AppleMagazine #174

If you’ve recently purchased a laptop computer made by Lenovo, you may want to hear this: Experts say the world’s biggest computer maker shipped laptops with pre-installed software that could let hackers steal passwords or other sensitive information when you use the web to shop, pay bills or check email. Lenovo said Thursday that it has disabled the offending software, known as Superfish, and will provide customers with a tool that permanently removes the program from their computers. The company initially said its own investigation didn’t find “any evidence to substantiate security concerns.” But it later removed that sentence from a statement on its website. The problem affects an unknown number of computers: Lenovo said it shipped “some” laptops with Superfish between September and December last year, before it stopped…

A little-known war museum outside Boston is drawing back the curtain on a key secret of “The Imitation Game” giving visitors a rare chance to use the complex Nazi Enigma coding machines at the center of the Oscar-nominated film. The Museum of World War II’s new exhibit “The Most Secret Top Secret: The German Enigma Code Machines” is billed as the largest public display of the encryption machines, which the Nazis used for nearly every level of military communication, from the mundane to the top secret. Among the nine machines in the exhibit are two that visitors can use to encrypt and decrypt their own messages. Museum founder and historian Kenneth Rendell says only the National Security Agency has more Enigma coding machines. The NSA owns more than 50 and…

REPORTS SUGGEST THAT CUPERTINO COULD RIVAL TESLA Apple has already been quite the game-changer in music and phones - two fields that it had little association with prior to the debut of iTunes and the iPhone respectively. So, is it necessarily far-fetched to suggest that the Californian giant could even become a car manufacturer? That has been the talk over the last few weeks, thanks to a series of reports. Much of the conjecture centers on an article in the Wall Street Journal that has shed considerable light on a supposed electric vehicle project, codenamed ‘Titan’. The suggestion is that Apple CEO Tim Cook already gave the nod to plans for an Apple-branded automobile more than a year ago, and that several hundred members of the Cupertino firm’s staff are…

YouTube is going to release a mobile app that will only show video clips suitable for young children to help parents control what their kids are watching on the Internet. The YouTube for Kids app, scheduled to be released for Android devices on Monday features thousands of kid-focused channels that provide both entertainment and education. The content is mostly meant for children two to eight years old. Clips are selected by computer algorithms and human review. Although YouTube doesn’t permit pornographic videos or most other clips containing nudity, a wide range of salacious, violent and crude material is available on the site. That prompted many parents to ask YouTube for a “family-friendly” version of its service, said Shimrit Ben-Yair, a product manager for the kids’ app. The concept is similar…

That phone app keeping track of your exercise and meals might keep you out of the hospital one day. Why give your doctors permission to incorporate data from fitness trackers and health apps into electronic patient records? Well, they might spot signs of an ailment sooner and suggest behavioral changes or medication before you land in the emergency room. They also might be able to monitor how you’re healing from surgery or whether you’re following a treatment regimen. “Right now we only see our patients for about a 15-minute visit in the office, and it’s a very constricted view,” said Dr. Lauren Koniaris, a specialist in pulmonary critical care at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. “This really globalizes the view of their health status, so that we’re really…

More hospitals and doctors are starting to use data from fitness trackers and health apps to help treat patients. But they are moving cautiously. The technology has a lot of potential, but there are key challenges to work out: LIABILITY What if a patient’s data shows signs of an ailment, but no one notices? That’s the chief reason Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey is starting with only six patients and three doctors and is monitoring mainly lifestyle data, such as nutrition. It wants to add blood pressure, heart rate and other vital signs to its monitoring, but a hospital committee needs to sign off first. Doctors say that many patients already bring health data to visits, often as printouts that an office must then scan in. Getting data…