Month: October 2016

Enlarge / Hurt me plenty. (credit: ModDB)

Happy Halloween! We at Ars invite you to celebrate the most morbid of Western holidays with one of the most morbid Western game series ever: Doom. Specifically, with a free version of the less-popular version on the Nintendo 64 system, now restored and updated by a dedicated group of fans and modders.

While finding working copies and digital restorations of other Doom games isn't hard, the N64 version, created by Midway Games' San Diego studio in the '90s, has never seen an official retail re-release (fan attempts to port the game to PC popped up in the early '00s though). Which is a shame, because the N64 Doom was made up of entirely new levels and content that stood toe-to-toe with some of Doom 2's best maps, and the game offered some effective visual upgrades to the original idTech engine.

A quick tease of the lighting-engine goodness found in Brutal Doom 64.

Now, fans have stepped in with the stunning-looking, tough-as-nails Brutal Doom 64. Even though it was made by people who worked on last year's Brutal Doom mod, this newer version is tuned to recreate the N64 version rather than to supercharge it, at least in terms of gameplay (though the authors admit to tweaking and changing certain levels to make the game more modern, including a brand-new opening sequence that pits marines against Hell's worst monsters).

Enlarge / Win32k.sys has some problems. Again.

Recently, Google’s Threat Analysis Group discovered a set of zero-day vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and the Microsoft Windows kernel that were already being actively used by malware attacks against the Chrome browser. Google alerted both Adobe and Microsoft of the discovery on October 21, and Adobe issued a critical fix to patch its vulnerability last Friday. But Microsoft has yet to patch a critical bug in the Windows kernel that allows these attacks to work—which prompted Google to publicly announce the vulnerabilities today.

“After 7 days, per our published policy for actively exploited critical vulnerabilities, we are today disclosing the existence of a remaining critical vulnerability in Windows for which no advisory or fix has yet been released,” wrote Neel Mehta and Billy Leonard of Google’s Threat Analysis Group.”This vulnerability is particularly serious because we know it is being actively exploited.”

The bug being exploited could allow an attacker to escape from Windows’ security sandbox. The sandbox, which normally allows only user-level applications to execute, lets programs execute without needing administrator access while isolating what it can access on the local system through a set of policies.

Enlarge (credit: Robyn Beck / Getty Images News)

On Monday, supporters of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline began a viral campaign enticing people to “check in” to the reservation on Facebook as a way to “overwhelm and confuse” local law enforcement.

However, there is no evidence that this tactic is effective, particularly as the Morton County Sheriff’s Department expressly said on its own Facebook page that it “is not and does not follow Facebook check-ins for the protest camp or any location. This claim / rumor is absolutely false.”

In recent months, activists have been protesting at the site on the border of North and South Dakota in an attempt to halt a planned oil pipeline that many believe would damage the local water supply and desecrate tribal lands.

(credit: Mike Mozart)

The Federal Communications Commission has given a helping hand to Louisville, Kentucky, in the city's attempt to enforce local rules that would make it easier for Google Fiber to compete against AT&T.

AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County in February to stop a One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) ordinance designed to give Google Fiber or other new competitors faster access to utility poles. Today, the US government submitted a statement of interest (full text) on behalf of the FCC, which says that one of AT&T’s primary legal arguments is incorrect.

AT&T—also known as BellSouth Telecommunications in Kentucky—argued that the Louisville ordinance is preempted by the FCC’s pole-attachment rules. The local ordinance "conflicts with the procedures created by the FCC, and upsets the careful balances struck by the FCC in crafting its pole attachment regulations," AT&T's lawsuit said.

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

There’s a deceptively simple number at the heart of the science of climate change: the sensitivity of Earth’s climate system to an addition of greenhouse gas like CO₂. This variable gets defined in technical terms on several different timescales, but it all boils down to how much global warming we’ll get if we increase CO₂ by a given amount.

All kinds of complex interactions are contained within this number, including all the feedback loops that amplify or dampen the warming response. One of the harder feedbacks to pin down has been changes in clouds. As the world warms, more water vapor ends up in the atmosphere—and water vapor is an important greenhouse gas. But the bright, low clouds that water vapor can form reflect sunlight, shading and cooling the Earth.

It turns out the net result of increased water vapor enhances warming rather than limiting it. A new study by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Chen Zhou, Mark Zelinka, and Stephen Klein reveals an interesting interaction that makes this even more complicated. It’s not enough to figure out what clouds will do in general—there's not some single number that you can get to stand in for clouds. Instead, there are spatial patterns to clouds' effects, and they vary over time. This has some pretty interesting implications for understanding the last few decades and what’s coming in the future.

Enlarge (credit: Mustafa Al-Bassam)

Shadow Brokers—the name used by a person or group that created seismic waves in August when it published some of the National Security Agency's most elite hacking tools—is back with a new leak that the group says reveals hundreds of organizations targeted by the NSA over more than a decade.

"TheShadowBrokers is having special trick or treat for Amerikanskis tonight," said the Monday morning post, which was signed by the same encryption key used in the August posts. "Many missions into your networks is/was coming from these ip addresses."

Monday's leak came as former NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin III remains in federal custody on charges that he hoarded an astounding 50 terabytes of NSA data in his suburban Maryland home. Much of the data included highly classified information such as the names of US intelligence officers and highly sensitive methods behind intelligence operations. Martin came to the attention of investigators looking into the Shadow Brokers' August leak. Anonymous people with knowledge of the investigation say they don't know what connection, if any, Martin has to the group or the leaks.

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 07: FBI Director James Comey testifies during a hearing before House Oversight and Government Reform Committee July 7, 2016 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The committee held a hearing "Oversight of the State Department," focusing on the FBI's recommendation not to prosecute Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for maintaining a private e-mail server during her time as secretary of state. (credit: Alex Wong via Getty Images)

James Comey, the FBI director, has been facing intense criticism for days now following his Friday revelations that the bureau has started investigating newly discovered e-mails said to have passed through Hillary Clinton's private server.

The Friday revelation sent heads spinning, from the left and the right, since there is less than two weeks before the presidential election. (Clinton, the Democratic nominee, faces Donald Trump on the GOP ticket on November 8.)

The development came three months after Comey publicly said Clinton or any member of her staff while she was secretary of state were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing in connection to Clinton's use of a private e-mail server at her New York home. But on Friday, Comey wrote members of Congress that the bureau had recently discovered e-mail that might have passed through that server while conducting a separate investigation. The bureau was looking into Anthony Weiner, a politician and the husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, in an unrelated sexting scandal.