T-Mobile misled state regulators about its planned CDMA network shutdown to gain approval for its 2020 merger with Sprint, according to a ruling from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). As first reported by Ars Technica, the watchdog ordered the carrier on Friday "to show cause why it should not be sanctioned by the commission" over providing "false, misleading, or omitted statements."

One of the main ways T-Mobile won regulatory approval for its $26 billion acquisition of Sprint was by agreeing to sell Boost Mobile to a competitor. In 2020, Dish paid $1.4 billion to acquire the Sprint prepaid brand from the carrier. As part of the deal, T-Mobile agreed to provide 4G LTE and 3G CDMA service to Boost customers while Dish worked on moving them over to a 5G network it was building on its own. Initially, T-Mobile said it would support those customers until 2023, but the carrier's current CDMA plan will see it shut down that part of its network on January 1st, 2022. That's in 137 days as of the writing of this article.

The CPUC lists five contradicting claims from T-Mobile, one of which involves a statement the carrier made that Dish would have up to three years to migrate Boost Mobile customers. The watchdog can fine T-Mobile up to $100,000 per offense. While that's unlikely to hurt the carrier, it could lead to additional scrutiny from the CPUC. "The discrepancy between information in T-Mobile's testimony and information provided in its response is so serious that it warrants further investigation by this commission," the watchdog said. T-Mobile will have a chance to answer the CPUC's allegations during a hearing on September 20th.

T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert responded to the ruling in a lengthy blog post the carrier published last week. "Listen, this is a manufactured crisis, orchestrated by Dish, and it is about money, not customers," he said. "If Dish was really concerned for customers, they would simply take real action and get their customers new phones on time, before the network upgrade happens, just as T-Mobile is doing for affected Sprint customers."

To that point, Dish has said the number of customers involved, in combination with the ongoing global chip shortage, makes it impossible to migrate them all to a 5G device before T-Mobile shuts down its CDMA network early next year. "A forced migration of this scale under this accelerated time frame is simply not possible and will leave potentially millions of Boost subscribers disenfranchised and without cell service come January 1st, 2022," the company said in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission back in April.

We've reached out to both T-Mobile and Dish for additional comment.

The CPUC ruling follows a recent July 9th letter the Department of Justice sent to T-Mobile and Dish. The agency said it had "grave concerns" over the impending shutdown and the possibility that a significant number of Boost Mobile customers would be left without service on January 1st, 2022. The DoJ said it expected both companies "to take all available steps" to remedy the situation.

The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) may have exposed the records of nearly 2 million individuals and left them accessible online for three weeks. Security researcher Bob Diachenko says he discovered a terrorist watchlist on July 19th that included information like the name, date of birth and passport number of those listed in the database. The cluster also included “no-fly” indicators.

According to Diachenko, the watchlist wasn’t password protected. Moreover, it was quickly indexed by search engines like Censys and ZoomEye before the Department of Homeland Security took the server offline on August 9th. It’s unclear who may have accessed the data.

“I immediately reported it to Department of Homeland Security officials, who acknowledged the incident and thanked me for my work,” Diachenko said in a LinkedIn post spotted by Bleeping Computer. “The DHS did not provide any further official comment, though.” We’ve reached out to the Department of Homeland Security.

Among the watchlists the TSC maintains is America’s no-fly list. Federal agencies like Transportation Security Administration (TSA) use the database to identify known or suspected terrorists attempting to enter the country. Suffice to say, the information included in the exposed watchlist was highly sensitive.

A recent bipartisan Senate report recently warned of glaring cybersecurity holes at several federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security. It said many of the bodies it audited had failed to implement even basic cybersecurity practices like multi-factor authentication and warned national security information was open to theft as a result.

Apple has long allowed Mac, iPhone and iPad users to access their iCloud drives on a PC using an app you can get from the Microsoft Store. And while the software let you download your photos and files, any passwords stored on your keychain were a more complicated matter. That’s about to change for the better. 

With version 12.5 of iCloud for Windows, Apple is adding a password manager to the software. Once you download the update from the Microsoft Store, you can use the tool to add, edit, copy and paste, delete and look up any passwords you have stored in your iCloud keychain. You can also use the app in conjunction with a Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome extension to autofill a password when you’re surfing online.  

Apple says the app stores all your passwords within an encrypted database on your computer and transfers them to the relevant browser extension over a secure channel. The app will automatically save and sync any website usernames and passwords but won’t do the same for applications and other sensitive personal data like your credit card number. 

It’s all pretty standard functionality apps like 1Password and Dashlane have offered for years, but if you’re an iPhone user who frequently saves their logins to iCloud, you’ll appreciate having easy access to them on your PC.    

Following reports of a data breach over the weekend, T-Mobile has confirmed it’s investigating a cybersecurity incident. In an update published on Monday, the company said someone gained unauthorized access to its computer systems, but that it has yet to determine if any customer data was stolen.

“We are confident that the entry point used to gain access has been closed, and we are continuing our deep technical review of the situation across our systems to identify the nature of any data that was illegally accessed,” the carrier said.

When Motherboard first broke the news of the data breach on Sunday, the information of about 30 million T-Mobile customers was on sale on the dark web for about $270,000 in Bitcoin. A hacker told the outlet they had obtained social security and IMEI numbers connected to more than 100 million people. As of the second quarter of 2021, T-Mobile had 104.7 million subscribers. The carrier said it could not “confirm the reported number of records affected or the validity of statements made by others” until it completes its investigation. Once it knows more about the situation, T-Mobile promises to proactively contact customers.

Robots that can swim underwater are nothing new. For instance, Carnegie Mellon fitted its famous snakebot with turbines and thrusters earlier this year to give it aquatic capabilities. But few can do so with the grace, speed and effortlessness of a real-life fish. And it’s not that scientists have avoided trying to create a robot that can do just that, but the exact way fish swim faster or slower is something that has proved elusive.

Marine biologists have known for a while that the secret lies somewhere in the way they can alter the rigidity of their tails. The problem is that it’s difficult to measure that while a fish swims. However, using a combination of fluid dynamics and biomechanics, researchers from the University of Virginia say they’ve derived a formula that not only provides an answer to that question but also allows a robot with a specially designed tail to be nearly as good as its natural counterpart at speeding up and slowing down in water.

When they applied the formula to a tuna-like robot they built, they found it could swim at a greater variety of speeds using almost half as much energy as one with a fixed-stiffness tail. If you’re a cyclist, you’ll love this analogy. "Having one tail stiffness is like having one gear ratio on a bike," Dan Quinn, one of the co-authors of the study, told Big Think. "You'd only be efficient at one speed. It would be like biking through San Francisco with a fixed-gear bike; you'd be exhausted after just a few blocks."

With a tuna-sized machine under their belt, the University of Virginia team plans to scale their tail technology for use on both bigger and smaller robots. They’re also developing one that undulates like a stingray. Their work could one day lead to a class of drones that can quickly travel to a remote location and then slow down to investigate the area. Like an aquatic snakebot, that's something the Navy could use to inspect their ships for damage. 

The field of neuroprosthetics has advanced significantly in recent years, but the technology is still nowhere near accessible enough to make a difference in the lives of most amputees. However, a new development from MIT could change that. In a joint project with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the school designed a neuroprosthetic that costs about $500 in components. It's an inflatable hand made from an elastomer called EcoFlex and looks a bit like Baymax from Big Hero 6.

The device foregoes electric motors in favor of a pneumatic system that inflates and bends its balloon-like digits. The hand can assume various grasps that allow an amputee to subsequently do things like pet a cat, pour a carton of milk or even pick up a cupcake. The device translates how its wearer wants to use it through a software program that "decodes" the EMG signals the brain sends to an injured limb.

The prosthetic weighs about half a pound and can even restore some sense of feeling for its user. It does this with a series of pressure sensors. When the wearer touches or squeezes an object, they send an electric signal to a specific position on their amputated arm. Another advantage of the arm is it doesn't take long to learn how to use it. After about 15 minutes, two volunteers found they could write with a pen and stack checkers.

"This is not a product yet, but the performance is already similar or superior to existing neuroprosthetics, which we're excited about," said Professor Xuanhe Zhao, one of the engineers who worked on the project. "There's huge potential to make this soft prosthetic very low cost, for low-income families who have suffered from amputation."

While we're a while away from seeing this tech in the real world, the team behind the project is already working on improving the design. They want to make it better at decoding electrical inputs and more customizable when it comes time for mass production.

Following a $2 billion Hail Mary, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has filed a complaint with the US Court of Federal Claims over NASA's handling of the Human Landing System program. The court challenge comes less than a month after the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) dismissed a protest the company filed in response to NASA's decision to award a single contract for the Artemis lunar lander. The agency went with a $2.9 billion bid from Elon Musk's SpaceX, opting not to fund a $5.9 billion proposal from Blue Origin. 

NASA's original intention was to sign two separate contracts, but limited funding from Congress made that difficult to do so. Blue Origin alleged the decision was "fundamentally unfair" because NASA allowed SpaceX to modify its bid, something the company says it didn't get the opportunity to do as well. However, the GAO concluded NASA's "evaluation of all three proposals was reasonable and consistent with applicable procurement law, regulation, and the announcement's terms."

At the time, Blue Origin hinted it would escalate the situation. "We stand firm in our belief that there were fundamental issues with NASA's decision, but the GAO wasn't able to address them due to their limited jurisdiction," the company said following the announcement.

"Blue Origin filed suit in the US Court of Federal Claims in an attempt to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA's Human Landing System," a spokesperson for Blue Origin told Engadget. "We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America."

What this means for the Human Landing System program and Project Artemis more broadly is likely another delay. Following Blue Origin's GAO protest, NASA ordered SpaceX to stop work on the lunar lander contract while the watchdog investigated the matter. While this latest complaint is sealed, a source told The Verge Blue Origin asked a judge to order a temporary pause on SpaceX's contract while the case is resolved in court. NASA and SpaceX lost about three months waiting for the GAO to investigate Blue Origin's protest. If a judge approves the company's request, this latest pause could be even longer. Ultimately, any further delays will make NASA's goal of returning to the Moon by 2024 difficult.

Sonos has won an early victory in its ongoing legal battle with Google. On Friday, a federal judge with the US International Trade Commission (ITC) made a preliminary decision related to a complaint the company had filed against Google in early 2020, alleging the search giant had infringed on five of its patents. Validating all five claims, the judge said Google should not be allowed to import devices that violate the intellectual property of Sonos.

"Today the ALJ has found all five of Sonos' asserted patents to be valid and that Google infringes on all five patents. We are pleased the ITC has confirmed Google's blatant infringement of Sonos' patented inventions," said Sonos chief legal officer Eddie Lazarus. "This decision re-affirms the strength and breadth of our portfolio, marking a promising milestone in our long-term pursuit to defend our innovation against misappropriation by Big Tech monopolies."

As The New York Times notes, the judge's decision isn't final. The entire ITC body has to make a final ruling before it mandates any remedial measures. With a meeting scheduled for December 13th, that won't happen for another few months.

"We do not use Sonos' technology, and we compete on the quality of our products and the merits of our ideas," said Google spokesperson José Castañeda. "We disagree with this preliminary ruling and will continue to make our case in the upcoming review process."

Sonos first sued Google in early 2020. It accused the company of copying some of the technologies most critical to its speakers, including its Trueplay tuning tool. In patent disputes, companies typically use simultaneous ITC complaints to force the hand of their opponent since the body tends to resolve matters faster than a traditional court. Google subsequently countersued Sonos, claiming the company had been using its search, software, networking and audio processing technologies without paying the proper licensing fees. The feud escalated later that same year when Sonos filed a second suit. 

Out of the box, modern Sonos speakers support Alexa and Google Assistant, and in a roundabout way Siri as well. Between those options, you might think Sonos would be covered when it comes to voice-activated assistants, but the company may be working on a solution of its own. In a customer survey spotted by VoiceBot.ai and later The Verge, Sonos describes a system that would respond to the phrase “Hey Sonos” and allow users to control music playback, search for songs and move tracks between different speakers in their home.

Additionally, the company states the potential voice assistant would process requests locally, claiming that’s something that would allow it work faster. It also points to the privacy benefits of such a setup. “Sonos Voice Control interprets your voice entirely on the speaker, so no audio is sent to the cloud, stored, transcribed, or listened to by anyone,” the company says in the survey. We’ll note here Sonos bought a startup that specialized in fast and private on-device voice processing in 2019.

A Sonos spokesperson told The Verge the company frequently collects feedback from its customers, but that it had no additional information to share. If Sonos plans to release its own voice assistant, it’s not hard to understand its motivations. After spending at least a year to get Assistant on its devices, the company had a very public falling out with Google in 2020, culminating in an ongoing legal spat between the two.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but Twitter has once again temporarily stopped accepting new verification applications from users. This latest pause follows after the company briefly opened the process to the public in May and then subsequently closed it down some eight days later.

At the time, the company said it was doing so because it was “rolling in” verification requests. It took until June for Twitter to sort out the backlog. This time around, the company has a more encouraging excuse. It said it’s taking time to implement tweaks to both the application and review processes, but stopped short of detailing the work it’s doing.

We imagine this latest pause also has something to do with the fact Twitter briefly verified a fake Cormac McCarthy account. Under the company’s public verification rules, an account holder is required to provide evidence like a government-issued ID to prove they’re who they say they are. The holder of the phony McCarthy account apparently didn’t do that.

“For those who have been waiting, we know this may be disappointing,” Twitter said. “We want to get things right, and appreciate your patience.” As before, the company hasn’t said when it plans to start taking applications again.