Month: November 2016

Enlarge / Frag as your favorite members of Run The Jewels for $20. Yep, $20. Two-zero. (credit: Microsoft Studios)

'Tis the season for new big-ticket video games, and increasingly, now is also the season for new experiments in DLC and add-on purchases for retail titles. We don't normally spotlight add-on packs if they're just cosmetic, but today's reveal of a new "loot box" for October's Gears of War 4 got Ars' attention—and not necessarily in a good way.

Today's new Gears box is a cross promotion with hip-hop duo Run the Jewels, who had already released a music video connected to the game in September. Microsoft is charging a whopping $20 for the add-on, which includes the following: two skin unlocks (featuring RTJ members Killer Mike and El-P, with unique spoken dialogue), a single teal-blue skin for every weapon in the game, two emblem designs that can be applied to player profiles (only seen between matches), and two one-time XP "bounties" that can be claimed when playing an online versus match as either RTJ member.

As of right now, none of the contents in this loot box can be unlocked using the in-game currency that is doled out in online modes such as versus and "Horde" co-op. The only other cash-only content in Gears 4 is a $50 season pass for downloadable maps.

There's a new, more powerful Internet-of-things botnet in town, and it has managed to infect almost 3,500 devices in just five days, according to a recently published report.

Linux/IRCTelnet, as the underlying malware has been named, borrows code from several existing malicious IoT applications. Most notably, it lifts entire sections of source code from Aidra, one of the earliest known IoT bot packages. Aidra was discovered infecting more than 30,000 embedded Linux devices in an audacious and ethically questionable research project that infected more than 420,000 Internet-connected devices in an attempt to measure the security of the global network. As reported by the anonymous researcher, Aidra forced infected devices to carry out a variety of distributed denial-of-service attacks but worked on a limited number of devices.

Linux/IRCTelnet also borrows telnet-scanning logic from a newer IoT bot known as Bashlight. It further lifts a list of some 60 widely used username-password combinations built into Mirai, a different IoT bot app whose source code was recently published on the Internet. It goes on to add code for attacking sites that run the next-generation Internet protocol known as IPv6.

Enlarge (credit: Jim Resnick)

Audi's original Allroad found a small but vocal following when it was first introduced on the old A6 platform, but it also had a bit of an (understandable) inferiority complex. Just as the medium-sized luxury SUV segment exploded, the Allroad offered much of that segment's versatility and cargo space, but it didn't hover over smaller cars like a leviathan. That stature also helped its on-road and soft-road dynamics. Flash-forward to late 2016, and the advantages of a wagon with all-wheel-drive versatility haven't gone anywhere. In fact, this year's Audi A4 Allroad further refines the art.

The Allroad was first based on the A6 platform using turbocharged V6s and then naturally aspirated V8s, last sold in the US market in 2005. The more recent A4-based Allroad debuted in 2010, propelled by four-cylinder engines. The new A4 Allroad's body muscles up compared to the A4 sedan, with flared wheel openings, vertical grille bars, and tall roof rails that all accent height, as well as bright accents for the rockers and lower front end. Rear turn signals are a feast for the tech nerd. Sequential LEDs illuminate to sweep across the back in the direction of the turn, suggesting motion itself. I learned that ergonomics engineers deep in the bowels of Audi discovered that this arrangement is a few milliseconds faster than conventional bulbs, even static LEDs.

Jim Resnick

Enlarge / William and Dolores are definitely out of their loops now. (credit: HBO)

We've finally made it to Pariah, and the Easter Egg town's orgies and war madness were actually a lot less shocking than the reveal about who runs the place. Dang! We also found out more about how Westworld is funded, and the economics don't look very good. In the world of robot psychology, we have to ask whether Dolores is finally losing her mind or if all those hallucinations are the pathway to consciousness. We talk about all this and more on our latest Decrypted podcast.

This week, I'm joined by Ars Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson to talk about guns, fan theories, and all the madness of episode 5 of Westworld, "Contrapasso." Hutchinson brings his considerable knowledge of guns and Internet fan theories about the show into our conversation, and now we have a working idea of how the park's guns function.

Topics discussed: the state of Dolores' mind (Arnold and a bunch of other things are in her head); Ford's freaky conversation with the MIB (a treat to watch); the economics of Westworld (it's hemorrhaging cash); the economics of the real world (MIB says it's peachy, but the poor med tech Felix is terrified he'll lose his job); the two faces of Lawrence (El Lazo!); what's going on in Pariah (and are the Confederados linked to Wyatt?); how guns work in Westworld (at least, what we've figured out so far); why it's important that the bots use GPS (we have to be on Earth, under open sky); and how the two most popular fan theories about Westworld just got nuked (bye bye, double timeline).

An example flow: push the button and a few minutes later get a notification.

Microsoft Flow, a service that lets you plumb together various cloud-based services to construct workflows, and PowerApps, a tool to enable non-developers to build data-driven business apps, are both out of beta and in production today.

Flow and PowerApps join Power BI, Microsoft's service for reporting and analyzing business data, to make a trio of cloud-driven business tools called the "Business Application Platform." Power BI lets business types examine and understand their data, PowerApps lets them create new data, and Flow lets them take automated action in response to data. The common feature to all three is that they're designed for non-developers: you don't need to learn APIs and programming languages to use these services; you just have to understand the data you're working with.

Microsoft describes Flow in business terms—for example, monitoring tweets mentioning your company and automatically responding to messages and adding people to CRM systems—but people are already looking at Flow in broader terms, using it as a competitor to IFTTT ("if this then that"). IFTTT allows similar joining together of cloud services; as an example, I use IFTTT to automatically send a tweet every time a story is published to my personal RSS feed. IFTTT is also finding use for connecting together smart home services, with people using it to turn on lights automatically when it starts to rain, for example, or connect motion-sensing switches to other gadgets.

Last Friday, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg—the founding developer of the WordPress open source blogging and content management platform—posted an open letter on his personal blog accusing the developers of the blogging site Wix of essentially stealing WordPress code for a new mobile application:

If I were being charitable, I’d say, “The app’s editor is based on the WordPress mobile app’s editor.” If I were being honest, I’d say that Wix copied WordPress without attribution, credit, or following the license. The custom icons, the class names, even the bugs. You can see the forked repositories on GitHub complete with original commits from Alex and Maxime, two developers on Automattic’s mobile team. Wix has always borrowed liberally from WordPress—including their company name, which used to be Wixpress Ltd.—but this blatant rip-off and code theft is beyond anything I’ve seen before from a competitor.

WordPress’ code is open source, but it is published under the GNU Public License (GPL). And the way that Wix used the code, Mullenweg said, is in violation of the GPL. Wix’s new mobile app, he said, reused WordPress’ text editor without credit. And the Wix application was closed and proprietary—not published under the same GPL license.

Wix CEO and co-founder Avishai Abrahami fired back, writing in an open response to Mullenweg, “Wow, dude I did not even know we were fighting.” Abrahami pointed to 224 projects that Wix had open sourced on GitHub, and he admitted that Wix had used the text editor code—making some modifications and sharing the code via GitHub:

(credit: Nashville Fire Department)

A Nashville couple whose home burned down after a hoverboard caught fire has filed a lawsuit against Amazon.

Brian and Megan Fox bought a hoverboard for their children for Christmas last year. It burst into flames on January 9. The fire destroyed "virtually all their personal belonging in a manner of minutes," and nearly killed their 16-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son, according to the couple's complaint (PDF).

The offending hoverboard was purchased through an Amazon marketplace store called "W-Deals" and was supposed to contain an "original Samsung advanced battery," but it allegedly didn't. They say W-Deals is a sham entity with a registered address of an apartment building in Brooklyn, New York. Inquiries sent to the address weren't responded to.

Jury selection in a local Charleston, South Carolina, courthouse entered its second day Tuesday in the murder trial of a 34-year-old fired North Charleston police officer who was secretly captured on video shooting a fleeing suspect multiple times in the back. The defense is trying to keep jurors from seeing the video, calling it "factually deficient."

Michael Slager, a white North Charleston officer, is accused of killing Walter Scott, 50, a black man who was pulled over in April 2015 for a routine traffic stop. Scott had a warrant for his arrest, fled the Mercedes-Benz he was driving, was chased into a field, and was then shot and killed as a passerby secretly captured the shooting on video.

For the most part, those are the general undisputed facts in a case that likely would have been swept under the rug without video evidence. Before the video surfaced, the police defended the officer's actions. As reported by the Post and Courier, the police said that "...a man ran on foot from the traffic stop and an officer deployed his department-issued Taser in an attempt to stop him. That did not work, police said, and an altercation ensued as the men struggled over the device. Police allege that during the struggle the man gained control of the Taser and attempted to use it against the officer. The officer then resorted to his service weapon and shot him..."

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Before Charter purchased Time Warner Cable (TWC) in May of this year, the company promised New York state regulators that it would bring broadband to 145,000 unserved and underserved homes and businesses by 2020. The condition helped Charter win government approval of the merger.

Christian Babcock of Schuylerville, New York, is one of the state’s unserved residents, but he has no idea if his home will be included in the required buildout to 145,000 locations. Before the merger, TWC told Babcock he’d have to pay thousands of dollars up front to subsidize construction needed to serve his home. Even now, the Charter-owned TWC is demanding more than $9,000 in exchange for service. That's the price to cover Charter's construction; Babcock would have to pay that plus the usual monthly service fees.

Making the situation even more frustrating, Charter wouldn’t have to extend the TWC network very far to reach the house owned by Babcock and his wife. One nearby house has Charter service already, Babcock says. But even just getting an accurate explanation of the costs has been a hassle.