I’m embarrassed to write about this semifailed experiment. Disconnection has become the most congratulated, least convincing narrative gimmick of recent times, a widely excusable hypocrisy.

The author writes with a certain colorful, literary irony and sparkle. As a result, his social commentary about our fixation and dependence on the smartphone is delightful reading in and of itself. And yet, and yet, the author manages to make us ponder. What have we done to ourselves as humans?

A woman from Florida was recently saved by her Apple Watch after she was trapped in a car underwater.

Amanda Antonio told first responders in Hillsborough County, Fla., that she used her Apple Watch to locate her iPhone to call 9-1-1 after her car rolled in a ditch full of mud and water. “It’s up to my waist,” Antonio said according to a transcript of the call obtained by Spectrum Bay News 9, a television station covering the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. She later said, “It’s now up to my chin. I’m freezing. I’m so scared.”

An elite Intel team is still fighting Meltdown and Spectre, two security vulnerabilities that affected millions of devices.

Throughout 2018, researchers inside and outside Intel continued to find exploitable weaknesses related to this class of “speculative execution” vulnerabilities. Fixing many of them takes not just software patches, but conceptually rethinking how processors are made.

I recommend reading Wired’s article, it’s an interesting look into Intel and how serious the two flaws still are.

Hackers warned thousands of Chromecast users of a security flaw…by hijacking their devices. They were the latest people to work out how to force the Chromecast to play any YouTube video they want. For good measure, the hackers, who go by the names Hacker Giraffe and J3ws3r, encouraged users to subscribe to controversial YouTube personality PewDePie’s channel. Techcrunch spoke to researchers concerned that the vulnerability could leave exposed devices vulnerable to more damaging attacks.

The bug, dubbed CastHack, exploits a weakness in both Chromecast and the router it connects to. Some home routers have enabled Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), a networking standard that can be exploited in many ways. UPnP forwards ports from the internal network to the internet, making Chromecasts and other devices viewable and accessible from anywhere on the internet.

It has been a pretty exciting time for space technology recently. SpaceX completed its first mission for the U.S. military on December 23, 2018. On Wednesday, scientists on NASA’s New Horizons mission shared the first close-up images of an object in the distant Kuiper Belt that is not Pluto or one of its moons. On Thursday, just over 50 years since man first went to the Far Side of the Moon in Apollo 8, a Chinese robot spacecraft become the first to actually land there. BBC News Online provided a fantastic rundown of what happened in this historic mission.

Previous Moon missions have landed on the Earth-facing side, but this is the first time any craft has landed successfully on the unexplored and rugged far side. Some spacecraft have crashed into the far side, either after system failures, or after they had completed their mission.Ye Quanzhi, an astronomer at Caltech, told the BBC this was the first time China had “attempted something that other space powers have not attempted before”

On December 26, Brian X. Chen wrote for the New York Times: “Personal technology was so awful this year [2018] that nobody would think you were paranoid if you dug a hole and buried your computer, phone and smart speaker under six feet of earth.” However, some things did get better. Author Chen provides a list and his observations.

In the past, Huawei ambassadors such as Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot raised some eyebrows by tweeting their love of the Chinese firm’s phones via an iPhone. Now, the company’s own PR department has done the same, tweeting a “happy new year” message from an iPhone. All rather embarrassing, particularly, as AppleInsider noted, in the context of an apparent boycott of Apple products from Chinese firms following the arrest of Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou at the request of the U.S.

Despite an international incident involving the arrest of Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou on fraud charges related to violating U.S. trade sanctions against Iran, and the supposed Asian iPhone boycott announced by Nikkei, the Chinese phone maker’s public relations group continued to use iPhones in the promotion of its brand, as noted by MKBHD video blogger Marques Brownlee

One of the internet’s founding fathers, Larry Roberts, sadly passed away over the holiday season. Dr. Roberts pioneered packet switching technology and went on to become the Chief Scientist on the ARPANET project. He also had success in the private sector. Dr. Roberts died on 26 December 2018 after suffering a heart attack, aged 81, The Register paid tribute:

After studying electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completing his PhD, Roberts implemented a packet-switched link for his uni. In 1966, he was appointed chief scientist for the Advanced Research Projects Agency – and put in charge of its embryonic ARPANET. He worked with packet-switching theorist Lawrence Kleinrock to create the project’s first working network of four computers connected to each other in 1969.