Month: April 2016

(credit: Down Detector)

Verizon FiOS and DSL networks in California, Florida, and Texas were transferred to Frontier Communications today, completing a $10.54 billion sale announced last year. Although Frontier promised it would be "ready to go day one," there were some problems that left business and residential customers temporarily without service.

@FrontierCorp still no internet for me which is vital to my business. After being on hold for an hour I was disconnected. I'm not delighted

— McStuffins M.D. (@GoCartMozart35) April 1, 2016

There was a "technical issue" involving the integration of systems early in the morning, Frontier spokesperson Brigid Smith told Ars. She did not provide specifics on the cause of the problem or the number of customers affected but said it primarily disrupted service to enterprise and carrier customers in the three states. However, residents have been reporting problems as well through Twitter and the Down Detector website.

The technical problem was resolved at 9:30am ET, Smith said, but customer reports indicate that some have remained without Internet access into the early afternoon. In Florida, an unrelated fiber cut in Tampa caused further outages, but the problems in Texas and California were apparently due only to the system integration mishap.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

The teenager who grabbed headlines earlier this week for hacking a fake game listing on to Valve's Steam store says there are "definitely" more vulnerabilities to be found in the popular game distribution service. But he won't be the one to find them, thanks to what he sees as Valve "giv[ing] so little of a shit about people's [security] findings."

Ruby Nealon, a 16-year-old university student from England, says that probing various corporate servers for vulnerabilities has been a hobby of his since the age of 11. His efforts came to the attention of Valve (and the wider world) after an HTML-based hack let him post a game called "Watch paint dry" on Steam without Valve's approval over the weekend.

Once that exploit was fixed and publicized, Nealon quickly discovered a second Steam exploit, which Steam has since fixed. This one took advantage of a cross-site scripting hole to hijack a Steam admin's authentication cookie through Valve's own administrative Steam Depot page. Before it was reported and patched, this exploit could have given attackers unprecedented control of Steam's backend, basically letting them pretend to be a Valve administrator.

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Android for Work is Android's built-in dual-persona system for enterprises and small businesses. For Google Apps subscribers, the feature allows users to access separate apps and data for work and personal usage. This allows users to have a "Work Gmail" app and "Personal Gmail" app, for instance.

The biggest negative we found in our review of Android for Work was the ridiculously complicated setup process. It involved ticking checkboxes all over the Google Apps Dashboard and even copying and pasting security tokens from one part of the dashboard to another. Google seems to agree that the process was a bit much—setup for Android for Work has been overhauled and now happens with one click.

Google's blog post comes out pretty strongly against the old system, saying, "No longer must admins complete fifteen steps spread across different pages in the admin console, cutting and pasting security tokens, to set up Android for Work." The prerequisite Mobile Management Setup is an easy one-step setup process now, too. Just press the "Manage now" button and it will automatically enforce sensible policies like a lock screen and remote wipe.

Founder and CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes at TEDMED 2014. (credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBvzKp0AERE)

Late Thursday, federal regulators released a redacted 121-page inspection report of a Newark, California Theranos facility, which revealed that the company’s high-profile finger-prick blood tests failed quality control checks nearly 30 percent of the time.

Theranos and its CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, made waves last year with claims that they could carry out more than 200 medical tests with their Edison devices using just a few drops of blood from a finger prick—rather than a full vein draw taken by a needle. With promises that the cheap and easy finger-prick tests could revolutionize medical diagnostics, the company was valued at $9 billion.

However, since the initial buzz, the company has been hit with a series of questions, criticisms, and federal regulatory snags surrounding the accuracy and validity of its tests. In the latest setback, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a redacted inspection report that seems to substantiate concerns and whistleblower reports of the Edison’s failings.

Enlarge / iFixit cracks open the iPhone SE. (credit: iFixit)

iFixit completed its customary teardown of Apple's latest iPhone yesterday, and it turns out that the similarities between the iPhone SE and the iPhone 5S don't stop at the design. Most of the repair procedures for the new phone are substantially identical to the procedures for the old phone, and in fact the two share a number of identical components: the entire display assembly—including the LCD and digitizer, front camera, earpiece speaker, and proximity sensor—is interchangeable, as are the speaker assembly, vibration motor, and SIM tray.

The shared components mean that shops already set up to repair the iPhone 5S should have no problem repairing the SE, and that you should have no problem finding compatible components from iFixit or other sources for do-it-yourself repairs. One major exception is the battery, which uses a different connector than the one in the 5S—you'll need to buy a SE-specific battery to repair the SE, and you can't give your 5S a minor battery boost by replacing its 1560mAh battery with the SE's 1624mAh version (it's only a four percent increase—you'll live).

It also highlights one of the downsides to buying an SE: the display panel is exactly the same as the one in the 5S, which means no improvements to brightness, color gamut, contrast, or any of the other small advancements Apple worked into the iPhone 6 and 6S. It's not that the 5S/SE display is bad, it just isn't as good as what you'll get in the flagships.