Bytes: What’s new in tech
Air Force turns to flying taxis
A flying-taxi startup received a first-of-its-kind safety endorsement from the Air Force, said Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel in The Wall Street Journal. The endorsement for Joby Aviation’s novel electric-powered “vertical-takeoffand-landing craft” could eventually “lay the groundwork” for civilian certification that could “jump-start the budding” air-taxi industry. For now, Joby’s vehicle, which requires a pilot, will be “contracted to carry cargo and people” between U.S. military facilities, while the Air Force will “help accelerate safety analyses.” Air-taxi development has attracted significant investments in recent years, with Boeing, Toyota, Hyundai, and Airbus all pursuing novel airborne vehicles. Last week, Uber announced a deal to sell its air unit to Joby.
Schools get tools to hack phones
Schools are buying devices to extract data from students’ phones, said Tom McKay and Dhruv Mehrotra in Gizmodo.com. The use of “phone-cracking tools” by law enforcement gained notoriety in 2016 after the FBI cracked the locked iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter. Since then, the technology has “spread dramatically.” Gizmodo reviewed school district records and found substantial payments to Cellebrite, the best-known mobile forensics firm. “Accounting documents from eight school districts, seven of which are in Texas, showed that administrators paid as much as $11,582 for the controversial surveillance technology.” The Supreme Court has “ruled that schools do not necessarily need a warrant to search students.”
Apps sold private location data
Apple and Google have banned a controversial location-tracking company’s software from apps that appear in their app stores, said Mitchell Clark in TheVerge.com. The company, X-Mode Social, is one of many that provide code, called a software development kit (or SDK), that can be embedded by developers into apps to track users’ locations. The data get sent to X-Mode, which sells the information and then pays the developer a commission. The business practice isn’t new, and users technically “can only get your location data when given permission” by your opting in. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that X-Mode reports on nearby connected devices, such as fitness trackers. Vice reported that XMode collects data from several Muslim prayer apps, including one with nearly 100 million downloads, and sells it to the U.S. military.