Bytes: What’s new in tech
The downside of teen surveillance
Constantly “surveilling your kids” with phone tracking apps is very likely to backfire, said Devorah Heitner in The Atlantic. Many parents start tracking their children with locationtracking apps like Life360, and are unwilling to give it up as their kids become teenagers or even adults. But what “feels like good parenting in the short term” can end up threatening the kids’ ability to make good choices in the long run. One mother told me how her phone sleuthing found that her son, who said he was at the movies, was actually at the house of a girl he was interested in. “She presented this to me as something of a success story: Her child had lied to her; she caught him.” But the same mom also told me that her son was a “very private person.” Will he really be more likely to share any detail of his life with his parents, knowing they “can surveil it out of him whether he discloses it or not?”
Hackers target casinos
A cyberhacking group that took down casino chain MGM’s computer systems for more than a week had targeted Caesars days earlier, said William Turton and Andrew Martin in Bloomberg. The hackers got a payment of about $15 million from Caesars to get its systems back online. MGM refused ransom demands earlier this month, and the U.S.and U.K.-based hackers, known as Scattered Spider, “disrupted the company’s websites, reservation system, and some slot machines at its casinos across the country.” The attacks began “with a breach of the company’s IT help desk,” an increasingly popular hacking method. A former MGM employee said that “to obtain a password reset, employees would only have to disclose basic information—their name, employee identification number, and date of birth—details that would be trivial for a criminal hacking gang.”
Easier charging for your iPhone
Finally, an iPhone with a USB-C port, said
Tom Warren in The Verge. “We’ve been waiting for the day that the iPhone would finally switch to the widely used USB-C standard instead of Apple’s proprietary Lightning connector.” The iPhone 15, in stores this week, is the first Apple phone to make the switch. It’s a great development, but “if you were hoping for a totally new iPhone 15 design, well, that’s not happening.” The new phone looks almost the same as last year’s, though inside the lowerend phones have an A16 chip, “the same one found in last year’s iPhone 14 Pro models.”
A popular, useless cold medicine
An ingredient in some of the most widely used cold and allergy medications is effectively useless, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel has concluded. Phenylephrine, which is supposed to ease congestion by reducing swelling in blood vessels in the nasal passages, does offer relief for a few days when it is administered via nasal decongestant sprays such as Afrin and Mucinex Sinus-Max.
But researchers found that when the drug is taken orally—in products like Sudafed PE, Vicks Dayquil, Theraflu, and many others—only an insignificant amount actually makes it up to the nose. The evidence is “pretty compelling,” says Susan Blalock, a member of the advisory committee. “I don’t think additional data are needed to support that conclusion.” The drug’s over-the-counter designation as “safe and effective” will likely be revoked, meaning pills and capsules containing phenylephrine would have to be removed from store shelves. That doesn’t mean, pharmacists say, that you have to clear them out of your medicine cabinet. The pills aren’t unsafe; that one ingredient just doesn’t work. “If you have a stuffy nose and you take this medicine,” pharmacist Leslie Hendeles tells The New York Times, “you will still have a stuffy nose.”
Sitting linked to dementia
Bad news for older office workers, reports The Times (U.K.): Sitting for more than 10 hours a day increases your risk for dementia, even if you regularly get up and walk around. That’s the conclusion of a new study based on data from 50,000 adults from the U.K., all over 60. Each wore a device to measure their daily movements over an average of six years. The average person spent 9.3 hours a day sitting down. Compared with that cohort, those who sat for 10 hours had an 8 percent increased risk of dementia. For those sitting for 12 hours a day, the increase in risk was 63 percent; above 15 hours, it was a staggering 200 percent. In a surprising turn, the risk held regardless of whether the sitting hours were consecutive or interspersed with activity. “Many of us are familiar with the common advice to break up long periods of sitting by getting up every 30 minutes or so to stand or walk around,” says David Raichlen, from the University of Southern California. “But we found that once you take into account the total time spent sedentary, the length of individual sedentary periods didn’t really matter.”
Why our brains shrank
Human brains grew in volume almost fourfold in the past 2 million years, but in the more recent past they have been shrinking. It was thought that the change began about 10,000 years ago, when the advent of farming changed our diets. But new research based on fossil and modern brain data suggests the shrinkage actually started much later, between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. The researchers think the evolutionary driving force was the development of complex societies, which meant humans began relying on collective intelligence rather than individual knowledge. “We’re so social that we don’t have to know everything anymore,” co-author Jeremy DeSilva, from Dartmouth College, tells The Wall Street Journal. “We collectively operate as a pretty functional society.” DeSilva and his colleagues calculated that brains have decreased in volume by about 10 percent over this period, or by roughly the size of a lime. But he emphasizes that size alone does not dictate smarts, and that our brains have probably become more efficient. “Computers used to be the size of a room,” he says, “and now they fit in your pocket.”