Technology

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is still reviewing the 12 applications from companies to operate electric scooters in the city. In early June, companies like Uber, Lime, Bird, Lyft and others applied for permits to operate electric scooter-share services in San Francisco.San Franciscopermit process came as a result of Bird, Lime andSpindeploying their electric scooters without permission in the city in March. As part of a new city law, which went into effect June 4, scooter companies are not able to operate their services in San Francisco without a permit.

The SFMTA initially said it expected to make a decision about which five, if any, companies would receive permits by the end of June. Well, itnow July and still no decision. The SFMTA expects to finalize its recommendations and documentation &in the coming weeks,& the SFMTA wrote in a blog post today. Once thatdone, the agency says it will work with companies to finalize and clarify the terms and conditions of the permit. The goal, according to the blog post, is to issue permits sometime in August.

As part of the 24-month pilot program, electric scooter companies selected to operate in the city will need to provide user education and insurance, share its detailed trip data with the city, have a privacy policy that protects user data, offer a low-income plan and operate in a to-be-approved service area. The city will allow no more than 2,500 electric scooters on the streets at any one time.

Despite the standstill in San Francisco, scooter companies are moving full force ahead, snatching up venture funding and partnering with larger players. Last week, Lime raised a $335 million round led by GV with participation from Uber. Late last month, Spin announced itclosing a $125 million security token offering. That came shortly after electric scooter startupBird raised a $300 millionround led by Sequoia Capital.

For a breakdown of the ongoing scooter wars, be sure to read TCoverview.

Walt Disney Animation Studio is set to debut its first VR short film, Cycles, this August in Vancouver,the Association for Computing Machineryannounced today. The plan is for it to be a headliner at the ACMcomputer graphics conference (SIGGRAPH), joining other forms of VR, AR and MR entertainment in the conferencedesignated Immersive Pavilion.

This film is a first for both Disney and its director,Jeff Gipson, who joined the animation team in 2013 to work as a lighting artist on films likeFrozen, Zootopiaand Moana. The objective of this film, Gipson said in the statement released by ACM, is to inspire a deep emotional connection with the story.

&We hope more and more people begin to see the emotional weight of VR films, and with Cycles in particular, we hope they will feel the emotions we aimed to convey with our story,& said Gipson.

Cycles centers around the meaning of creating a home and focuses on the ups and downs of a family as they create a life in theirs.

&Every house has a story unique to the people, the characters who live there,& says Gipson. &We wanted to create a story in this single place and be able to have the viewer witness life happening around them.&

While VR is a perfect candidate for this kind of emotionally driven story, the process of bringing an idea like this to life is no simple task. Apart from the technical feats involved (the short took about four months with 50 collaborators), even the notion of storyboarding is new when designing films like these. When working onCycles, the team used both Quill VR animations and motion capture to bring their idea into a 3D space.

While this film is Disneyfirst foray into VR films, it is terrain that its subsidiary Pixar Animation Studios explored this past winter in a VR trailer for the award-winning filmCoco. And, according to a statement Pixar studio executives gaveThe Washington Post in December, itan area the studio would like to explore further through possible VR spin-offs.

Films likeCycles are far from mainstream, but as influential companies like Disney and Pixar continue to experiment in this space, the distant future of widespread VR cinema may be finally approaching.

You would think that Amazon, Reddit, Wikipedia and other highly popular websites would by now tell you that &password1& or &hunter2& is a terrible password — just terrible. But they don&t. A research project that has kept tabs on the top sites and their password habits for the last 11 years shows that most provide only rudimentary password restrictions and do little to help users.

Steven Furnell, of the University of Plymouth, first did a survey of websites& password practices in 2007, repeating the process in 2011 and 2014 — and then once more this week. His conclusions

It is somewhat disappointing to find that the overall story in 2018 remains largely similar to that of 2007. In the intervening years, much has been written about the failings of passwords and the ways in which we use them, yet little is done to encourage or oblige us to follow the right path.

Although the university writeup notes that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo had the best password practices and Amazon, Reddit and Wikipedia had the worst, it diplomatically declined to go into specifics. Fortunately, I acquired the paper for myself and am prepared to name and shame.

The top 10 unique sites in English(as measured by Alexa; the lineup has changed somewhat over the years) were evaluated: Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Microsoft Live and Netflix.

The biggest failure is inarguably Amazon, which combines truly inadequate password controls with an incredibly valuable and personal service. Wikipedia and Reddit had fewer restrictions, but neither protects such important data; an Amazon account being accessed by malicious actors is a far greater danger.

Amazon accepted practically every password Furnell threw at it, including repeats of the username, the userown name and, of course, the all-time classic, &password.& (Netflix and Reddit also took &password,& though Wikipedia didn&t. Wikipedia, on the other hand, accepted single-character passwords like &b.&)

Even sites that do have restrictions, like requiring multiple character types or rejecting commonly used passwords, seldom explain themselves. Presented with no feedback at the start, users creating an account may enter a password, only to be told it must be longer… and then, again, that it can&t have a certain word (like the userlast name)… and then, again, that it must include special characters. And some sites have different requirements when you sign up than when you set a new one!

Why not lay it all out at the start And for that matter, why not explain the reasoning behind it It&d be trivial to make a little info box saying &We require X because Y.& But hardly any of the top sites do.

The one bit of light in this dreary report is that two-factor authentication — arguably more important than a good password — is in fact making strides, and some of the worst offenders in password policy (looking at you, Amazon) allow it. Now they just have to move it off of SMS and onto a secure authenticator app.

The final word is pretty the same as itbeen for the last decade:

The basic argument here & as with the earlier versions of the study and the others referenced & is for provision of user-facing security to be matched with accompanying support. Passwords are a good example because we know that many people are poor at using them. And yet the lesson continues to go unheeded and we continue to criticise the method and blame the users instead.

Two-factor is a start, but:

Users arguably require more encouragement & or indeed obligation & to use them. Otherwise, like passwords themselves, they will offer the potential for protection, while falling short of doing so in practice.

In other words, quit talking about how bad passwords are and do something about it!