Mark A. Forkner, Boeing's former chief technical pilot involved in the company's 737 Max testing, was indicted for fraud by a grand jury in Texas. Due to his position with the company, he was in charge of coordinating with the Federal Aviation Administration to determine the kind of training a pilot needs to fly a particular plane. The indictment accuses him of deceiving the agency's Aircraft Evaluation Group (FAA AEG) when it evaluated and certified the 737 Max model. If you'll recall, two 737 Max planes crashed within months of each other in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people.

Forkner allegedly provided the FAA with "materially false, inaccurate, and incomplete information about a new part of the flight controls for the Boeing 737 MAX called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS)." In both crashes, the AEG determined after an investigation that MCAS, a system designed to push the plane's nose down in certain situations, activated during the flight. The planes that crashed — Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 — nosedived almost as soon as they took off.

According to the Department of Justice, Forkner discovered an important change to MCAS in November 2016, but he allegedly withheld that information from the AEG. As a result, the FAA removed all reference to MCAS in the pilot training materials for the 737 Max. Acting US Attorney Chad E. Meacham for the Northern District of Texas said in a statement that the former chief pilot's actions were financially motivated:

“In an attempt to save Boeing money, Forkner allegedly withheld critical information from regulators. His callous choice to mislead the FAA hampered the agency’s ability to protect the flying public and left pilots in the lurch, lacking information about certain 737 MAX flight controls. The Department of Justice will not tolerate fraud — especially in industries where the stakes are so high."

Earlier this year, Boeing agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle the criminal charge that it had conspired to defraud the FAA. It also agreed to work with the FAA's fraud section for any ongoing and future investigations. As for Forkner, he was charged with two counts of fraud involving aircraft parts and four counts of wire fraud. He's now facing a sentence of up to 100 years in prison. 

Alienware began operations 25 years ago in a garage near Miami, and the Dell-owned brand is celebrating the milestone anniversary with a stylish gaming PC. The latest Aurora system has a redesigned chassis that has extra internal space and more efficient airflow, and it should run more quietly.

The open-air Legend 2.0 chassis increases the internal volume by 50 percent compared with Aurora R12 or R10 without major changes to the overall size of the machine, Alienware says. You won't need any tools to open up the shell, so you'll have easier access to the components. There's an optional transparent side panel, so you can look inside and see a motherboard lit up with up to eight zones of AlienFX lighting. In addition, Alienware is also offering an optional magnetic cable cover to keep the back of the system in order.

Alienware

As part of the redesign, Alienware focused on improving the airflow. Every system has two 120mm fans, an intake and an exhaust. Depending on the configuration, Alienware may include one or two more fans: first, a second intake and then, if needed, a top exhaust. Since this is an Aurora system, there are of course liquid cooling options too.

Along with keeping your system cool while you're running games at max settings, Alienware says the fans can make the PC quieter. Compared with the previous generation system, the brand claims the new Aurora is up to 16 percent quieter when idle and up to nine percent less noisy during CPU-intensive tasks. While you're overclocking, the PC can make up to 15 percent less noise. In addition, Alienware says the PC can offer a five percent increase in graphics performance compared with the Aurora R12.

There are two color options for the Aurora: Lunar Light and Dark Side of the Moon. In other words, white and black. Alienware will reveal more details about the specs, pricing and availability later this fall.

Virgin Galactic has suffered yet another setback. On Thursday, the company told CNBC it has delayed the start of its commercial space tourism service to the fourth quarter of 2022. It had previously hoped to begin offering paid spaceflights sometime in the third quarter of next year.

With the delay, the company will begin refurbishing both its carrier airplane and spacecraft this month. Virgin Galactic says it expects the entire process should take between eight to 10 months. As a result of the move, Unity 23, the company’s next flight, won’t take off until mid-2022 at the earliest.

“The re-sequencing of our enhancement period and the Unity 23 flight underscores our safety-first procedures, provides the most efficient path to commercial service, and is the right approach for our business and our customers,” Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement.

The delay is not connected to the recent investigation the FAA conducted into Unity 22, the flight that took Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson to the edge of space. The federal agency cleared the company for future flights after completing the investigation. 

You're not the only one frustrated with tech companies that appear to favor their own products. The Washington Postreports that Senators Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley will introduce a bill, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO), to bar tech firms from prioritizing their products and services on their own platforms. Amazon couldn't misuse seller data to compete against those sellers, for example, while Apple wouldn't be allowed to unfairly rank its apps above others in the App Store. 

The senators characterized AICO as a modernization of antitrust law. It tackles the "exclusionary conduct" you see in leading platforms, Klobuchar said. Penalties would be steep, including fines of up to 15 percent of a company's revenue during the period when it broke the law.

The necessary House equivalent to the bill recently cleared that wing's Judiciary Committee and is waiting for a vote. Both bills stand a better-than-usual chance of passing thanks to both bipartisan support and a Biden administration focused on improving competition in technology. The Senators have kept Biden's camp "informed" about work on the bill, Klobuchar added.

Industry lobbying groups like the Chamber of Progress (which counts tech firms like Amazon and Google in its ranks) have unsurprisingly balked at the bill. They contend the measure wouldn't be effective, and might even hurt favorite products. Not that this opposition will necessarily carry much weight. Senators have characterized this period as Big Tech's "big tobacco moment" — that is, it's finally being held accountable for harmful behavior. Politicians across the spectrum appear eager to keep tech companies in check, and AICO may be one of their best near-term opportunities to rein in those corporate giants.

New research has found that policies put in place by YouTube to curb election misinformation had a significant impact on the number of false and misleading videos on Facebook and Twitter. The findings come from a report a team of researchers from theCenter for Social Media and Politics at New York University shared withThe New York Times. In the immediate aftermath of the US election on November 3rd, the researchers recorded a dramatic increase in the number of YouTube election fraud videos shared on Twitter. That month, those clips represented approximately one-third of all election-related videos shared on the platform.

After December 8th, the day YouTube said it would remove videos that claimed widespread errors and fraud changed the outcome of the contest, there was a dramatic drop in misleading election claims on Twitter. In that time period, the ratio of election fraud videos shared on Twitter from YouTube dropped to below 20 percent. That ratio fell again following the US Capitol riot when YouTube said it would hand out strikes to any channel spreading misinformation about the results of the election. By the time President Biden swore the Oath of Office on January 20th, only around five percent of all election fraud videos on Twitter were coming from YouTube.

The researchers saw that same trend play out on Facebook. Before YouTube’s December 8th policy decision, about 18 percent of all videos shared on the platform were related to election fraud theories. By Inauguration Day, that number fell to four percent. To compile their findings, the team at New York University collected a random sampling of 10 percent of all tweets each day and then isolated the ones that linked out to YouTube videos. They did the same on Facebook using the company’s CrowdTangle tool.

If nothing else, the findings highlight the outsized role YouTube plays in how information is shared in our current moment. As the most ubiquitous video platform on the internet, the company has an enormous amount of power to shape political discourse. Its policies can do both great harm and good. “It’s a huge part of the information ecosystem,” Megan Brown, a researcher at the Center for Social Media and Politics told The Times. “When YouTube’s platform becomes healthier, others do as well.”

American soldiers won't be training with HoloLens headsets for a while. Reuters and Windows Central report the US Army has delayed the deployment of the HoloLens-based Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) by a year, to September 2022. Janesunderstood the delay was prompted by the need to bump operational testing from July this year to May 2022 to "further mature" the mixed reality technology.

The Defense Department's Inspector General launched an audit earlier in October to determine whether or not Microsoft's system would meet requirements. It's not clear if the audit is linked to the delay.

This didn't mean the military-oriented HoloLens was in trouble. The Army maintained it was "fully committed" to the nearly $22 billion IVAS contract, and had conducted tests as recently as September. The branch planned to "regularly" conduct tests through its fiscal 2022, which ends September of next year.

IVAS is meant to serve as both a combat assistant and training tool. Infantry will see squad positions and other vital data in the field, complete with night vision — they'll ideally have the kind of situational awareness previously reserved for video games. In training, the headsets can supply data to help instructors improve specific techniques.

The delay won't do much to allay criticism of the HoloLens deal from inside Microsoft. Employees have long objected to Microsoft directly supporting the military and 'gamifying' war, especially as workers didn't have input on the decision. Microsoft isn't likely to change its tune, though. The company sees IVAS a way to aid and protect the troops rather than an offensive weapon — and losing the contract would clearly hurt both Microsoft's bottom line and momentum for HoloLens at large.

Dyslexia affects as much as 20 percent of the population and is one of the most common learning disabilities. It’s for that reason accessibility features like the "Select-to-speak" tool in Chrome OS are vitally important. If you’re not familiar, it allows you to select a section of text and have it read out loud by the operating system. Following an update earlier in the year that added playback controls, Google is now introducing more human-sounding voices. With today’s update, the feature is available in 25 languages and various accents, with more to come.

Google worked with both people who live with dyslexia and educators to develop the new voices. The company says it should help with reading comprehension, particularly in classroom settings. You can enable Select-to-speak through your Chromebook’s settings menu. Once the feature is turned on, highlight a section of text and press either the Everything Button or the Launcher Key and S for Chrome OS to dictate your selection.

As is the way of things when it comes to revealing a major game's features these days, EA has been drip-feeding info about Battlefield 2042 over the last several months. To wit, it has only just pulled back the curtain on Hazard Zone, one of the game's three main modes, a month before the November 19th release date.

Hazard Zone is about getting into the arena, retrieving data drives and escaping via an extraction point before a storm overwhelms you or enemies take you out. Only two teams can make it out, as only a couple of extraction windows will pop up at random locations (though only one player needs to get out for their team to win). Matches run for up to 20 minutes and will take place across all seven of Battlefield 2042's maps.

Survival is key here. You only have one life, but one of your three teammates can resurrect you if you're killed. Once your entire team is wiped out, it's game over. Still, if you're sneaky enough, you can win a match without firing a shot. Some satellites will already be on the ground at the start of a game, and more will drop in as the round progresses, so you'll need to adjust your strategy as you go.

Before the start of a round, you and your teammates can kit yourselves out with gadgets. Players can use money earned in previous matches (primarily by making it out with data drives) to buy gear like a scanner that shows data drive locations, a healing upgrade and a Squad Redeploy Call-in. The latter lets you revive dead squad mates; otherwise, you'll need to find a Redeploy Uplink somewhere on the map to bring back your buddies.

All of the XP you earn will go toward your overall Battlefield 2042 progression, which will boost your player level and unlock weapons. Teams are made up of unique characters — players will need to find specialists and loadouts that work in harmony to increase their chances of success.

Hazard Zone isn't quite a battle royale mode, since you don't need to be the last squad standing to win. Instead, it's objective-based and actually sounds a little like the main mode of Ubisoft's recently announced (and delayed) Ghost Recon Frontline. As with the other Battlefield 2042 modes, Hazard Zone supports 64 players on Xbox One and PlayStation 4. On PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, up to 128 players will square off on larger maps.

Tinder wants to help you find a date for the next wedding you plan to attend. The dating app now includes a “Plus One” feature that allows you to indicate whether you’re looking for a wedding date or open to be that person for someone else. You’ll find the experience inside the Explore tab. That’s the same section of the app where you can pay for a Lyft ride for your date.

In a way, the introduction of Plus One is a response to something Tinder users already come to the app to find. Since the start of 2021, the company says profile mentions of “plus one” have increased by 45 percent. Still, it must be said it takes a certain amount of audacity to show up at a wedding with a total stranger — just imagine the drama that could unfold. And not every host may be cool with the idea. Use at your own risk.

Missouri Governor Mike Parson might want to read up on the differences between disclosing and exploiting security flaws. According to The Missouri Independent, Parson accused a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter of being a "hacker" for having the audacity to... report security holes. The journalist disclosed a Department of Elementary and Secondary Education web app flaw that let anyone see over 100,000 teachers' Social Security numbers in site source code, and Parson interpreted this as a "political game" meant to "embarrass the state" — that is, a malicious hack.

The governor has already referred the case to the Cole County Prosecutor, and even has the Missouri Highway State Patrol investigating. An attorney for The Post-Dispatch maintained that the reporter "did the responsible thing" by sharing the flaw with the government to get it fixed. The lawyer also helpfully refreshed Parson on his internet lingo. A hacker is someone who "subverts" security with sinister intent, not a reporter trying to bolster security by sharing publicly available information.

This flaw wasn't recent, either. University of Missouri-St. Louis professor Shaji Khan told The Post-Dispatch that this kind of vulnerability had been known for "at least" 10 years, and that it was "mind boggling" the Department would let these problems linger. Audits in 2015 and 2016 had highlighted data collection issues at both the Department and school districts.

No, prosecutors probably won't file charges. It's a bit difficult to convict someone whose 'hack' effectively amounted to clicking "view page source" in their browser. However, this highlights an all-too-familiar problem with politicians that don't understand tech. It doesn't just lead to embarrassments, such as letters to long-gone CEOs — it can discourage responsible security disclosures and put thousands of people at risk.