Technology

Twitter on Tuesday announced yet another crackdown on abusers.

With the goal of making Twitter a safer place, it has come up with new ways to

• Prevent the creation of new abusive accounts;
• Make search safer; and
• Collapse potentially abusive or low-quality tweets.

Twitter also pledged to persist in its anti-abuse endeavors, saying it would keep rolling out product changes, some more visible than others, and updating users on its progress every step of the way.

Twitter "is more vulnerable than other social media because people expect it to be their link to the world, and not just their friends," noted Jim McGregor, a principal analyst at Tirias Research.

"People use it for news and for access to quick gossip," he told TechNewsWorld, adding that its open-ended structure makes it an easier target for abuse.

Latest Offensive

Twitter will identify account owners it has suspended permanently and block them from creating new accounts.

That might be a reaction to the creation of multiple fake accounts last fall, after Twitter had suspended several accounts linked to the alt-right movement, which is known for advocating white supremacy and other extreme views.

Those suspensions came amid mounting criticism of the company's failure to expunge harassing, racist, sexist and anti-Semitic tweets from its network.

Safe search involves filtering tweets that contain potentially sensitive content, as well as tweets from blocked and muted accounts, from search results. However, users would have other ways to search for and access those tweets.

Under the new system, potentially abusive and low-quality replies will be collapsed, although they will be available if users want to seek them out. This change will roll out in the coming weeks, Twitter said.

Protection or Cybergagging?

"Ultimately, determining what constitutes cyberharassent or any kind of inappropriate behavior on Twitter is a subjective undertaking," said Michael Jude, a program manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan.

"As soon as you introduce subjectivity into regulating Twitter, it loses its appeal," he told TechNewsWorld. "One person's freedom of speech is another person's microaggression. Twitter's best bet is to say, 'Abandon all hope ye who enter here.'"

Getting around the problem of subjective judgment will be difficult, McGregor suggested. "How do you decide what's appropriate or abusive, and what's not? You need to have a context for the conversation and the relationship."

Friends would couch statements in terms that might be considered inappropriate when relayed to a stranger, he pointed out. "For example, I could tweet the word 's**t' to a friend in response to something he'd said or a news item we were discussing, and it would be all right."

Using artificial intelligence to filter out potentially offending tweets isn't going to resolve the issue, because "AI systems have to learn like humans do, and no AI solution will really work unless you have a finite number of inputs," McGregor pointed out.

Twitter's Battle Against the Trolls

Twitter in 2014 suspended several accounts for violating its rules after actor Robin Williams' daughter Zelda publicly quit the site due to hateful tweets about her father's tragic suicide. She later reactivated her account

Another victim, Imani Gandy, had been harassed since 2012 by someone with the handle "Assholster," who created up to 10 different Twitter accounts a day to hurl racist invectives at her.

I really don't want to have to stop reading my mentions. I enjoy interacting w/ people. 'but at what cost to my mental health? #Assholster

— Imani Gandy (@AngryBlackLady) April 21, 2016

Leslie Jones, a Saturday Night Live cast member, temporarily quit Twitter last year after being deluged with hundreds of racist and abusive tweets. She returned after an outpouring of support.

Twitter permanently suspended conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos this summer on the grounds that he had subjected users to targeted abuse.

Twitter over the years has introduced a laundry list of new measures to curb the abuse.

The frequent changes are necessary, according to Laura DiDio, a research director at 451 Research.

"Twitter has to update its rules to reflect the changing times," she told TechNewsWorld. "Nothing's 100 percent foolproof."

Dozens of applications for Apple's mobile devices are vulnerable to WiFi snoopers, a security researcher reported this week.

Will Strafach, CEO of the Sudo Security Group, identified 76 popular iOS apps available at Apple's App Store that were vulnerable to wireless eavesdroppers, even though the connections were supposed to be protected by encryption.

There have been 18 million downloads of the vulnerable apps, he said.

Strafach categorized 33 of the vulnerable apps as "low risk." Potentially intercepted information included partially sensitive analytics data about a device and partially sensitive personal data, such as an email address or login credentials.

VivaVideo, Snap Upload for Snapchat, Volify, Loops Live, Private Browser, Aman Bank, FirstBank, VPN One Click Professional, and AutoLotto: Powerball, MegaMillions Lottery Tickets are some of the apps he assigned to the low-risk category.

Riskier Apps

Strafach categorized another 24 iOS apps as "medium risk." Potentially intercepted information included service login credentials and session authentication tokens for users logged onto the network.

Strafach labeled the remaining apps "high risk" because potentially intercepted information included the snatching of financial or medical services login credentials.

He did not identify the medium and high risk apps by name, in order to give their makers time to patch the vulnerability in their apps.

How concerned should users be about their security when using these apps?

"I tried to leave out anything regarding concern level, as I do not want to freak people out too much," Strafach told TechNewsWorld.

"While this is indeed a big concern in my opinion, it can be mostly mitigated by turning off WiFi and using a cellular connection to perform sensitive actions -- such as checking bank balances -- while in public," he said.

Man in the Middle Attack

If anything, Strafach is understating the problem, maintained Dave Jevans, vice president for mobile security products at Proofpoint.

"We've analyzed millions of apps and found this is a widespread problem," he told TechNewsWorld, "and it's not just iOS. It's Android, too."

Still, it likely is not yet a cause for great alarm, according to Seth Hardy, director of security research at Appthority.

"It's something to be concerned about, but we've never seen it actively exploited in the wild," he told TechNewsWorld.

What the vulnerability does is enable a classic man-in-the-middle attack. Data from the target phone is intercepted before it reaches its destination. It is then decrypted, stored, re-encrypted and then sent to its destination -- all without the user's knowledge.

To do that, an app needs to be fooled into thinking it's communicating with a destination and not an evesdropper.

"In order for a man-in-the-middle attack to be successful, the attacker needs a digital certificate that's either trusted by the application, or the application is not properly vetting the trust relationship," explained Slawek Ligier, vice president of engineering for security at Barracuda Networks.

"In this case, it appears that developers are developing applications in a way that allows any certificate to be accepted," he told TechNewsWorld. "If the certificate is issued and not expired, they're accepting it. They're not checking if it's been revoked or even if it's properly signed."

Developer's Problem

Should Apple act to weed these vulnerable apps from behind its walled garden?

"Apple should most certainly remove any of the offending apps from the App Store," said Sam McLane, head of security engineering at Arctic Wolf.

"This is something that is relatively easy to test for and should be enforced by Apple, since the trust model starts with the Apple ecosystem being safe for people to use," he told TechNewsWorld.

Strafach disagreed. "The setup now is exactly as it should be with regards to developer control of networking code," he said. "Developers can do something about this problem. For affected apps, the fix is only a few lines -- less than an hour tops, if that, to fix the matter in affected code."

Lazy Coders

If Apple tried to address this app vulnerability, it could create headaches for developers, especially those developing enterprise apps, noted Simeon Coney, chief strategy officer for AdaptiveMobile.

"A lot of app developers rely on current behaviors to do things like enterprise apps, which may not have a public certificate," he told TechNewsWorld, "so the responsibility lies more with the app developers to make sure their apps aren't bundled with this risk."

Apple doesn't want to force developers to fully trust certificates, added Ligier. "It will break a lot of things, especially internal apps, and generate a lot of unhappy users," he said.

Nevertheless, developers should not release apps that allow for third-party certificates to be blindly accepted, McLane maintained.

"This is entirely in their hands to remedy," he said. "It's easily tested and only out of laziness would someone ever ship an app that had this egregious security hole in production level code."

Apple had a good quarter, but if you look under the numbers there is a ton of trouble. It just dropped behind Google in brand value, and some analysts have predicted valuation will crater in a few months.

The iPhone 7 did well, but that shouldn't be a surprise, given that its biggest competitor, Samsung, saw its phone literally go up in flames last quarter. The Galaxy 8 is coming, though -- maybe sooner than anyone expects -- and it looks really impressive. This suggests Apple's one-up quarter is not repeatable, unless Samsung decides burning phones is a feature. (Just think of the marshmallows you could roast right in your car! Or "the Samsung S8 Burns Faster, Better, Hotter!")

Apple has moved aggressively to get suppliers to cut costs -- even going to court in an effort to move some of Qualcomm's profit to its own bottom line (this rarely ends well). Apple apparently hit a wall on top line growth, even though it is threatening to raise prices. (Good luck with that, because raising prices in a very competitive market ALWAYS ends well.)

Looking back, the Steve Jobs cycle really worked only once. It may not be Tim Cook's fault it is failing -- maybe working once was all it could do.

I'll explain and then close with my product of the week: the Microsoft Surface Book 2, the halo product in the tablet family that is going up as the traditional iPad goes down.

The Apple Cycle

The Apple product cycle was an amazing thing to watch -- not least because it showcased how folks could have, but didn't, compete with the once unbeatable iPod. When the iPod was at its peak, Sony, Samsung, Dell -- and even Microsoft, with the Zune -- tried to make a dent in its sales, but they bounced off the product like it was made of diamonds.

The only product that even worried Steve Jobs was a prototype from HP, and he was able to trick HP's then CEO Carly Fiorina into licensing the iPod instead. Then he really took advantage of her. Imagine how different history would have been for both HP and Carly if, instead of being screwed by Apple, HP had been the only company to displace the iPod. Maybe Fiorina, not Jobs, would have been CEO of the decade. (OK, I doubt it too.)

As it happened, Jobs saw that the real risk to the iPod was the emergence of smartphones that could do what the iPod did better. Instead of defending the iPod, he did what Microsoft and Palm should have done, leading Apple to create the best MP3/phone bundle.

That was particularly embarrassing for Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, because he'd disagreed with his internal team, which had wanted to do the same thing instead of creating the Zune. Ballmer wasn't alone, however. Palm's then CEO also killed a similar effort, saying something like "smartphones are just for business." There is some irony in HP buying Palm and then burning it to the ground, given its iPod mistake.

The iPod became the iPhone -- an even bigger hit -- and suddenly we had what looked like an amazingly powerful cycle, which worked pretty well for a decade.

When the Apple Cycle Broke

That successful cycle broke with the iPad. You see, the iPhone was an iPod-plus, so the next product in the cycle should have built on the iPhone -- but it didn't. The iPad is built on the iPod -- it basically is an iPod with a bigger screen.

The iPhone already had made the iPod redundant, and the iPhone's screen eventually grew, so instead of the iPad being an extension of the iPod, the iPhone became an extension of both. Instead of the iPad expanding the market like the iPhone did, it peaked and then went into an impressive nosedive.

Granted, the iPad Pro, which is sort of trying to be a blend of the iPad and MacBook, is having some success -- but largely as a result of Microsoft's Surface efforts. It arguably is doing a better job of slipstreaming the Surface than Zune did the iPod, but a huge hit it isn't.

Then the Apple Watch came along, breaking Apple's naming convention. It basically is a small iPod touch with limitations in screen size, features and platform compatibility. The iPod worked with Windows and the MacOS; the Apple Watch should work with Android as well as iOS but doesn't. As a result, the Apple Watch is a crippled wearable iPod, and there should be no surprise it isn't selling that well, even though it is considered one of the best smartwatches in the segment.

Wrapping Up: One-Trick Wonder

What all of this means is that Steve Jobs really only got this right once. Granted, he was increasingly sick after the iPhone and was gone for the Apple Watch, so he might have figured it out had he been alive and well. This makes me wonder if it even would be possible to extend the iPhone further. Could you create an iWonder product that would expand the smartphone to embrace the PC, for instance?

That is what Microsoft imagined with Continuum -- the idea that a smartphone truly could become a PC -- and what makes this ironic is that once again, it didn't execute on what might have been a true iPhone replacement.

If Jobs were around, I'd bet that's where he would go. What then would be the next step? Maybe some kind of Hololens-like product that could eliminate virtually everything else in its final form? I wonder who is going to get that right?

The most memorable launch of this decade, for me, was the Surface Book. That's because it was introduced as a laptop computer -- and to look at it, it is hard to tell the screen becomes a tablet. With a flourish and the release of an electronic latch, the presenter mirrored what Jobs used to do with his "one more thing" surprise, and I haven't seen people get so excited about a PC since the 90s.

I carried the Surface Book for months, and I had just one major complaint -- that it couldn't play any decent games. When you travel as much as I do, there is a lot of down time in airports or between meetings when time just drags. It's even worse on long flights, when you can't even move for hours.

I do read a lot, but the way I can burn through hours is with video games. The typical trade-off is that you either get a notebook that is thin and light with good battery life, or you get one that is heavy and thick with lousy battery life, but that plays games. Games don't pay the bills for me, though.

What is amazing about the Surface Book 2 is that it significantly ups the graphics performance and increases battery life by a third -- from 12 to 16 hours -- while adding only one-third of a pound of weight.

Surface Book With Performance Base

Granted, you still aren't at gaming laptop speeds, but this one now runs my current favorite game, Ashes of the Singularity, while the old one wouldn't.

The Surface Book has never been a cheap date. It costs around US$2K for the sweet spot configuration of an i7 and 256M SSD drive, but the Surface Book 2 adds only $400 for a far more capable product with the same options.

It has a couple of shortcomings. To get it out before Christmas, Microsoft had to miss Intel's latest Kaby Lake processor. Also, it doesn't have USB-C ports -- just the older USB 3.0 configuration. Still, given that most of what I have is still USB 3.0-compatible and that Kaby Lake was a minor upgrade, neither has been a problem.

Carrying the Surface Book is like carrying art. To my eye, it is arguably the best-looking laptop in the market. It can transform into a very attractive tablet that I rarely use -- but most important, it will play games! As a result, the Surface Book 2 is my new carry box and my product of the week. It is a pretty thing.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick on Thursday resigned from President Trump's business advisory council amid fierce blowback against the president's recent executive order on immigration, and in the wake of reports that several major Silicon Valley firms, including Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google, have been circulating a draft letter opposing Trump's action.

Kalanick said he no longer would participate in the council after consumers railed against Uber for continuing to operate at John F. Kennedy International Airport over the weekend. The Taxi Workers Alliance in New York had gone on strike, refusing to pick up fares at the airport, to protest Trump's executive order on refugee resettlement and travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations.

"Earlier today I spoke briefly with the President about the immigration executive order and its issues for our community," Kalanick wrote in a memo to employees. "I also let him know that I would not be able to participate on his economic council. Joining the group was not meant to be an endorsement of the President or his agenda, but unfortunately it has been misinterpreted to be exactly that."

In the memo, Kalanick said he was proud to work with Thuan Pham, Uber's CTO, and Emil Michael, the company's senior vice president of business, both of whom are refugees who "came here to build a better life for themselves."

Policy Backlash

A number of major tech players have been contemplating the publication of an open letter protesting not only Trump's so-called Muslim ban, but also other proposed changes that they fear could damage their companies' ability to conduct business around the world, according to published reports.

The draft letter, first reported by ReCode and Bloomberg News, calls on the Trump administration to reconsider several key policies in addition to the halt in refugee resettlement into the U.S.

The letter also urges the administration to reconsider its policies with regard to Dreamers -- that is, children of illegal immigrants who face deportation and the breakup of their families, a group that President Obama wanted to protect.

The Silicon Valley leaders' concerns go to the heart of the ability of their firms to recruit staff and conduct business. Many of their top executives, as well as professional programmers and engineers, have been recruited from Asia, the Middle East, and other parts of the world that are impacted directly by the Trump administration's recent and proposed executive orders.

Thousands of Silicon Valley professionals work under H-1B visas that allow highly skilled foreigners to remain in the U.S. as long as they continue to work for the companies that recruited them.

After Trump signed the immigration ban, it was not only foreigners attempting to reach the U.S. for the first time who were impacted. Visa holders who were traveling overseas on business also were caught up in the chaos.

Key Contributors

Immigrants are twice as likely as native-born Americans to start new businesses, said Arnobio Morelix, senior research analyst and program officer in research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

More than half of the billion-dollar startups in the U.S. were launched by immigrants, and 70 percent of those unicorn companies have immigrants as key members of their management or product development teams, he told TechNewsWorld.

More than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were launched by immigrants and their children, and Silicon Valley is the metro area with the most immigrant entrepreneurs in the country, the foundation's data shows. Immigrants account for 41.9 percent of entrepreneurs in the San Jose metro area.

It's unlikely that the Trump administration will back down on the immigration issue, despite the concerns raised by the technology industry in the draft letter that's been circulating, according to Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

"I doubt it," he told TechNewsWorld, as "the president is pretty set on his plan, and it was a key campaign promise."

It such an open letter were published, it might upset Trump to the point where he would rescind his pledge to help the technology industry by cutting back on government regulations, Enderle feared.

Secondary Strategy

It's doubtful the letter tech leaders reportedly are signing would have any effect on the president's opinion or his executive order, suggested Charles Kind, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

"In the first two weeks of his administration, Trump has shown himself to be willful, combative and quick to take offense -- none of which are qualities one associates with a desire to seek compromise," he told TechNewsWorld.

That said, "simply writing the letter could be as important for tech companies as finding a way to get through to the administration," King continued.

"The fact is that the impact of the executive order on Silicon Valley's employment of foreign-born engineers is just one of the elements in play here. More important will be the effect that Trump's unilateral actions and 'America first' intentions have on foreign markets, many of which are crucial to the current and future health of U.S. tech companies," he explained.

"If Mr. Trump sparks crises," said King, "including trade wars with formerly friendly allies -- and it seems likely that he will -- the immigration letter signers' willingness to confront the president could help them maintain their good standing with trusted partners and customers who are otherwise threatened by the administration's policies."

Elon Musk's hyperloop dream began to take shape in reality last weekend as 27 teams, including six from outside the United States, participated in a competition to create the mass transit vehicle of the future.

The competition in Hawthorne, California, sponsored by SpaceX, which Musk founded, attracted teams made up mostly of students who created pods designed to run on hyperloop transportation systems.

In a hyperloop system, the vehicles, or pods, travel in a vacuum in tubes at speeds close to the speed of sound. To do that, the pods have to be suspended slightly off the ground, typically by riding on a magnetic field.

For its competition, SpaceX built a test chamber that was three-quarters of a mile long and six feet wide. The company capped the speed at which a pod could go at around 50 miles per hour.

In order to get to test its pod in the vacuum chamber, a team had to pass a rigorous 101-point review. Only three teams could do that: Delft University of Technology of The Netherlands; Technical University of Munich, Germany; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kind of a Drag

Operating in a vacuum is important to hyperloop systems because it reduces friction. "Hyperloop is all about friction," said Adonios Karpetis, a faculty advisor to the Texas A&M aerospace team, which competed at the event.

"You have to minimize the air friction in the tube," he told TechNewsWorld.

By creating a vacuum or near-vacuum in the tube, the drag of the vehicle is nearly eliminated, which allows it to reach tremendous speeds, as high as 700 miles per hour. By contrast, a Boeing 747 has a cruising speed of 570 miles per hour.

"It's like operating a ground-based vehicle at an altitude of 100,000 feet where the air is very thin," said Rick Williams, an advisor to Auburn University's hyperloop team.

A hyperloop vehicle has an advantage over an aircraft, though.

"Once the vehicle reaches its cruising speed, it will coast for a long ways because of the minimal drag," Williams told TechNewsWorld.

"From an energy standpoint, it's going to be significantly lower," he said.

Defining the Unknown

A team didn't have to use the chamber with the vacuum enabled, though, to learn about improving its pod's design.

"We could see the different engineering approaches taken by the teams and talk with them about their pods," explained David Goldsmith, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech University, which participated in the competition.

"We saw pods that had gone down different developmental paths, and we saw pods that had gone down the same path we had," he told TechNewsWorld. "That was invaluable."

The competition also helped the teams define the parameters of their knowledge.

"We now know what we don't know," Texas A&M's Karpetis remarked. "We did not know a lot of little things, from electronics, to breaking, to levitation, to batteries."

Journey as Destination

Students also learned the value of dealing with the unexpected.

"We learned a lot about being flexible," said Claire Holesovsky, Badgerloop operations director at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

"A lot of times, things don't go your way, so you have to have alternative plans and think quickly on the spot," she told TechNewsWorld.

The teams now are looking forward to this summer, when the next round of the competition will be held. They'll be able to take what they learned in this last round and use it to improve their pods for the next one.

While there are many people who would embrace the idea of a 30-minute hyperloop ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Carlo Ratti, director of the Sensesable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology isn't one of them.

"The other week I was in London and I had to go to Paris. I could have traveled from the city center to Heathrow Airport, flown 45 minutes, and then taken another transfer from Charles de Gaulle airport to the city center," he said.

"This the kind of experience that hyperloop proposes between San Francisco and Los Angeles, with long transfers to suburban stations and then a short trip in a small, dark tube," Ratti told TechNewsWorld.

"Instead, I enjoyed very much spending two hours on the Eurostar. I was online, the comfortable seat became my workplace during the trip, and I could enjoy the gorgeous English and French landscape all around," he explained.

"As our trains -- and tomorrow our self driving cars -- become an extension to our offices, homes or even bedrooms, shouldn't we focus on making them more comfortable and point-to-point, instead of thinking about such a 20th century idea of fast travel between large hubs?" Ratti asked. "Then, the journey could really become the destination."

In a couple of interesting briefings last week, BlackBerry announced that its turnaround was finished, and Microsoft finally provided some information on its new connected car deliverables.

One strange thing was that after CEO John Chen excitedly pointed out that BlackBerry had displaced Microsoft in Ford, he then announced a strategic initiative to work more closely with Microsoft's Azure platform on BlackBerry's own market-leading QNX car operating system. That showcased not only the massive changes in both companies, but also the really strange way this market is evolving.

I'll close with my product of the week: a very low-cost wearable smartphone display that could get you through your next dentist appointment or boring sermon.

BlackBerry's QNX

With all the focus on the coming autonomous car and on BlackBerry's old phone business, most don't know that QNX, the operating system that BlackBerry acquired, is dominant in the car market, largely for car operations. To give you an idea, it currently is in 60M -- yes, that's million -- cars. It is ranked No. 1 in telematics and automotive software entertainment, and its main advantage is that it just works and continues to meet all of the car companies' start of product deadlines.

Chances are that if you like the software running the different parts of your car, it is QNX. The car companies like it because it is very secure, their own software developers know it (it's been dominant for a number of years), and it works on both 32- and 64-bit hardware platforms from folks like Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia.

As you'd expect from any modern system, it is set up for over-the-air updates, similar to Tesla. In effect, QNX has become the equivalent of Android or Windows, but for the car -- and it dominates the segment.

BlackBerry introduced the Karma folks at the briefing to talk about their most advanced offerings. Karma is what became of Fisker -- the firm that tried, with some significant drama, to compete with Tesla. (Karma also showcased why Tesla's decision to use Panasonic batteries turned out to be brilliant.)

Karma's current car is physically identical to the Fisker Karma, with the exception that all of the electronics have been revamped completely, so it now is reliable. (I was an old Jaguar mechanic, and given the issues the Fisker had with its electronics, I've always wondered if they were done by Lucas electrics, which were almost always at the heart of Jaguar reliability issues in the 1960s and 70s.)

However, I spoke to the Karma executives at the event, and their point was that it took them only 15 days to bring up the software on their redeveloped car. (By the way, the new Karma is about US$140K, and it is still a looker.)

BlackBerry currently is pivoting to support the next generation of technology, which includes autonomous vehicles.

Now you'd think that Microsoft and BlackBerry would be at each other's throats. While BlackBerry has pivoted away from focusing exclusively on secure phones and email, Microsoft has pivoted away from its focus on tools and operating systems.

Microsoft: It's About Azure

Microsoft has changed a lot over the last several years, since Satya Nadella has been running the firm. I really didn't get that initially, so the company had to set up a special retraining meeting. I had covered Microsoft for so long that my brain apparently was hard coded to think of it in just one way -- and it isn't that company any more.

Microsoft's big push with automotive is with Azure now, which is a good thing, because its in-car efforts over the last two decades weren't that great.

I actually had an AutoPC for a number of years. It was very advanced for its time, but truly flawed -- so much so that my wife still threatens to throw something at me -- and in those early years it was the AutoPC -- if I ever suggest something like that again.

To be fair, that product was crippled by an underperforming processor -- but I have to say, there is no misery like having a GPS system that can't navigate at anything exceeding 25 miles per hour. Of course, I put the AutoPC in her new car, not my own, which in hindsight likely wasn't that wise. (Yes, I'm also often surprised I'm still married.)

Anyway, Microsoft's current effort is to provide the cloud resource for cars, so that updates, maintenance, and even some cloud intelligence can be delivered -- bad weather, reported accidents, or even neighborhoods in flux and potentially unsafe -- in order to improve not only the car maker's connection to the car, but also the driver's connection to the car maker.

You see Tesla -- particularly when it pulled an Apple and got hundreds of thousands of pre-orders for a car that wouldn't arrive for years -- woke up the traditional vendors with a holy crap moment. Now they realize that if they can't provide some level of better-connected support in the next few years, they'll likely be gone.

Those companies don't trust Google at all, for the most part, (which is largely why Google had to spin out its own car effort), and they appear to be more comfortable with Microsoft than with Amazon.

Wrapping Up

Both BlackBerry and Microsoft have changed a lot, and while BlackBerry is focused like a laser on operating systems and related services, Microsoft largely has pivoted to the cloud as its premier platform, and that means they can partner much more easily going forward.

In effect, the firms have pivoted away from each other in terms of focus -- and that means rather than having a cage match to the death, they now can cooperate to create something far more powerful.

It is possible that with their combined autonomous car efforts, these companies could do together what neither firm could do individually, and thus dominate the next generation of ever-smarter cars. Go figure.

The Vufine+, which started out as a Kickstarter project, is basically a small head-mounted display, priced at around $180, that's useful for watching video or looking at your PC, tablet or smartphone screen while you are moving about.

Vufine+ Wearable Display

I wouldn't suggest using this while driving, running or bike riding, though, as it isn't a ton less distracting then holding up your phone when watching a video. It is a rechargeable device, but battery life is about an hour and a half, suggesting that if you want to use it longer you should carry a long USB cable and a cellphone booster battery.

There are some downsides: It isn't wireless, and it works well only on your right eye (cables stick up if you put it on your left). Unlike Google's Glass, which used a projector, this is a screen -- so lining it up can be a tad difficult the first time.

However, Glass cost something like $1,500 and this is $180, so it is a great little device to figure out what works for you and what doesn't.

Some people use their Vufine+ to see both their drone and what it sees, but my ideal use is in a dentist's office where I can watch a movie while having my teeth cleaned and not be bored to tears.

At $180, if I accidentally lost it I wouldn't be likely to have a coronary.

It works with phones and tablets that have HDMI out and the same with laptops. It comes with an HDMI to Micro-HDMI cable, so clearly it's expected that you'll start out with a laptop, even though you are more likely to use a Micro-HDMI to Micro-HDMI cable (about $10 on Amazon).

Oh, don't forget headphones or earbuds -- wireless if you don't have a separate HDMI jack or headphone jack on your device -- and be aware, your laptop may see an audio component in the device and switch your speakers to it so you can't hear sound. Go into your control panel and switch that to whatever you actually want to use, or you'll be listening to the sounds of silence.

The Vufine+ solved a problem for me: It gave me something that allowed me both to watch video and pay attention to the oral hygienist, transforming what always has been an incredibly boring experience (I get really tired of watching the ceiling fan spin) into a more interesting, far faster-moving one. As a result, the Vufine+ is my product of the week.

A ransomware attack darkened the video surveillance system of the District of Columbia's police department eight days before the presidential inauguration of Donald J. Trump.

Video storage devices for 70 percent of the CCTV system were unable to record anything between Jan. 12 and Jan. 15, as police techies scrambled to combat malicious software found on 123 of 187 networked video recorders, The Washington Post reported Friday.

However, the safety of the public was never in jeopardy during the camera blackout, Brian Ebert, a Secret Service official, told the Post.

Although the city has characterized the malicious software it found as ransomware, no ransom demand appears to have been made. The city resolved the problem by taking the storage devices offline, removing all their software and then restarting them.

The city is investigating who might be behind the hack, which affected only CCTV cameras monitoring public areas and did not reach deeper into the city's networks, the Post reported.

Blind Deterrent

Closed circuit cameras can be important for collecting evidence about a crime. Fortunately for the D.C. police, that wasn't an issue while some of its network was disabled.

"If a crime had been committed in an area and its compromised camera held important evidence, then they might have found themselves in trouble," said Bob Hansmann, director of security analysis and strategy Forcepoint.

"In this case, they were lucky and nothing crucial happened," he told TechNewsWorld.

In addition, cameras have a deterrent effect whether they're working or not.

"In this instance, it was beneficial that the general public did not know about the attack when it happened," noted James Scott, a senior fellow with the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology.

"So long as the attack was not common knowledge, the camera itself acted as a deterrent to crime, because potential offenders were not aware that it was infected with ransomware," he told TechNewsWorld.

Attractive Target

Other municipal infrastructures have been targeted in similar ways in the past. A ransomware attack last fall took down the ticket machines for San Francisco's light rail system for about a day.

"We're going to see more and more of these kinds of attacks this year," said Stephen Gates, chief research intelligence analyst with Nsfocus.

"This is a perfect example of hackers taking advantage of these municipal systems. They can cause all sorts of havoc," he told TechNewsWorld.

"We're seeing more and more ransomware attacks against the IoT, which is a disturbing trend," said Jean-Philippe Taggart, a senior security researcher with Malwarebytes.

"CCTVs, hotel locks, libraries, hospitals -- the criminals have a wealth of potential targets to choose from," he told TechNewsWorld.

Feasting on IoT

Ransomware extortionists are feasting on the Internet of Things, maintained Simon Crosby, CTO of Bromium.

To prevent these attacks, devices need to be shielded so they're not exposed on the Internet where hackers can find them, he said.

"Right now, attackers are having a field day finding exploitable systems that infrastructure operators either do not recognize are Internet-facing or think their exposure is too obscure for criminals to find, which is a very dangerous assumption," Crosby told TechNewsWorld.

In addition to being discovered easily by hackers, networks of IoT devices have another problem: diversity.

"Fleets of PCs can be protected with uniform defenses, but what do you install on rail kiosks, video cameras, cars or televisions?" Crosby asked.

"The operating systems in these devices may not be able to support embedded security software," he pointed out, "so the solution to protecting them requires collaboration among device manufacturers and strategies to block attacks before they reach these IoT endpoints."

Ransomware has become a lucrative pursuit for hackers, which is why it will continue to be a problem. An estimated billion dollars will be paid to digital extortionists in 2016, according to the Herjavec Group.

"Hackers have every incentive in the world to continue these attacks and to innovate in order to bypass basic defenses," said Mark Dufresne, director of threat research and adversary prevention at Endgame.

"This is a new reality in which we will live for a long time," he told TechNewsWorld, "and we will see it take new forms, such as hitting IoT devices."