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Sabine Hossenfelder, research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, writes: What we have here in the foundation of physics is a plain failure of the scientific method. All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There's math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn't mean this math describes reality. Physicists need new methods. Better methods. Methods that are appropriate to the present century. And please spare me the complaints that I supposedly do not have anything better to suggest, because that is a false accusation. I have said many times that looking at the history of physics teaches us that resolving inconsistencies has been a reliable path to breakthroughs, so that's what we should focus on. I may be on the wrong track with this, of course. Why don't physicists have a hard look at their history and learn from their failure? Because the existing scientific system does not encourage learning. Physicists today can happily make career by writing papers about things no one has ever observed, and never will observe. This continues to go on because there is nothing and no one that can stop it. You may want to put this down as a minor worry because -- $40 billion dollar collider aside -- who really cares about the foundations of physics? Maybe all these string theorists have been wasting tax-money for decades, alright, but in the large scheme of things it's not all that much money. I grant you that much. Theorists are not expensive. But even if you don't care what's up with strings and multiverses, you should worry about what is happening here. The foundations of physics are the canary in the coal mine. It's an old discipline and the first to run into this problem. But the same problem will sooner or later surface in other disciplines if experiments become increasingly expensive and recruit large fractions of the scientific community. Indeed, we see this beginning to happen in medicine and in ecology, too.

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Microsoft on Tuesday patched an extraordinarily serious security vulnerability in a core cryptographic component present in all versions of Windows. The vulnerability was spotted and reported by the NSA. CNBC reports: The flaw affected encryption of digital signatures used to authenticate content, including software or files. If exploited, the flaw could allow criminals to send malicious content with fake signatures that make it appear safe. The finding was reported earlier by The Washington Post. It is unclear how long the NSA knew about the flaw before reporting it to Microsoft. The cooperation, however, is a departure from past interactions between the NSA and major software developers such as Microsoft. In the past, the top security agency has kept some major vulnerabilities secret in order to use them as part of the U.S. tech arsenal. In a statement, Microsoft declined to confirm or offer further details. "We follow the principles of coordinated vulnerability disclosure as the industry best practice to protect our customers from reported security vulnerabilities. To prevent unnecessary risk to customers, security researchers and vendors do not discuss the details of reported vulnerabilities before an update is available." Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft said in a statement Tuesday: "Customers who have already applied the update, or have automatic updates enabled, are already protected. As always we encourage customers to install all security updates as soon as possible." Microsoft told CNBC that it had not seen any exploitation of the flaw "in the wild," which means outside a lab testing environment.

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Open-source intelligence proved vital in the investigation into Ukraine Airlines flight PS752. Then Iranian officials had to admit the truth. From a report: [...] In the days after the Ukraine Airlines plane crashed into the ground outside Tehran, Bellingcat and The New York Times have blown a hole in the supposition that the downing of the aircraft was an engine failure. The pressure -- and the weight of public evidence -- compelled Iranian officials to admit overnight on January 10 that the country had shot down the plane "in error." So how do they do it? "You can think of OSINT as a puzzle. To get the complete picture, you need to find the missing pieces and put everything together," says Lorand Bodo, an OSINT analyst at Tech versus Terrorism, a campaign group. The team at Bellingcat and other open-source investigators pore over publicly available material. Thanks to our propensity to reach for our cameraphones at the sight of any newsworthy incident, video and photos are often available, posted to social media in the immediate aftermath of events. "Open source investigations essentially involve the collection, preservation, verification, and analysis of evidence that is available in the public domain to build a picture of what happened," says Yvonne McDermott Rees, a lecturer at Swansea University. Some of the clips in this incident surfaced on Telegram, the encrypted messaging app popular in the Middle East, while others were sent directly to Bellingcat. "Because Bellingcat is known for our open source work on MH17, people immediately thought of us. People started sending us links they'd found," says Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat. "It was involuntary crowdsourcing." OSINT investigators then utilise metadata, including EXIF data -- which is automatically inserted into videos and photos, showing everything from the type of camera used to take the images to the precise latitude and longitude of where the taker was standing -- to validify that the footage is legitimate. They'll also try and identify who took the footage, and whether it's practical for them to have been where they claim to have been at the time. However, for this instance, they couldn't use EXIF data. "People would share photos and videos on Telegram which strip the metadata, and then someone else would find that and share it on Twitter," says Higgins. "We were really getting a second-hand or third-hand version of these images. All we have to go on is what's visible in the photograph." So instead they moved onto the next step.

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The cutest video ever. I love you are you stupid man?

Amazon is telling sellers they can begin using FedEx's ground delivery after the company temporarily halted access to the service during the holiday shopping season. From a report: The company will resume FedEx's Ground and Home services on Tuesday at 5 p.m. ET, according to an email Amazon sent Tuesday to merchants that was viewed by CNBC. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that the company is resuming ground-delivery service on Tuesday. The spokesperson said FedEx Ground and Home services have been consistently meeting Amazon's on-time delivery requirements, so it reinstated the shipping option for Prime orders.

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Annual global PC shipments rose for the first time in eight years, according to data released by industry tracking firms late Monday. New submitter mimil writes: International Data Group said late Monday that global PC shipments rose 2.7% year-over-year to 266.7 million units, the first annual gain since 2011, when PC shipments rose 1.7%. "This past year was a wild one in the PC world, which resulted in impressive market growth that ultimately ended seven consecutive years of market contraction," said Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. "The market will still have its challenges ahead, but this year was a clear sign that PC demand is still there despite the continued insurgence of emerging form factors and the demand for mobile computing," Reith said. Over at Gartner, data showed that PC shipments grew 0.6% for the year to 261.2 million units. Gartner does not include Chromebooks that run on Google operating system or Apple iPads.

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Google has announced plans to limit the ability of other companies to track people across the internet and collect information about them, a significant change that has widespread ramifications for online privacy as well as the digital economy. From a report: The company said Tuesday that it plans to phase out the use of digital tools known as tracking cookies, which other companies use to identify people online and learn more about them. The move is meant to offer users greater control over their digital footprints and enhance user privacy, according to Google. But the move could also provide Google with even greater control over the online advertising market, which the company already dominates. Google said the change will come to its Chrome web browser and be rolled out over two years. Google did not announce any changes to its own data collection methods. Google also said that a previously announced change to make third-party cookies more secure and precise in their abilities will be rolled out in February. Justin Schuh, director of engineering for trust and safety for Google's Chrome, said the search giant needs time to enact changes because it is working with advertisers and publishers to address the need for cookies to remember sign-ins, embed third-party services such as weather widgets and deliver targeted advertising. But he did not downplay the significance of Google's announcement. "We want to change the way the web works," he said in an interview.

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Why do customers buy products seemingly irrelevant to their web and voice assistant searches? That's a good question -- and one a team of Amazon researchers sought to answer in a study scheduled to be presented at the upcoming ACM Web Search and Data Mining conference in February. From a report: In it, they say that their analyses -- which looked at purchases and "engagements," the latter defined as interactions like sending search results to cell phones and adding products to shopping carts -- suggests customers are partial to products that are broadly popular or cheaper than products relevant to a given search query. Additionally, they say people are much more likely to buy or engage with irrelevant products in a few categories -- such as toys and digital products -- than in categories like beauty products and groceries. "Product search algorithms, like the ones that help customers place orders through [our Alexa assistant], aim at returning the products that are most relevant to users' queries, where relevance is usually interpreted as 'anything that satisfies the users' need,' wrote Laine Lewin-Eytan, senior manager of applied research in the Alexa Shopping group, in a blog post. "A common way to estimate customers' satisfaction is to rely on the judgment of human annotators. (We annotate a very small fraction of 1% of interactions.)"

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Google has announced plans today to phase out the usage of user-agent strings in its web browser Chrome. From a report: UA strings have been developed part of the Netscape browser in the 90s, and have been in use ever since. For decades, websites have used UA strings to fine-tune features based on a visitor's technical specifications. But now, Google says that this once-useful mechanism has become a constant source of problems, on different fronts. For starters, UA strings have been used by online advertisers as a way to track and fingerprint website visitors. "On top of those privacy issues, User-Agent sniffing is an abundant source of compatibility issues, in particular for minority browsers, resulting in browsers lying about themselves (generally or to specific sites) , and sites (including Google properties) being broken in some browsers for no good reason," said Yoav Weiss, a Google engineer working on the Chrome browser. To address these issues, Google said it plans to phase out the importance of UA strings in Chrome by freezing the standard as a whole. Google's plan is to stop updating Chrome's UA component with new strings (the UA string text that Chrome shares with websites). The long-term plan is to unify all Chrome UA strings into generic values that don't reveal too much information about a user. This means that new Chrome browser releases on new platforms such as new smartphone models or new OS releases will use a generic UA string, rather than one that's customised for that specific platform.

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On Monday, Attorney General William Barr called on Apple to unlock the alleged phone of the Pensacola shooter -- a man who murdered three people and injured eight others on a Naval base in Florida in December. Apple has responded by essentially saying: "no." From a report: "We reject the characterization that Apple has not provided substantive assistance in the Pensacola investigation," the company said. "It was not until January 8th that we received a subpoena for information related to the second iPhone, which we responded to within hours," Apple added, countering Barr's characterization of the company being slow in its approach to the FBI's needs. However, it ends the statement in no uncertain terms: "We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys." Despite pressure from the government, Apple has long held that giving anyone the keys to users' data or a backdoor to their phones -- even in cases where terrorism or violence was involved -- would compromise every user. The company is clearly standing by those principles.

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There are 649 references today on Google for voicemailcast.

My voicemailcast response to Doc's last. Doc, stay with the Voice Memo app on your iPhone. It's like using the iPhone as your default camera. It fits in your pocket. It's probably there when you have an idea. So many other things. Including fat tweets. A pitch for Fargo the TV show. Doug Engelbart and the tech he carried with him. Shedding projects. David Bunnell's story. My grandmother. Creating a groove.