Month: November 2016

Enlarge / A Volkswagen logo at a dealership in San Francisco. (credit: JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images)

Lawyers who won the massive $10.03 billion class-action settlement from Volkswagen Group over software that cheated on emissions tests now want their own payday: $175 million.

The extraordinary sum requires extraordinary justification, and lead plaintiffs' counsel Elizabeth Cabraser hopes her firm's motion (PDF) on the matter, filed late last night with the judge, will do the trick. "The aggregate fees and costs award... is the equivalent of less than 2 percent of the monetary benefit provided to the Class, far below the benchmark in this Circuit and well below the average award in 'super-mega-fund' settlements exceeding $1 billion," writes Cabraser. She added that the requested fees "are the lowest ever sought in a multi-billion dollar case."

Volkswagen was charged by regulators for creating software that would rig emissions tests, and a massive class-action suit on behalf of car owners soon followed. The company settled the case in June, agreeing to pay more than $10 billion to members of the class, which consists of people who bought 2.0L diesel cars from Volkswagen and Audi. Volkswagen, which ended FTC charges in the same settlement, will also pay $2.7 billion in fines to the EPA. The company will also be required to invest $2 billion in clean emissions research. The $175 million payment, which includes $167 million in attorneys' fees and $8 million in costs, won't come out of any of those pots of money.

Enlarge / AT&T will own a bunch of new media properties if it is allowed to buy Time Warner. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election might be big trouble for AT&T’s attempt to buy Time Warner, and it could even threaten Comcast’s 5-year-old acquisition of NBCUniversal.

We can’t be certain that Trump will follow through on statements he made during his campaign or whether the people he appoints as regulators will achieve Trump’s desired outcomes. But we do know that just a few weeks ago, Trump said he intends to block the AT&T/Time Warner deal and wants the government to consider breaking up Comcast and NBC.

In a speech in October, Trump declared his opposition to both mergers while discussing his dislike of how media organizations covered the election. News organizations were trying to “suppress my vote and the voice of the American people,” Trump said.

Enlarge (credit: MARTIN BUREAU/AFP/Getty Images)

A federal judge in San Francisco has put the brakes on Airbnb’s efforts to halt a new local law that would require the company to verify listings that have been registered with the city first.

If the ruling is upheld on the likely appeal, it may pave the way for similar regulations of the short-term housing market in other cities.

Last month, Airbnb and San Francisco lawyers appeared before US District Judge James Donato to argue Airbnb’s motion for a preliminary injunction, which he denied on Tuesday.

Enlarge

The cell cycle is the process in which a growing cell duplicates all of its DNA, copying each base precisely once, and then divides into two daughter cells. It consists of four phases: S, for synthesis, when the new DNA is made; M, for mitosis, when the cell splits into two; and two resting gap phases separating them, G1 before S phase and G2 between S and M.

The cell cycle is tightly regulated; ensuring that cells proceed through it at the proper pace and at the proper time is essential to maintaining an organism’s healthy development. But the cycle can be broken. Cancer is the ultimate example of the cell cycle gone awry, as cancer cells divide uncontrollably, often picking up DNA damage as they go.

In a laboratory setting, it's often useful to know which phase of the cell cycle one’s specimens are currently in. A researcher might want to know if all the cells in a dish are growing synchronously, for example, or to confirm that the cells she treated with her favorite drug are in fact stopping the cycle as expected.

These four early Kirby games will now have their ROMs preserved, thanks to the efforts of a group of preservationists. (credit: Frank Cifaldi / Twitter)

A group of dedicated game preservationists has obtained a set of obscure Japanese Kirby games from the Super Famicom era in order to archive them for future generations. But the uncertain fate of such early games presages a much bigger problem facing digital game preservation going forward.

Even die-hard Kirby fans would be forgiven for not knowing much about Kirby's Toy Box, a collection of six mini games that was only available through Japan's Satellaview, an early satellite-based distribution service for the Super Famicom (the Super NES in the West). That system only let you download one game at a time to a special 8-megabit cartridge, though, and you could only download when that specific game was being broadcast across the narrow satellite feed.

Thus, existing copies of most Satellaview games are available only if they happen to be the last game downloaded to individual cartridges (Satellaview broadcasts ended in the late '90s). While some of these games have been publicly dumped and preserved as ROM files, many exist only in the hands of Japanese collectors. Sometimes, those individuals are reluctant to release the digital code widely.

It's been go time for spear phishing as the window for Adobe and Windows zero-day exploits closes with recent patches. (credit: Wikipedia)

A Russia-based hacking group is seeking to maximize the value of its zero-day exploits before patches issued by Adobe (released on October 26) and Microsoft (released yesterday) become widely available. In a report issued today, researchers at Trend Micro noted that spear phishing activity—malicious e-mails sent to "various governments and embassies around the world"—had ramped up significantly after these exploits were announced.

The flaws, discovered last week by Google's Threat Analysis Group, have been used in a long-running spear-phishing campaign against government, political, and military targets in the US and Europe. It's all an apparent intelligence collection effort run by the group known variously as Pawn Storm, Fancy Bear, APT28, Sofacy, and Strontium. This is the same group blamed for the hack of the Democratic National Committee and the e-mail accounts of Hillary Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other political figures in the US.

While Adobe patched the vulnerability (CVE-2016-7855) with an emergency update on October 26, the Microsoft vulnerability was not patched until November 8. That's more than a week after Google announced the discovery of the exploit.

Enlarge / You can always figure out a way to hide from Big Brother.

The eighth episode of Ars Technica Live is coming up next tomorrow, November 16, in Oakland, California, at Longitude! Join Ars Technica editors Dan Goodin and Annalee Newitz with guest Morgan Marquis-Boire for a conversation about infosec, surveillance, and digital authoritarianism.

Marquis-Boire is a New Zealand-born hacker, security researcher, and journalist. He is the director of security for First Look Media and a contributing writer for The Intercept. Prior to this, he worked at Google. Marquis-Boire is a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto, focusing on state-sponsored hacking and the global surveillance industry. He currently serves as a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and as an advisor to the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Amnesty International.

Filmed before a live audience at Oakland tiki bar Longitude, each episode of Ars Technica Live is a speculative, informal conversation between Ars Technica hosts and an invited guest. The audience, drawn from Ars Technica’s readers, is also invited to join the conversation and ask questions. These aren’t soundbyte setups; they are deep cuts from the frontiers of research and creativity.