Month: November 2015

Greetings, Arsians! Thanks to our partners at TechBargains, we have a ton of Cyber Monday deals to share. Many retailers have upped the ante from Black Friday, including Amazon which now offers 50 percent off a one-year subscription to Playstation Plus when you purchase the Playstation 4 Uncharted: Nathan Drake bundle. That gaming bundle has also received a $50 price cut, bringing it down to $299. Anyone with a Dell credit should take a look at the company's website, as they are offering the same Playstation bundle for $299 as well.

As usual, we have a bunch of other deals on laptops, TVs, accessories, and more below.

Featured Deals

In response to a demand for backdoor access to its enterprise messaging products, BlackBerry is completely pulling out of the Pakistan market. The announcement comes as a ban on providing BlackBerry Enterprise Services over mobile networks in Pakistan was due to take effect today.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority's ban on BlackBerry Enterprise Services (BES) was issued this summer, and it was planned to become effective on November 30, as Ars reported in July. "Security reasons" were cited as the cause of the ban. But just before the restriction was announced, Privacy International issued a report that warned of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency's efforts to gain network surveillance capabilities within the country that rival those of the National Security Agency.

While the government has pushed back the effective date of that order to December 30, BlackBerry COO Marty Beard announced today that the company would exit the Pakistani market completely rather than meet government demands for unfettered access to the service's message traffic.

On November 25, General John F. Campbell, the commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, announced the findings of an initial investigation into the air strike by an Air Force AC-130 gunship that hit a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) trauma center in Kunduz, Afghanistan on October 3. The strike—in which the AC-130 attacked using its onboard cannon, killing 30 patients and members of the MSF hospital staff and injuring another 34—lasted nearly a half-hour.

Campbell called the strike "a tragic, but avoidable accident caused primarily by human error." But among the secondary factors cited in the report, he noted, there were several contributing technical failures, including a networking failure that could have provided information that would have prevented the mistaken targeting of the hospital. Furthermore, information systems available to the command responsible for the aircraft failed to alert those on duty in the operations center that the target selected by the aircraft was on a no-strike list.

Spooky action at a distance

The aircraft responsible for the errant attack on the hospital was an AC-130U "Spooky" gunship, a 20-year-old aircraft that carries a five-barreled 25 millimeter Gatling gun, a 40mm Bofors cannon, and a 105mm howitzer. The airplane is a veritable flying artillery battery that "orbits" its targets while firing upon them with high-explosive rounds. (The Air Force has also deployed the AC-130W "Stinger," a modified version of the special operations transport the MC-130W "Dragon Spear," to Afghanistan. These aircraft carry a 30mm automatic cannon and launch tubes for Griffin and Hellfire missiles and laser-guided glide bombs.)

An active hacking campaign is forcing Reader's Digest and many other websites to host malicious code that can surreptitiously infect visitors with malware and linger for days or weeks before being cleaned up.

Reader's Digest has been infected since last week with code originating with Angler, an off-the-shelf hack-by-numbers exploit kit that saves professional criminals the hassle of developing their own attack scripts, researchers from antivirus provider Malwarebytes told Ars. People who visit the site with outdated versions of Adobe Flash, Internet Explorer, and other browsing software are silently infected with malware that gains control over their computers. Malwarebytes researchers said they sent Reader's Digest operators e-mails and social media alerts last week warning the site was infected but never got a response. The researchers estimate that thousands of other sites have been similarly attacked in recent weeks and that the number continues to grow.

"This campaign is still ongoing and we see dozens of new websites every day being leveraged to distribute malware via the Angler exploit kit," Malwarebytes Senior Security Researcher Jérôme Segura wrote in an e-mail. "This attack may have been going on for some time but we noticed a dramatic increase in infections via WordPress sites in the past couple of weeks."

The National Security Letter (NSL) is a potent surveillance tool that allows the government to acquire a wide swath of private information—all without a warrant. Federal investigators issue tens of thousands of them each year to banks, ISPs, car dealers, insurance companies, doctors, and you name it. The letters don't need a judge's signature and come with a gag to the recipient, forbidding the disclosure of the NSL to the public or the target.

For the first time, as part of a First Amendment lawsuit, a federal judge ordered the release of what the FBI was seeking from a small ISP as part of an NSL. Among other things, the FBI was demanding a target's complete Web browsing history, IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded with, and records of all online purchases, according to a court document unveiled Monday. All that's required is an agent's signature denoting that the information is relevant to an investigation.

"The FBI has interpreted its NSL authority to encompass the websites we read, the Web searches we conduct, the people we contact, and the places we go. This kind of data reveals the most intimate details of our lives, including our political activities, religious affiliations, private relationships, and even our private thoughts and beliefs," said Nicholas Merrill, who was president of Calyx Internet Access in New York when he received the NSL targeting one of his customers in 2004.

BARRE, Vermont—It started with Mars. In 1993, NASA gave a Small Business Innovation Research grant to Vermont-based Northern Power Systems (NPS) to build a very southern wind turbine—as in, a turbine that could reliably work at the South Pole.

NASA was interested in a wind turbine that could potentially provide power for human exploration of Mars, and the National Science Foundation was interested in some electricity at its South Pole station that didn’t require flying in fuel. NPS set about tackling both challenges in one fell swoop, designing a low-maintenance turbine using components that could survive the deathly Antarctic (or Martian) cold. A few years later, a 3 kilowatt turbine was spinning away at the South Pole.

Video: Ars visits Northern Power Systems to get our wind turbine learn on. Shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

AMD announced its new Crimson drivers, replacing the Catalyst name and software, with great fanfare earlier this month. The first Crimson drivers are now out, and they appear to have a serious problem. There are widespread reports of cards overheating and perhaps even failing permanently.

It appears that the new driver is setting the video card fans to 20 percent and then leaving them there. Normally, the fan speed should increase as the GPU temperature goes up, but that is not happening with Crimson. Even during games and intensive workloads, the fans are sticking at 20 percent, allowing GPU temperatures to climb to more than 90° C. These high temperatures are causing poor performance due to thermal throttling, graphical glitches and crashes, and some users are reporting permanent hardware damage. Although the GPU itself throttles when it overheats, there's speculation that other components on the cards, such as the VRMs, can still be damaged.

AMD has acknowledged the fan speed issue and says that a hot fix will be published today. This is unlikely to be any great comfort to those whose cards have bitten the dust, and it makes for an inauspicious debut for AMD's new driver. This is, however, not a problem unique to AMD; in 2010, Nvidia published a driver update that had a similar fan controller issue that led to cards overheating and in some cases breaking entirely. Another Nvidia release in 2013 also yielded complaints of overheating and video card destruction.

It's Cyber Monday, which means there are a ton of deals out there if you're willing to hunt around. If you know someone who needs to upgrade his or her smartphone, one of our favorites, the Nexus 5X, is on sale at the Google Store for $80 off. That makes it a nice, even $299.

Thanks to stock Android, a fantastic camera, a great price, and quick updates directly from Google, the new Nexus devices are the best Android phones you can buy. They're also the most secure, due to Google's monthly security update program. The device is compatible with Google's Project Fi Internet service, which may or may not be cheaper than your usual cell service, depending on your usage pattern. $80 off makes the already great price irresistible.

The Google Store is also shipping any two Chromecasts for $50, which works out to a $20 savings. You can mix and match the audio and video Chromecasts in whatever combination you want.