When authorities arrested Graham Ivan Clark, who they said was the "mastermind" of the recent Twitter hack that ensnared Kanye West, Bill Gates and others, one detail that stood out was his age: He was only 17. Now authorities have homed in on another person who appears to have played an equal, if not more significant role, in the July 15 attack, New York Times reported Tuesday, citing four people involved in the investigation who declined to be identified because the inquiry was ongoing. They said the person was at least partly responsible for planning the breach and carrying out some of its most sensitive and complicated elements.His age? Just 16, public records show. From the report: On Tuesday, federal agents served the teenager with a search warrant and scoured the Massachusetts home where he lives with his parents, said one of the people involved in the operation. A spokesman for the FBI confirmed a search warrant had been executed at the address. The search warrant and other documents in the case are under seal and federal agents may decide not to charge the youth with a crime. If he is ultimately arrested, the case is likely to be handed over to Massachusetts authorities, who have more leverage than federal prosecutors in charging minors as adults. (The New York Times is not naming the teenager at this point because of his age and because he has not been charged.)

Kelerei writes: Microsoft Flight Simulator players spotted a giant mountain-high obelisk in Australia last month. While Flight Simulator has done a great job at recreating the real world, this unusually huge structure doesn't exist in real life. Players have now discovered that its existence stems from a simple typo. University student Nathan Wright made an edit to OpenStreetMap data for part of his degree work last year, adding more than two hundred stories to a building that's actually just two stories. Wright meant to type 2, but instead he typed 212 in the data section for floors. "I think it's so funny as it was the first time I was using OpenStreetMap," says Wright in an email to The Verge. "I was using it for a university task and had to add data for class. I didn't think I would have to see it again." His university work is now internet famous, especially with the Microsoft Flight Simulator community. The typo made its way into Microsoft's Bing Maps data, which Asobo Studio, the developers behind Microsoft Flight Simulator, uses to map out the world in the game. Flight Simulator uses Azure-powered procedural generation technology, combined with Bing Maps data, to recreate virtual buildings like this 212-story obelisk.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google and Facebook have withdrawn plans to build an undersea cable between the United States and Hong Kong after the Trump administration raised national security concerns about the proposal. On Thursday, the companies submitted a revised plan that bypasses Hong Kong but includes links to Taiwan and the Philippines that were part of the original proposal. One of the original project's partners, Hong Kong company Pacific Light Data Communication, has been dropped.

Federal law requires a license from the Federal Communications Commission to build an undersea cable connecting the United States with a foreign country. When Google and Facebook submitted their application for an undersea cable connecting the US to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines, a committee of federal agencies led by the Justice Department recommended against approving the connection to Hong Kong, citing the "current national security environment." The Trump administration cited "the [People's Republic of China] government's sustained efforts to acquire the sensitive personal data of millions of U.S. persons" as a reason to deny the application. The proposed cable's "high capacity and low latency would encourage U.S. communications traffic crossing the Pacific to detour through Hong Kong before reaching intended destinations in other parts of the Asia Pacific region," the government argued.