Month: February 2016

Behold: VSS Unity, the spacecraft Virgin Galactic says will open up space to the rest of us. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

It’s been 16 months since SpaceShipTwo crashed into the Mojave Desert and killed the vehicle’s co-pilot Michael Alsbury. On Friday, Virgin Galactic sought to move on from that accident and put the company firmly back on a path toward delivering tourists to the edge of space by unveiling a new version of its spacecraft named VSS Unity.

“I’m really proud of the entire team,” said George Whitesides, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, in an interview with Ars. “It’s a bunch of folks who came to this company to open space up, and they’re not going to be deterred by the accident. They’ve been working really hard for a year and a half to finish this vehicle.”

The new spacecraft is in many ways the same as the original SpaceShipTwo, dubbed Enterprise, Whitesides said. It has the same basic airframe and propulsion systems. The biggest change is to the feather locking system, used to aid in the descent of the spacecraft. During the fatal flight on Oct. 31, 2014, Alsbury prematurely deployed the system while still making a powered ascent. Unity now includes a mechanical pin to prevent the feather lever from moving when the vehicle is flying in an unsafe flight regime.

GOP presidential contender Donald Trump is urging his followers to boycott Apple until it complies with the US government in its ongoing encryption battle. Apple is currently facing a court order requiring the company to assist authorities in unlocking an iPhone used by one of the two killers involved in a San Bernardino mass shooting that killed 14 and injured two dozen others in December 2015.

"First of all, Apple ought to give [authorities] the security to that phone," Trump told the crowd at a South Carolina rally on Friday. "What I think you ought to do is boycott Apple until they give that security number. I just thought of that—boycott Apple.”

Trump was initially discussing how he believes the US needs to bring back jobs from China before he stumbled into his Apple position. The comments come as the debate about encryption reached a fever pitch this week. On Friday, the Justice Department demanded that a federal judge make Apple comply with a Tuesday court order requiring Apple to create a custom firmware in the seized iPhone 5C used by Syed Rizwan Farook. That firmware would remove a possible automatic wipe feature on the phone if a passcode is incorrectly entered 10 times.

An Oregon man has admitted he tricked hundreds of people into divulging their Apple and Gmail passwords in a scheme that allowed him to steal nude images of more than a dozen victims, some of them celebrities.

Andrew Helton, 29, of Portland, entered the plea on Thursday to one felony count of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information, according to documents filed in federal court in Los Angeles. Prosecutors said he gained illegal access to 363 Apple and Gmail accounts, including those belonging to members of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. He then used the access to obtain data stored in the online accounts, including 161 sexually explicit, nude, or partially nude images of 13 people, some who were unidentified celebrities.

According to a plea agreement unsealed Friday, Helton engaged in a fraud campaign from March 2011 to May 2013 in which he sent e-mails that falsely claimed to come from Apple or Google. The phishing e-mails asked victims to verify their accounts by clicking on links that led to what looked like authentic Apple or Google login pages. When targets complied, their passwords were transmitted to Helton, who used them to illegally access account data.

(credit: Tavis Ormandy)

A reasonable expectation of security software is that at worst it should make your system no less secure than would be without the software. Sadly, it often seems that such hardware fails to meet even this low bar.

Comodo Internet Security is a security suite that includes anti-virus, firewalling, and sandboxing to allow applications to be run in a notionally secure unprivileged environment. By default, it also includes a component called GeekBuddy. GeekBuddy is a VNC server, providing full remote access to your system. In May of 2015 it was pointed out that this VNC server was running without a password—yes, really—providing, at the very least, local privilege escalation. Sandboxed applications such as Google Chrome, or even those running in Comodo's own sandbox, could connect to this VNC server and have full access to your system.

With the right (or rather, in this case, wrong) network configuration, the VNC server might even be exposed to remote attackers.

Vishal Mathur

This is what was sent to journalists... is that Wite-Out?

5 more images in gallery

A few days ago, an Indian device called the "Freedom 251" surfaced, so named because it only cost Rs. 251 (About $3.64), making it the "world's cheapest smartphone." If you thought a $4 smartphone seemed a little too good to be true, you may be right. There are now all sorts of questionable issues popping up with this device.

First up, it looks like the company might have done at least a visual switcheroo. When the product site first launched, it looked like this, showing a modern, high-end looking phone with very thin side bezels and three capacitive buttons on the bottom. After news coverage of the phone spread, the site was updated and all the phone images were replaced with a much uglier, much cheaper looking device with thick bezels and a single hardware home button.

Testers in India have gotten their hands on the device, and sure enough, it sports the newer, uglier design. The oddities don't stop there. The company selling the Freedom 251 is called "Ringing Bells" but the hardware sent to testers was actually built by Adcom and carries Adcom branding. On the front of the device is an Adcom logo, which was obscured with...Wite-Out? The the Adcom logo is actually covered up with a white blob right on top of the bezel. This editing can be easily removed to show the logo beneath.

(credit: Richard Masoner @ Flickr)

Individual tax credits and rebates aren't the only policy levers we use to try and increase the adoption of electric cars and other alternative fuel vehicles. The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration both have quite a lot to say about the matter as well, especially through rules that set fleet-wide standards for both fuel efficiency (the Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency, or CAFE standards) and an associated Greenhouse Gas Emission standard. But a new paper from Jeremy Michalek and colleagues suggests that the incentives built into those standards—meant to encourage the uptake of alternative fuel vehicles—might actually increase fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions.

New CAFE standards that get stricter over time were announced by the NHTSA in 2015. CAFE mandates fleet-wide targets for car makers, with a formula that takes into account the footprint of each model. Bigger cars or light trucks are allowed to get lower fuel efficiency than smaller models, and a car maker's total sales are taken into account to calculate the average across their model range.

At the same time, the EPA has another set of standards for the amount of greenhouse gas emissions across a manufacturer's range (this is separate from the EPA fuel efficiency rating that new cars get, which also differs quite a bit from the CAFE numbers). Failing to meet these targets comes with a set of different consequences. OEMs that don't meet their CAFE target have to pay a fine ($5.50 per 0.1mpg per vehicle sold), which several car makers have historically chosen to accept as cheaper than the alternative. The EPA's emissions standards aren't quite as lenient, however; it's within the agency's power to revoke one's license to sell vehicles inside the US.

LARP archers accused of patent infringement. (credit: Larping.org)

When Jordan Gwyther started Larping.org, a website that promotes his favorite hobby, he didn't expect it would lead to him being sued for patent infringement over foam arrows. And when he spoke out about the lawsuit, neither he nor his attorney saw what was coming next: the patent-owner filed papers in court last week asking for a temporary restraining order (TRO) that would keep Gwyther quiet.

Live-action role-playing (aka LARPing) is an increasingly popular pastime in which ordinary folks transform into medieval weekend warriors, donning armor and using foam weapons to duke it out in local fields and parks.

Gwyther founded Larping.org five years ago as a community hub where LARPers could talk to each other and find local events. Over time, he also started selling certain items useful to LARPers, like leather and metal armor, latex weapons, and foam arrows. "It's a hobby that grew into a side business," Gwyther told Ars in a phone interview this morning.

(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

On Friday, prosecutors asked a federal court in Riverside, California to force Apple to comply with a court order issued earlier this week to assist the FBI’s investigation of the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack.

Apple has been ordered specifically to create a custom firmware in the seized iPhone 5C that was used by Syed Rizwan Farook, which would remove a possible automatic wipe feature on the phone if a passcode is incorrectly entered 10 times. If Apple does comply, it would allow the government to brute force access to the phone.

The 35-page motion to compel is a clear repudiation of Apple’s public position, which has been to wholly resist the court order. Earlier this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the court order an “overreach by the US government.”