> The coronavirus pandemic is sparking baseless theories about the dangers of 5G. But the fear that wireless technology is slowly killing us isn’t new—and it doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon.

> The ETHW is not a “how-does-technology-work” site. The scope of the ETHW is historical; instead of focusing on the inner workings of technology, it aims to explain how the technology was developed, who were the major players involved, and what long term significance the technologies have. The ETHW is not only an encyclopedia of the history of technology, but it also contains a full range of materials that relate to the legacy of engineering, including personal accounts, documents, and multimedia objects. In that sense, it is a combination reference guide, blog, virtual archive, and on-line community.

> Pondering the disastrous fate of the HP TouchPad, an early tablet based on WebOS that’s best known for being the subject of a well-remembered fire sale.

> 75k - The number of restaurants around the world that use the Aloha point of sale system. Aloha is an industry stalwart that has managed to stay relevant while often still looking like it was designed in 1998.

Plus some NCR history.

> The phrase “Urban Air Mobility” (UAM) seems like it’s been with us for quite a while, but really it’s only been in widespread use for two or three years. NASA officially recognized UAM in 2017, calling for a market study of remotely piloted or unmanned air passenger and cargo transportation around an urban area. Most people would probably call this the “air taxi” idea—a vision of hundreds of small, unmanned electric multi-copters shuttling two or three passengers from nearby suburbs or city spaces to vertiports at about 100 mph (roughly 161 km/h).

> But if things had worked out differently in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we might have a very different understanding of UAM—something more like mass-transit. We might have had a city-center to city-center 55-passenger vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) airliner shuttling between urban heliports at 180 mph (289 km/h).

> Actually, we did have that, it’s just few people remember. It was called the Fairey Rotodyne.

source: ars

> This is the future, I’m afraid. A future that plans on everything going right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong. Because computers don’t make mistakes. An automated future where no one actually knows how things work.

source: E

> The employee interface verified that my cart contained two (2) items. She scanned both. It verified that those two items were ones I had scanned. And then it told her that she needed to scan five more items to complete the audit, because the audit requires seven items to be scanned.

source: ars

> The central irony (‘combination of circumstances, the result of which is the direct opposite of what might be expected’) referred to in this paper is that the more we automate, and the more sophisticated we make that automation, the more we become dependent on a highly skilled human operator.

> There’s a box that moved with Sarah Loveless and her husband from San Diego to Charleston, S.C., from Charleston to Dallas and from Dallas to Richland, Wash. The box, never unpacked, went into a closet or the garage each time. Contents: 20 to 30 electronics cords.

> Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

> Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.

source: L

> They have millions of fans and big endorsements, but there’s a twist — these ‘virtual celebrities’ don’t actually exist

Also, about Miquela: https://www.ft.com/content/ba6255d6-4186-11e8-803a-295c97e6fd0b

https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/

> Public defenders lack access to gadgets and software that could keep their clients out of jail.

> This tech gap has two basic forms. First, law enforcement agencies can use warrants and court orders to compel companies to turn over emails, photos and other communications, but defense lawyers have no such power. And second, the government has access to forensic technology that makes digital investigations easier. Over the last two decades, the machines and software designed to extract data from computers and smartphones were primarily made for and sold to law enforcement.

> To successfully defend its clients, the Legal Aid Society, New York City’s largest public defender office, realized in 2013 that it needed to buy the same tools the police had: forensic devices and software from companies including Cellebrite, Magnet Forensics and Guidance Software. Not only does the expensive technology unearth digital evidence that is otherwise hard or impossible to find, it captures it in a format that can hold up in court, as opposed to evidence that could have been tampered with or forged.

source: green

> Motorola has today announced a modern successor to one of the most iconic phones ever released: the Razr V3. The popular flip-phone was first released in 2004 and had been a huge success for the company as it went on to sell over a 100M units. The clamshell design was immensely popular as it was a lot thinner and had a unique design. The new Razr takes the core aspects of this design and ports it over to the latest 2019 technologies. At the heart of the new smartphone lies Motorola’s take on foldable displays, giving the new Razr a proper modern “full body screen” experience.

A nice look at how they got the fold to work. We’ll see.

Lots of little facts organized in various ways.

source: grugq

> This post is an excerpt of a far longer post on Galileo, its structures and the cause of the outage. Here we’ll only focus on the outage - the potential underlying reasons behind it are described in the full article.

> Since the week-long outage in July I’ve been fascinated by Galileo and, together with a wonderful crew of developers, experts and receiver operators, have learned so much about what I now know are called ‘Global Navigation Satellite Systems’ or GNSS. This has lead to the galmon.eu project, which monitors the health and vital statistics of GPS, Galileo, BeiDou and GLONASS. More about the project can be read in the full article.

I totally missed the fact that there was an outage, but some interesting commentary.

source: HN

> Light Commands is a vulnerability of MEMS microphones that allows attackers to remotely inject inaudible and invisible commands into voice assistants, such as Google assistant, Amazon Alexa, Facebook Portal, and Apple Siri using light.

> In our paper we demonstrate this effect, successfully using light to inject malicious commands into several voice controlled devices such as smart speakers, tablets, and phones across large distances and through glass windows.

source: grugq

> There wasn’t any indication of what it had been part of, or what it was for, but it did have the marking PART 2198768 on the back, so I handed that to The Goog.

> And the result was instantaneous and unequivocal: it belongs to my refrigerator. Specifically, it goes in the back of the freezer compartment to keep food from falling down into the back and blocking the drainage path.

> For some reason, my alarm clock requires that I install an app on my phone. And the app required me to create an account.

> I’m going to repeat that: In order to set my alarm clock, I had to create an account with the clock manufacturer.

> In politics, stock markets, space, and the battlefield, tiny software calculation mistakes have had enormous consequences.

> Sometimes those fractional cents aren’t stolen—they simply vanish. In the early 1980s, a new stock index at the Vancouver Stock Exchange tracked a steady and mysterious loss in value. An investigation revealed that floor() was being used instead of round(), with the lost fractions of cents accumulating to almost a 50 percent loss of value in 22 months. The programming mistake was finally fixed; the index closed around 500 on a Friday and reopened the following Monday at over 1,000, the lost value restored.

source: ML

> There’s no airplane quite like the Grumman X-29. Its astonishing forward-swept wings were just one of its many bold innovations.

> Created at the height of the Cold War by a conglomerate of giants -- NASA, the US Air Force, the “men in black” at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and aerospace behemoth Grumman -- it first flew in 1984 as part of a quest to build the ultimate fighter jet.

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN6vGxyMcVU

source: HN