Linked List: June 3, 2021

Thursday, 3 June 2021

United Commits to 15 Supersonic Planes From Boom 

David Koenig, reporting for the AP:

United Airlines aims to bring back supersonic travel before the decade is over with a plane that is currently just an artist’s drawing — even the prototype hasn’t flown yet.

The airline said Thursday that it plans to buy 15 jets from Boom Supersonic with an option for 35 more once the start-up company designs a plane that flies faster than the speed of sound while meeting safety and environmental standards.

United hopes to carry passengers on the plane in 2029. The airline said the plane will reduce flights between London and the New York area to just 3.5 hours and make Tokyo only 6 hours from San Francisco.

The last commercial supersonic flight was in 2003, when the Concordes were grounded.

Trump Pulls Plug on Blog After Just 29 Days 

Drew Harwell and Josh Dawsey, reporting for The Washington Post:

Upset by reports from The Washington Post and other outlets highlighting its measly readership and concerns that it could detract from a social media platform he wants to launch later this year, Trump ordered his team Tuesday to put the blog out of its misery, advisers said.

On its last day, the site received just 1,500 shares or comments on Facebook and Twitter — a staggering drop for someone whose every tweet once garnered hundreds of thousands of reactions.

You hate to see it.

Another Take on Amazon’s Sidewalk Mesh Network 

Josephine Wolff, writing for Slate:

By all means, opt out of Amazon Sidewalk if anything about this program makes you uncomfortable or if (despite already owning a Ring or Echo) you don’t trust the company enough to share a little of your home network with your neighbors safely. You’re under no obligation to participate in this mesh networking experiment, and it probably would have made more sense for Amazon to at least launch the program with an opt-in model that gave people more time to learn about how it works and whether they want to be involved.

But if you’re just learning about mesh networks for the first time and aren’t sure what to think, or whether this is something to be very worried about, I really don’t think it is. If you’ve already reconciled yourself to the privacy implications of owning an Echo or a Ring, the additional privacy and security drawbacks of participating in Sidewalk seem very limited and the benefits are potentially considerable, for you and for everyone around you.

I like this take. The thing to consider is whether you trust Echo and Ring devices with your privacy. If you do, you might as well participate in Sidewalk. It’s not that different, conceptually, from Apple’s Find My network.

Using Fake Reviews to Find Dangerous Browser Extensions 

Brian Krebs:

Fake, positive reviews have infiltrated nearly every corner of life online these days, confusing consumers while offering an unwelcome advantage to fraudsters and sub-par products everywhere. Happily, identifying and tracking these fake reviewer accounts is often the easiest way to spot scams. Here’s the story of how bogus reviews on a counterfeit Microsoft Authenticator browser extension exposed dozens of other extensions that siphoned personal and financial data.

After hearing from a reader about a phony Microsoft Authenticator extension that appeared on the Google Chrome Store, KrebsOnSecurity began looking at the profile of the account that created it. There were a total of five reviews on the extension before it was removed: Three Google users gave it one star, warning people to stay far away from it; but two of the reviewers awarded it between three and four stars.

Fraudulent reviews are a scourge. Apple’s App Store is riddled with them — I’m not sure I’ve seen a single story about a scammy app in the App Store that didn’t have a bunch of 5-star reviews. Amazon product pages are riddled with fake reviews too. There’s a huge cottage industry in paying for fake reviews in any online forum where reviews can come from anyone.

I don’t know what the answer is. Users think they like reading reviews from other users, but they have no idea how utterly untrustworthy unverified reviews are. There’d be outrage if Apple or Amazon simply pulled the plug on user-submitted reviews, or wiped the slate clean by nuking existing reviews and starting over with some sort of “verified reviewer” system. But the status quo is a cesspool of scammy reviews that many users believe they can trust. It’s a mess.