Month: August 2016

(credit: Silk Road 2.0)

A 27-year-old Irishman whom police say was an administrator on the Silk Road drug-dealing website is fighting to avoid facing trial in the US.

Gary Davis of Wicklow, Ireland was indicted in 2013. US prosecutors say Davis was "Libertas," a Silk Road admin who helped with things like customer service and moderating the forums.

Davis was arrested in 2014. Earlier this month, Ireland's High Court ordered that he should be extradited to the US. Davis has appealed that order, The Irish Times reported this weekend. Davis has been charged with conspiracy charges related to narcotics distribution, money laundering, and computer hacking. If convicted, he could face up to a life sentence.

The Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance—which took place on August 21st—is one of the automotive world's swankiest events. For well-heeled car collectors, the Concours is a way to one-up each other with rare vintage cars. But automakers—particularly those targeting the one percent—use the Pebble Beach Concours to show off their latest concepts and special editions. This year was no different, with concept cars from Acura, BMW, Bugatti, and Cadillac, as well as exclusive new machines from Aston Martin, Lamborghini, and McLaren.

Acura's Precision Concept was first seen at the North American International Auto Show at the beginning of the year. The concept features Acura's new grille—hastily bolted on to the new MDX—as well as some interesting human-machine interface ideas.

BMW's 2002 Hommage was resplendent in its Jaegermeister-inspired racing livery. Squint carefully and you can see plenty of influence from the 2 Series.

Enlarge / PlayStation Plus price hike coming on September 22nd. (credit: Sony)

If you're a fan of Sony's PlayStation Plus subscription service—which doles out free monthly downloads for the company's various systems and enables online play on PS4 games in exchange for an annual fee—you might want to lock in your next annual renewal of $50 per year pretty soon.

That's because the annual fee goes up to $60 (or CAD $70) starting September 22, which is exactly one month after an announcement posted on Monday. Sony took an odd approach to making this announcement: the company edited the news into a late-July alert about the freebies PS Plus members would receive in August. The post did not receive an updated headline, despite the official PlayStation Twitter account linking to the post once it had been edited.

The announcement explained that the price hike—the first for the service since its launch in 2010—is thanks to "current market conditions." Since the post neither linked to any financial or market analyses nor announced any new features coming to PlayStation Plus, Ars is tempted to assume that those "current market conditions" are little more than "we think people will grin and bear the price hike."

Enlarge

Android's release schedule has historically been all over the place, but for the last few years we've gotten roughly one major release per year, occasionally punctuated with medium-sized maintenance releases, minor feature updates, and monthly security patches. Now, the latest of Google's blog posts about the Android Nougat release suggests things will become more predictable in the future.

We’re moving Nougat into a new regular maintenance schedule over the coming quarters. In fact, we’ve already started work on the first Nougat maintenance release that will bring continued refinements and polish, and we’re planning to bring that to you this fall as a developer preview. Stay tuned!

This strongly implies a quarterly-ish release schedule for new versions of Android rather than one big announcement followed by a major release a few months later (like we've seen with Lollipop, Marshmallow, and Nougat). And the public beta program that delivered new Nougat betas to interested Nexus users all summer is going to live on, delivering a steady drip of beta software all year long.

A regular release schedule would more closely track what Apple and Microsoft are doing—both companies still tend to save major changes for big updates that hit once or twice a year, but the Apple Beta Software Program and Windows Insider program both supply beta testers with new builds throughout the year. Google does itself this with Chrome OS, which offers stable, beta, and developer release channels that all get updated continuously and gradually rather than all at once.

This is not what NSA's TAO is doing right now.

A group called the Shadow Brokers made headlines this month by leaking a hacking tool belonging to the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) team. Now this week, several informed sources suggest an inside source may have been involved.

The leaked software—which can exploit weaknesses in a number of network hardware platforms and other devices—apparently may have come with the help of an NSA insider, according to the analysis of several information security experts, reports citing former NSA employees, and one journalist who had access to the files leaked by Edward Snowden. While the hacking tools were said not to have come from the Snowden documents cache, they may in fact be associated with another leaker who provided information to Jacob Appelbaum and Wikileaks, James Bamford suggests in a commentary published Monday by Reuters.

Details of the hacking tools also match with a training manual for NSA cyberespionage operations included in the Snowden document trove, released last week by The Intercept. Some of the tools also match with entries in the TAO's ANT catalog—an NSA internal wishbook for hardware and software exploits. That document was published in part by Der Spiegel in collaboration with Appelbaum back in December of 2013.

Over the years, BlackBerry has amassed a giant portfolio of patents, but it hasn't used them to sue others—until now.

BlackBerry has filed three patent infringement lawsuits in as many weeks. The struggling phone company's offensive barrage began with a case filed against IP telephony company Avaya on July 27. Last week, BlackBerry filed two lawsuits against budget cell phone maker BLU's products, alleging that BLU infringes a whopping 15 patents.

The dual lawsuits against BLU suggest that BlackBerry's new turn toward patent licensing isn't going to be a one-off event, but rather a more extended campaign. In a May earnings call, BlackBerry CEO John Chen told investors he's in a "patent licensing mode" and is hoping to monetize his company's 38,000 patents.

A funny thing happened on the way to the diesel emissions scandal—Volkswagen still sells cars. There are no diesels until they get a clean bill of health, but as VW must rely solely on gas-fired sales in the US right now, the Golf TSI SEL sits squarely in the middle of their lineup globally. Through some recent updates, VW has improved its latest edition. We cohabitated with the new Golf TSI for a week and agreed to not even bring up the "d" word.

The biggest Golf changes for this year are on the inside. The most immediately apparent is a new 5-inch display on the base model and a 6.5-inch display on all other trim levels. Running VW's Modular Infotainment Platform II (MIB II), it supports Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and MirrorLink. More importantly, this display looks and works much better than the previous infotainment system, which took forever to respond to menu selections.

Beyond MIB II, the car's buttons are logically placed, switchgear is vastly better, and the standard seats offer above-average support and bolstering. The steering wheel and gauges even exude greater-than-VW quality—everything you touch inside would be equally at home in a BMW or Audi.