Apple Confirms Tattoos Can Affect Apple Watch’s Heart Rate Sensor Readings

Apple has updated its Apple Watch support documentation, confirming that the device may have issues when worn by users who have wrist tattoos. The changes were added following a series of reports from new Apple Watch owners who found that their tattoos seemed to interfere with the smartwatch’s ability to track their pulse or cause other problems. Apple now says that permanent and temporary changes to your skin, including the ink used in tattoos, can impact the heart rate sensor’s performance.

In addition, the document clarifies, the ink, pattern and saturation of the tattoo can block the light from the sensor, making it difficult for Apple Watch wearers to get reliable readings. That is to say, those with darker tattoos that cover more of the skin’s surface may have more issues than those with lighter tattoos that are smaller in size.

The paragraph on tattoos was added to a page detailing how the Apple Watch heart rate sensor works, in a section that explains what sorts of factors could affect the sensor’s performance and a wearer’s ability to get a good reading. The Internet Archive, which keeps historical copies of websites, shows that an earlier version of this same page didn’t include the note about tattoos, ahead of the Apple Watch’s launch in April.

That implies that Apple learned of the issues from user feedback, as Watch owners began to call in to report problems with their device. Some users even posted videos to YouTube demonstrating the problem first-hand, which were picked up by the media.
It’s not all that surprising that a wrist tattoo could impact the effectiveness of the Apple Watch’s light sensor. The sensor allows an Apple Watch owner to wear the device looser on the wrist – “snug but comfortable,” says Apple – and still get a good reading. Explains Apple:

Apple Watch uses green LED lights paired with light‑sensitive photodiodes to detect the amount of blood flowing through your wrist at any given moment. When your heart beats, the blood flow in your wrist — and the green light absorption — is greater. Between beats, it’s less. By flashing its LED lights hundreds of times per second, Apple Watch can calculate the number of times the heart beats each minute — your heart rate.

This type of technology has been known to cause problems in the past. For example, a reddit user several months ago noted that they had a problem getting a good reading using the Fitbit HR heart monitor. (A CNet report from 2014 also found that some of the then-current heart rate monitors on the market could also be thrown off by skin pigmentation.)

Apple Watch’s sensor is actually more advanced than the company has claimed, according to the teardown from iFixit posted in late April. The site said that Apple’s heart rate monitor is “actually a plethysmograph—it looks and acts like a pulse oximeter, but Apple isn’t claiming it can measure your blood oxygen level,” iFixit’s analysis noted. It suggested also that Apple wasn’t advertising the functionality due to FDA regulations.

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Despite having this better sensor, it doesn’t solve the problems associated with inks on the skin blocking readings.

Apple recommends a workaround for those who experience these sorts of issues, saying that you can connect your Apple Watch wirelessly to external heart rate monitors, like Bluetooth chest straps. Of course, that’s not quite as elegant a solution as simply wearing a watch, but at least it will give more serious athletes and other quantified self enthusiasts an alternative means of gathering this data.

Hobnob Lets You Create Personalized Event Invites To Send By Text

There are a number of services today that allow you to create and send digital invitations to birthdays, parties and other events, where the invites themselves are sent out via email, social networks, or even by postal mail if you choose. But a new application called Hobnob, launching now, is designed instead to support invite delivery entirely via SMS and MMS. This means recipients will receive the invites immediately, the company says, and organizers in return will get prompt RSVPs.

As someone who has sent and responded to my fair share of Evites and Facebook Event invites in the past, I get the appeal of this app. In fact, I hacked together just this sort of thing for myself in the past. I saved a screenshot of the paper invite I was sending out for my daughter’s birthday party, which I then texted around to friends and family. It was just easier that way.

Hobnob co-founder and CEO Tina Fitch, previously the CEO of travel commerce and loyalty platform Switchfly, found herself facing a similar situation. She says she couldn’t believe she was still receiving invitations to events via Evite emails filled with ads. Meanwhile, she noticed that Facebook Event users often failed to RSVP.

“I found myself organizing and discussing these types of events via group text, not social media or email,” explains Fitch. But that had its drawbacks, she says. “Group text is fine for chat, but is annoying for things like group events where you get random comments from people whose number you don’t recognize at all hours of the night. And it doesn’t get anyone excited about the occasion,” she adds.

That’s how she came up with the idea for an app that would let you build invites that looked great on the phone, while also supporting the conveniences of group texting without the annoyances. She then asked longtime friends Mark Quezada (co-founder of FastCustomer and CardBux) and Tiffany Quezada, whose background includes event management and fashion, to help her build Hobnob.

The Hobnob app itself is as easy to use as any other invite app. You begin by entering details about your event, including the event name, location, start time and date, and, optionally, the end time and date. You can pick one of several designer templates provided by swiping through the various previews, or you can upload your own photo or design.

There are only a handful of templates, so you may prefer to use your own photos. But more templates will arrive in time – including paid options, which is how the startup plans to generate revenue for its otherwise free service.

As a last step, you select your event recipients by pulling their contact info from your phone’s address book, enter in your own name and phone number, and your invites are sent out automatically.

The best thing about the app is that you don’t have to register for an account to use it; it asks you to confirm your mobile number, but there’s no email sign-up or social networking integration required. And even better: your guests don’t have to download the app in order to read their invite either.

Instead, they simply receive a text message which includes a photo of the invite you designed. The accompanying text explains that the host has invited them to an event, offers a link to the event’s web page, and instructs them to reply “YES” or “NO” to RSVP. (They can also RSVP from the web.)

Event hosts can also manage their RSVPs in the app and chat with their guests directly.

“We believe there is app fatigue, and more and more people want to see value from services like ours without having to always download an app from the start,” says Fitch. “We accomplish this with hybrid messaging, leveraging either SMS or push notifications depending on each user and what is most convenient for him or her.”

The startup has been running a public beta with over 1,000 testers around the U.S., and has now spread the app to nearly every U.S. state. Testers have been using the app for events that range in size from just 2 people to over 340, notes the CEO. And they’ve seen 300 percent higher guest response rates when compared to Facebook Events or Evites, she says.

The bootstrapped startup is a team of four based in Hawaii. Hobnob is currently a free download from iTunes. An Android app is in the works.

Death To C

Ladies and gentlemen, the C programming language. It’s a classic. It is sleek, and spartan, and elegant. (Especially compared to its sequel, that bloated mess C++, which shares all the faults I’m about to describe.) It is blindingly, quicksilver fast, because it’s about as close to the bone of the machine as you can get. It is time-tested and ubiquitous. And it is terrifyingly dangerous.

But don’t take my word for it. Take the word of living legend John Carmack:

Found two pointer-to-out-of-scope-stack bugs today. I like tight native code, but C/C++ still makes me worry a lot.

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) April 12, 2015

or Andy Isaacson, one of the smartest hackers I know, which is saying quite a lot:

Can we stop hand-writing parsing code in C please? #langsec RT @mdowd remotely exploitable Blackphone/SilentText bug http://t.co/jDub3ugicL

— @eqe (Andy Isaacson) (@eqe) January 28, 2015

If you write code in C, you have to be careful not to introduce subtle bugs that can turn into massive security holes — and as anyone who ever wrote software knows, you cannot be perfectly careful all of the time. (This is especially true in C; it’s so easy to write impenetrable, incomprehensible C that it has become a competitive sport.)

In principle, as software evolves and grows more mature, security exploits should grow ever more baroque, in the same way that plane crashes are getting weirder and weirder. We learn from previous crashes, and fix those problems, and “as the obvious fixes are found, we discover less and less likely ways that things can go wrong.”

And this is indeed the case for much of today’s software. Look at a few prominent recent exploit discoveries. A side-channel attack to read L3 caches via Javascript. The mindboggling “Rowhammer” attack, which relies on the fact that

As DRAM manufacturing scales down chip features to smaller physical dimensions, to fit more memory capacity onto a chip, it has become harder to prevent DRAM cells from interacting electrically with each other. As a result, accessing one location in memory can disturb neighbouring locations, causing charge to leak into or out of neighbouring cells. With enough accesses, this can change a cell’s value from 1 to 0 or vice versa.

and. astonishingly, turns that fact of hardware life into a totally viable attack vector.

But this is not the case for software written in C/C++. Buffer overflows and dangling pointers lead to catastrophic security holes, again and again and again, just like yesteryear, just like all the years of yore. We fail to learn. Heartbleed. GHOST. The Android 4.3 KeyStore. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

C was and is magnificent, in its way. But we cannot afford its gargantuan, gaping security blind spots any more. It’s long past time to retire and replace it with another language.

The trouble is, most modern languages don’t even try to replace C. They’re vastly more abstract. They’re easier to read. They provide programming constructs which are enormously powerful if you’re dealing with vast quantities of data, or multiple concurrent threads and processes, or distributed systems. But they’re not good at the thing C does best: getting down to the bare metal and working at mach speed.

…Which is why I’m so interested in Rust. It’s the one new programming language that might, finally, at last, replace C and C++ — and Rust 1.0 finally went into beta last month. To quote Steve Klabnick:

Historically, programming languages have had a tradeoff: you can have a language which is safe, but you give up control, or you can have a language with control, but it is unsafe. C++ falls into that latter category. More modern C++ is significantly more safe than it used to be, but there are fundamental aspects of C++ which make it impossible to ever be truly safe. Rust attempts to give you a language with 100% control, yet be absolutely safe.

So please, low-level programmers of the world, I beseech you (while, to be clear, also respecting you immensely): for your next project, try Rust rather than C/C++. There is no longer any good reason for today’s software to be as insecure as it is. Those old warhorses have served us well, but today they are cavalry in an era of tanks. Let us put them out to pasture and move on.

Nepal quake victims still stranded, PM says toll could be 10,000

(GNN) - People stranded in remote villages and towns across Nepal were still waiting for aid and relief to arrive on Tuesday, four days after a devastating earthquake destroyed buildings and roads and killed more than 4,600 people.

The government has yet to assess the full scale of the damage wrought by Saturday's 7.9 magnitude quake, unable to reach many mountainous areas despite aid supplies and personnel pouring in from around the world.

Prime Minister Sushil Koirala told Reuters the death toll could reach 10,000, as information on damage from far-flung villages and towns has yet to come in. That would surpass the 8,500 who died in a 1934 earthquake, the last disaster on this scale to hit the Himalayan nation.

 "The government is doing all it can for rescue and relief on a war footing," Koirala said. "It is a challenge and a very difficult hour for Nepal."

Nepal told aid agencies it did not need more foreign rescue teams to help search for survivors, because its government and military could cope, the national head of the United Nations Development Programme told Reuters.

Experts said the chance of finding people alive in the ruins was slim more than four days after disaster struck.

"After the first 72 hours the survival rate drops dramatically and we are on day four," said Wojtek Wilk of the Polish Center for International Aid, an NGO which has six medical staff and 81 firefighters in Nepal. "On the fifth day it's next to zero."

In a rare glimmer of hope, a Nepali-French rescue team pulled a 28-year-old man, Rishi Khanal, from a collapsed apartment block in Kathmandu after he had spent around 80 hours trapped in a room with three dead bodies.

In Jharibar, a village in the hilly Gorkha district of Nepal close to the quake's epicentre, Sunthalia was not so lucky.

Her husband away in India and with no help in sight, she dug for hours in the rubble of her collapsed home on Saturday to recover the bodies of two of her children, a 10-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son.

Another son aged four miraculously survived.

HUNDREDS KILLED IN LANDSLIDES

In Barpak, further north, rescue helicopters were unable to find a place to land. On Tuesday, soldiers had started to make their way overland, first by bus, then by foot.

Army helicopters also circled over Laprak, another village in the district best known as the home of Gurkha soldiers.

A local health official estimated that 1,600 of the 1,700 houses there had been razed. Helicopters dropped food packets in the hope that survivors could gather them up.

In Sindhupalchowk, about 3.5 hours by road northeast of Kathmandu, the earthquake was followed by landslides, killing 1,182 people and seriously injuring 376. A local official said he feared many more were trapped and more aid was needed.

"There are hundreds of houses where our people have not been able to reach yet," said Krishna Pokharel, the district administrator. "There is a shortage of fuel, the weather is bad and there is not enough help coming in from Kathmandu."

International aid has begun arriving in Nepal, but disbursement has been slow, partly because aftershocks have sporadically closed the airport.

According to the home (interior) ministry, the confirmed death toll stands at 4,682, with more than 9,240 injured.

The United Nations said 8 million people were affected by the quake and that 1.4 million people were in need of food.

Nepal's most deadly quake in 81 years also triggered a huge avalanche on Mount Everest that killed at least 18 climbers and guides, including four foreigners, the worst single disaster on the world's highest peak.

All the climbers who had been stranded at camps high up on Everest had been flown by helicopters to safety, mountaineers reported on Tuesday.

Up to 250 people were missing after an avalanche hit a village on Tuesday in Rasuwa district, a popular trekking area to the north of Kathmandu, district governor Uddhav Bhattarai said.

FRUIT VENDORS RETURN TO STREETS

A series of aftershocks, severe damage from the quake, creaking infrastructure and a lack of funds have complicated rescue efforts in the poor country of 28 million people sandwiched between India and China.

In Kathmandu, youths and relatives of victims were digging into the ruins of destroyed buildings and landmarks.

"Waiting for help is more torturous than doing this ourselves," said Pradip Subba, searching for the bodies of his brother and sister-in-law in the debris of Kathmandu's historic Dharahara tower.

The 19th century tower collapsed on Saturday as weekend sightseers clambered up its spiral stairs. Scores of people were killed when it crumpled.

Elsewhere in the capital's ancient Durbar Square, groups of young men cleared rubble from around an ancient temple, using pickaxes, shovels and their hands. Several policemen stood by, watching.

Heavy rain late on Tuesday slowed the rescue work.

In the capital, as elsewhere, thousands have been sleeping on pavements, roads and in parks, many under makeshift tents.

Hospitals are full to overflowing, while water, food and power are scarce.

There were some signs of normality returning on Tuesday, with fruit vendors setting up stalls on major roads and public buses back in operation.

Officials acknowledged that they were overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster.

"The big challenge is relief," said Chief Secretary Leela Mani Paudel, Nepal's top bureaucrat. "We are really desperate for more foreign expertise to pull through this crisis."

India and China, which have used aid and investment to court Kathmandu for years, were among the first contributors to the international effort to support Nepal's stretched resources.

(Reuters)(Additional reporting by Gopal Sharma, Ross Adkin, Frank Jack Daniel, Andrew Marshall and Christophe Van Der Perre in Kathmandu, Aman Shah and Clara Ferreira-Marques in Mumbai, Aditya Kalra, Douglas Busvine and Aditi Shah in New Delhi, and Jane Wardell in Sydney; Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Paritosh Bansal; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Paul Tait)