Month: March 2016

CJ Wilson Racing/CPSDIABLO on Xbox Live

The CJ Wilson Cayman GT4: the team calls it Darth Cayman. It's seen here exiting VIR's rather tricky "climbing esses," a series of corners where you really need to commit, otherwise disaster (and a rather firm wall) awaits.

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On Tuesday, we reported that Microsoft is porting Forza to Windows with Forza Motorsport 6 Apex. That wasn't the only big Forza news this week, though. Tuesday also saw the release of the long-awaited Porsche expansion pack. A $19.99/£15.99 add-on to the Xbox One game, the Porsche pack adds 21 new cars and a new track—Virginia International Raceway—to Forza 6. Lamborghini also got in on the action with the announcement that its Centenario hypercar will be the cover star of the next installment of the franchise. And to celebrate that, there's a new Lamborghini Super Trofeo eSports series underway.

The selection of new Porsches is pretty good, although it's not as rich as the 2012 addition to Forza Motorsport 4—that one featured 30 models. Sadly, we've been told not to expect any further Porsches appearing as DLC in the coming months, so bad luck if you were holding out hope for the 993 GT2 or 917.

The return of Porsche to the Forza franchise has been much-awaited by fans, although if Internet comments are anything to go by, many of them are of the opinion that the marque should have been included from the get-go. That wasn't possible, as Electronic Arts still has an exclusive license with the German car maker. We think that exclusive license expires at some point this year, although an enquiry with Porsche regarding the exact date hasn't been answered at the time of writing.

"Destroy all carbon-based life forms" would be a very bad algorithm for autonomous killbots. (credit: US Army)

At the National Defense Industrial Association's Ground Robotics Capabilities conference on Thursday, Department of Defense officials discussed the possibility of the US military fielding autonomous armed robots to fight alongside troops or act on their own, particularly in "highly competitive, highly contested space" behind enemy lines. "We have to think about what autonomous kinetic options really look like," said Melissa L. Flagg, a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the DOD's Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Directorate.

That thinking is still in its early stages, Flagg said. But military officials are looking hard at the possibility of developing robotic systems that are capable of acting on their own if remote control is cut off and decisions must be made on when to deploy a weapon—whether it's an armed drone dropping a bomb or launching a missile or a ground robot firing weapons. "These are hard questions, and a lot of people outside of us tech guys are thinking about it, talking about it, engaging in what we can and can't do," she said. "That's important. We need to understand and know that it doesn't necessarily need to happen, but we also have to put the options on the table because we are the worst-case scenario guys."

So far, the military has largely steered clear of deploying remotely operated ground weapons of any kind, though it has heavily invested in the development of armed "unmanned ground vehicles." The military did deploy remote-controlled machine gun turrets in Afghanistan as stationary defenses. But Marine Colonel Henry Lutz, the DOD Joint Staff's robotics and autonomous systems team officer in charge, said that soldiers were reluctant to use them because of the safety risks—both to fellow soldiers and civilians. "Understanding that in a counter-insurgency environment you can do more harm than good, there was not a level of trust," Lutz said.

Two sudden leaps in the number of advertised "hidden services" on Tor have led to rampant speculation about the cause of them. (credit: The Tor Project)

In recent weeks, the number of "hidden services"—usually Web servers and other Internet services accessible by a ".onion" address on the Tor anonymizing network—has risen dramatically. After experiencing an earlier spike in February, the number of hidden services tracked by Tor spiked to 114,000 onion addresses on March 1. They then dropped just as quickly, falling to just below 70,000 hidden services seen by Tor on Thursday—still twice the number that Tor had held steady at for most of 2015.

"We don't know what's causing this," said Kate Krauss, the director of communications and public policy for the Tor Project. "But it's not difficult for even one person—a researcher, for instance—to create a lot of new onion addresses—which is not the same as actual websites or services. In fact, we want the process of creating onion addresses to be as easy as possible to encourage the creation of more onion services. These spikes are typically temporary—and as you see from the chart, this one is already going away."

Still, there has never been this sort of wild gyration in the number of addresses in recent times—or at least as far back as the Tor Project has kept metric data. So what caused the sudden near-tripling of the size of Tor's hidden Web and its rapid contraction? Based on a deeper look at Tor's metrics and discussions with both Tor developers and security experts, the huge spike in the "size" of the hidden Web within Tor was likely caused by a perfect storm of coincidences: major Internet censorship events in at least two countries, the relatively rapid adoption of a new messaging tool, a malware explosion, and ongoing attempts to undermine the privacy of the network.

In the late 1990s, Microsoft Office macros were a favorite vehicle for surreptitiously installing malware on the computers of unsuspecting targets. Microsoft eventually disabled the automated scripts by default, a setting that forced attackers to look for new infection methods. Remotely exploiting security bugs in Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, and other widely used software soon came into favor.

Over the past two years, Office Macros have made a dramatic comeback that has reached almost a fevered pitch in the past few months. Booby-trapped Excel macros, for instance, were one of the means by which Ukrainian power authorities were infected in the weeks or months leading up to December's hacker-caused outage that affected 225,000 people. "Locky," a particularly aggressive strain of crypto ransomware that appeared out of nowhere two weeks ago, also relies on Word macros. The return of the macro-delivered malware seemed to begin in late 2014 with the advent of a then-new banking trojan called Dridex.

The return of the macro may have been a reaction to security improvements that Adobe, Microsoft, and Oracle have made to their software. Not only were the companies patching dangerous bugs more quickly, but in many cases, they fortified their code with defenses that caused exploits to simply crash the application rather than force it to execute malicious code. Streamlined update mechanisms and greater end user awareness about the importance of installing security patches right away may also have made code-execution exploits to fall out of favor.

(credit: Kirby Ferguson)

In 2014, no company filed more patent lawsuits than eDekka LLC, a Texas-based company with just one asset—US Patent No. 6,266,674. Fully 168 patent lawsuits came to a sudden halt in October, when US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap stopped the litigation campaign in its tracks.

eDekka's patent, which had been used to sue a wide array of online retailers, described nothing more than "the abstract idea of storing and labeling information," Gilstrap found. Those were "routine tasks that could be performed by a human" and didn't meet the standard for getting a patent. Gilstrap ruled the patent invalid.

Lawyers for eDekka appealed Gilstrap's decision, and the shell company's appeal brief was initially due in December. It asked for and received an extension until February 26. Instead of filing a brief blasting the lower-court results, though, eDekka's lawyers simply filed a short document asking to withdraw its appeal. Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted the motion.

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