Month: August 2016

(credit: D J Shin)

New data shows that the majority of robot-enabled scam phone calls came from fewer than 40 call centers, a finding that offers hope the growing menace of robocalls can be stopped.

The calls use computers and the Internet to dial thousands of phone numbers every minute and promote fraudulent schemes that promise to lower credit card interest rates, offer loans, and sell home security products, to name just a few of the scams. Over the past decade, robocall complaints have mushroomed, with the Federal Trade Commission often receiving hundreds of thousands of complaints each month. In 2013, the consumer watchdog agency awarded $50,000 to three groups who devised blocking systems that had the potential to help end the scourge. Three years later, however, the robocall problem seems as intractable as ever.

On Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, a researcher said that slightly more than half of more than 1 million robocalls tracked were sent by just 38 telephony infrastructures. The relatively small number of actors offers hope that the phenomenon can be rooted out, by either automatically blocking the call centers or finding ways for law enforcement groups to identify and prosecute the operators.

BlackBerry has filed a patent lawsuit (PDF) against internet telephony firm Avaya. The dispute marks a turning point for Blackberry, which pushed into the Android market last year but has been struggling.

In making its case that Avaya should pay royalties, BlackBerry's focus is squarely on its rear-view mirror. The firm argues that it should be paid for its history of innovation going back nearly 20 years.

"BlackBerry revolutionized the mobile industry," the company's lawyers wrote in their complaint. "BlackBerry... has invented a broad array of new technologies that cover everything from enhanced security and cryptographic techniques, to mobile device user interfaces, to communication servers, and many other areas."

This is the booking photo of Stockton Mayor Anthony Silva. (credit: Amador County Sheriff)

The mayor of Stockton, California was arrested Thursday and charged with felony eavesdropping, among other misdemeanor charges, related to a strip poker game that he allegedly played with teenage counselors at a camp for economically disadvantaged kids last year, according to prosecutors in neighboring Amador County.

Mayor Anthony Ray Silva was taken into custody Thursday morning at the annual mayor’s Youth Camp in Silver Lake, just outside of Stockton, an inland port city approximately 80 miles east of San Francisco.

N. Allen Sawyer, Silva's attorney, told Ars that his client remains mayor, has posted bail, and has returned Thursday afternoon to the camp to help final clean up. The City of Stockton said in a statement that law enforcement are on site at the camp, presumably to keep the peace.

This year's E3 gaming conference began with one of the industry's current heavy hitters, Bethesda, announcing two new games in a blatant "more smoke than fire" kind of way. Deep down, we knew why Quake Champions and the Prey reboot got such content-thin reveals back in June: because Bethesda had to save something for its giant, weekend-long QuakeCon festival.

That event kicked off in Grapevine, Texas on Thursday with gameplay reveals for both games, though Quake Champions' 75-second video was more revealing. The upcoming Quake-branded online shooter from id Software was shown in what looks like a fully functional pre-alpha state. Champions'combat was shown from an apparent first-person, mid-combat perspective, along with a few floating-camera shots of at least three arenas that look like modern upgrades of the castle, sewer, and factory settings from its forebear, 1999's Quake III Arena.

The verticality is strong in this one, as the QC sequence's combatants take advantage of booster-jump pads and their own rocket jumps to bounce around large, well-decorated arenas. While some details—particularly a giant, chained eyeball—are rendered well and smothered in cool lighting effects, other parts of the reveal look less polished than id's other recent, major shooter, the Doom reboot from earlier this year. This seems intentional, as id has advertised support for 120 Hz monitors for the sake of twitchy, high-speed gameplay—and QC's reveal looks mighty fast, packed to the brim with running, bunny-hopping, and precise railgun kills. (Clearly, the squad working on QC wants to evoke your fondest Q3A memories, what with a combatant who looks a lot like the hoverboard-riding character Anarki from the game of old!)

Facebook thinks headlines need to sober up. (credit: Jon S)

In 2014, Facebook said it was going to take steps to favor clear headlines over so-called clickbait, which it defines as headlines that try to cultivate interest in a story by omitting key pieces of information, or by misrepresenting what’s in the actual post. Now, the social media giant has revised its clickbait-tackling scheme, which for the past two years has been downgrading posts based on the amount of time Facebook users spend on the article after they click the headline.

In a post today, Facebook said that its current plan of attack involved cataloging “tens of thousands” of headlines, which were then analyzed by a team of employees that decided if the headlines withheld pertinent information or were misleading about the accompanying article. The team apparently double-checked its work, and “from there, we built a system that looks at the set of clickbait headlines to determine what phrases are commonly used in clickbait headlines that are not used in other headlines,” Facebook wrote in a press release today. “This is similar to how many e-mail spam filters work.”

Facebook added that its new system, instructed by the categorizations of human employees, would continue to actively learn which sites and Facebook Pages produce clickbait.

One of my favorite car companies is the quirky UK outfit Bristol Motors. I admit, the styling hasn't always been for everyone, but I adore all their clever aerospace-inspired touches.

Five years ago, things were looking bleak for a company many thought a relic of bygone times. The Fighter—a 200mph GT with the V10 from of a Dodge Viper in the nose—failed to find much of an audience in the 21st century, leading to insolvency. But new owners took over, and the past two years have seen occasional, tantalizing announcements about a new car—Project Pinnacle. Now, the wraps are off: meet the Bristol Bullet.

Before we get to the Bullet, a little history: originally a division of the Bristol Aeroplane Company, merger after merger turned Bristol Cars into some percentage of BAE Systems. Bristol started building cars after World War II—powered by BMW's 328 racing engine thanks to post-war reparations—and spun off the business in 1960 once the UK's aviation industry began to condense on government orders.

Enlarge / Apple will soon begin offering bounties for bugs found in some of its hardware and software. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

As part of a security presentation given at this year's Black Hat conference, Apple today announced that it would be starting up a bug bounty program in the fall. The program will reward security researchers who uncover vulnerabilities in Apple's products and bring them to the company's attention. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and many other companies have offered bug bounty programs for some time now, but this is Apple's first.

For now, Apple is intentionally keeping the scope of the program small. It will initially be accepting bug reports from a small group of a few dozen security researchers it has worked with in the past. For now, bounties are only being offered for a small range of iDevice and iCloud bugs. The full list is as follows:

• Secure boot firmware components: Up to $200,000 (~£150,000)
• Extraction of confidential material protected by the Secure Enclave: Up to $100,000.
• Execution of arbitrary code with kernel privileges: Up to $50,000.
• Access from a sandboxed process to user data outside of that sandbox: Up to $25,000.
• Unauthorized access to iCloud account data on Apple servers: Up to $50,000.

As the program continues and Apple works the, um, bugs out of its processes, the company will expand the list of eligible security researchers as well as the list of hardware and software bugs for which bounties are offered.

Balloons at an April rally opposing CSIRO cuts. (credit: Takver)

In February, the new leader of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) revealed a plan to lay off almost all of the agency’s climate scientists, along with an equal number of scientists from its Land and Water division. CSIRO CEO Larry Marshall framed the cuts as part of a significant change in mission, saying that the question of whether climate change is occurring “has been answered.” The mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, he said, should be the agency's focus.

The outcry was loud, particularly from climate scientists who recognized the value of the work that CSIRO had long been doing. As a result, Marshall has gradually conceded much of the planned reduction and decided to go ahead with a new climate research center in Tasmania that would house 40 current CSIRO scientists. With these changes, 35 of the agency’s 140 climate scientists will be losing their jobs.

Following on Australia’s July federal election, Greg Hunt became the new science minister. This week he announced plans to further limit the cuts to CSIRO’s climate science capacity—even if CSIRO will still be changing. According to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald, Hunt plans to direct CSIRO to add 15 new positions and AUD$37 million over 10 years to the (current) funding level.