Enlarge / Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman (credit: Randy Stewart)

“Real estate is by far the most screwed up industry in America,” Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said in a 2007 interview on 60 Minutes. “We feel like things that Amazon or eBay or Yahoo have done for other industries, we can do for the real estate industry.”

(credit: vincewilcox)

The Food and Drug Administration announced a comprehensive, multi-year plan Thursday to stamp out the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the country—tobacco use.

The agency intends to reduce the amount of nicotine allowed in traditional combustion cigarettes with the goal of making them “non-addictive.” At the same time, the FDA will delay regulations on electronic cigarettes and other newer products to “afford the agency time to explore clear and meaningful measures to make tobacco products less toxic, appealing, and addictive,” the agency said in a press statement.

“A key piece of the FDA’s approach is demonstrating a greater awareness that nicotine—while highly addictive—is delivered through products that represent a continuum of risk and is most harmful when delivered through smoke particles in combustible cigarettes,” the agency wrote.

Enlarge / The frequency generator used to power researchers’ “sonic gun” at Black Hat in Las Vegas. (credit: Sean Gallagher)

LAS VEGAS—At the Black Hat security conference on Thursday, a team of researchers from Alibaba Security demonstrated how sound and ultrasound could be used to attack devices that depend on sensor input from gyroscopes, accelerometers, and other microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). A sonic “gun” could in theory be used to knock drones out of the sky, cause robots to fail, disorient virtual or augmented reality software, and even knock people off their “hoverboard” scooters. It could also potentially be used to attack self-driving cars or confuse air bag sensors in automobiles.

Many of the commercial gyroscope sensors in electronic devices are tuning fork gyroscopes—MEMS devices that use the vibrations of two “proof masses” to track rotation and velocity. But an outside source of vibration matching the resonant frequency of the gyroscope could interfere with the sensor’s stability and cause the sensor to send bad data to the device it is embedded in.

By tuning an audio signal to the resonant frequency of the MEMS sensors, the researchers showed that the sensors could be temporarily disabled or manipulated into giving faulty data. In the process, this can cause the devices and software that depend on them to fail.

Enlarge (credit: Hamza Butt)

We’ve been covering a recent First Amendment lawsuit targeting President Donald Trump—a novel legal argument in which Twitter users claim their constitutional rights were violated because the commander-in-chief blocked them from his personal @realDonaldTrump Twitter handle.

To be sure, it’s a digital-age-based constitutional theory about social media rights in a day and age when politicians, from the president on down, are using their private accounts to discuss public affairs.

Now there’s some legal precedent on the matter. It comes from a federal judge in Virginia who said that a local politician had violated the First Amendment rights of a constituent because the politician briefly banned the constituent from the politician’s personal Facebook account.