“The Dharma Planet Survey, in a new study led by University of Florida (UF) astronomer Jian Ge and team including Tennessee State University (TSU) astronomers Matthew Muterspaugh and Gregory Henry, has shown that science fiction may be a little less so; the Dharma project has discovered what may be Star Trek’s famed planet Vulcan.” Or something close to it. Concept image via UF.

A recent Newegg breach lasted a whole month, and hackers stole customer credit card information.

Hackers injected 15 lines of card skimming code on the online retailer’s payments page which remained for more than a month between August 14 and September 18, Yonathan Klijnsma, a threat researcher at RiskIQ, told TechCrunch. The code siphoned off credit card data from unsuspecting customers to a server controlled by the hackers with a similar domain name — likely to avoid detection. The server even used an HTTPS certificate to blend in.

For the past couple of years I’ve used a service called Privacy.com. It connects to my bank account and I can create near-unlimited virtual cards to use with various places. And no this isn’t an ad, I just think it’s a great service. It’s basically a password manager for your money.

Turn off notifications. Just do it. They create unnecessary stress and some apps use notifications to whine that you’re not using it 24/7. Especially Facebook.

As our attention is increasingly fragmented and split among dozens of apps, the apps have compensated by getting more demanding of your time. Notifications are no longer used to notify you of anything—they’re used by apps to scream over each other in hopes that you’ll click them.

Our phones don’t control us. In fact it’s the other way around.

Apple updated its iTunes Store terms and privacy disclosures. Included is how the company computes a device trust score to prevent fraud.

To help identify and prevent fraud, information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive, will be used to compute a device trust score when you attempt a purchase. The submissions are designed so Apple cannot learn the real values on your device. The scores are stored for a fixed time on our servers.

They aren’t full records, rather “abstracted.” It’s not like Apple is going to abuse this information, but at first glance it does seem a bit unusual. Especially for devices like Apple TVs that don’t have email or phone capabilities.

Just in case you missed it in iOS 12 Release Mania, Wired has a great piece on Apple’s Infinite Loop campus. That’s the first Apple campus, the one before Steve Jobs’s and Jony Ives’s stunning Apple Park. It’s a great piece stitched together from Apple employees who worked at Infinite Loop over the decades. It’s long, but I think it’s a very good read. From the introduction:

For more than a year I’ve been interviewing Apple employees, past and present, about their recollections of Infinite Loop. In their own words, edited for clarity and concision, here is the story of a plot of land in Cupertino, California, that brought us the Mac revival, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, and the Steve Jobs legacy.

Wired has another good article today, written by Edward Snowden. He writes how government surveillance isn’t new.

Born to a mother who was a member of the Black Panther Party and raised in Brooklyn in an environment of political ferment and police scrutiny, Malkia was fighting against the surveillance of activists and people of color before anyone knew my name.

Us white people might not be so used to surveillance, but Mr. Snowden reminds us how African Americans and Muslim Americans have long been targeted by the government.