Month: April 2017

Enlarge / President Donald Trump. (credit: Getty Images News | Pool)

President Donald Trump today signed a repeal of online privacy rules that would have limited the ability of ISPs to share or sell customers' browsing history for advertising purposes. Trump's action follows the Senate and House voting to eliminate the rules issued by the Federal Communications Commission during Barack Obama's presidency.

"President Trump has signed away the only rules that guarantee Americans a choice in whether or not their sensitive Internet information is sold or given away," said Chris Lewis, VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. Trump's action also "eliminates the requirement that broadband providers notify their customers of any hacking or security breaches."

While Democrats in Congress urged Trump to veto the repeal, it was clear last week that Trump would not do so. "The White House supports Congress using its authority under the Congressional Review Act to roll back last year's FCC rules on broadband regulation," Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday in a press briefing. Spicer also criticized the FCC's 2015 reclassification of ISPs as common carriers, a designation that was used to implement both the privacy rules and net-neutrality rules. The net-neutrality rules could also be rolled back under Trump's leadership.

(credit: Tamara Dunn / Flickr)

New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said on Monday that the state is suing the Department of Energy (DOE) for delaying the date on which rules about ceiling-fan efficiency are supposed to take effect. The AG said he would sue the department again if it failed to publish a separate set of previously-approved efficiency rules promulgated by the DOE during the final days of the Obama administration.

The New York attorney general is joined in these legal actions by the attorneys general from California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, as well as the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the City of New York. The lawsuit against the DOE is one of the first taken by a coalition of states against the Trump administration's energy policies, which have been environmentally regressive.

The energy-efficiency rules for ceiling fans were published on January 19, 2017 and were set to take effect March 20, 2017. However, the DOE under Trump has twice delayed the date on which the rules are supposed to take effect. Currently, the rules won’t take effect until September 30, 2017. The state officials suing the DOE filed a petition with the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit asking the court to intervene; the states say that federal law compels the DOE (PDF) to offer a public comment period if rules are changed substantively after final publication, including if the “effective date” of the rule is delayed.

(credit: Employees of MGM)

Researchers have uncovered one of the most advanced espionage apps ever written for the Android mobile operating system. They found the app after it had infected a few dozen handsets.

Pegasus for Android is the companion app to Pegasus for iOS, a full-featured espionage platform that was discovered in August infecting the iPhone of a political dissident located in the United Arab Emirates. Researchers from Google and the mobile-security firm Lookout found the Android version in the months following, as they scoured the Internet. Google said an Android security feature known as verify apps indicated the newly discovered version of Pegasus had been installed on fewer than three-dozen devices.

"Pegasus for Android is an example of the common feature-set that we see from nation states and nation state-like groups," Lookout researchers wrote in a technical analysis published Monday. "These groups produce advanced persistent threats (APT) for mobile with the specific goal of tracking a target not only in the physical world, but also the virtual world."

Enlarge / CEO Tim Armstrong. (credit: TechCrunch / Flickr)

Today, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong triumphantly announced that, starting this summer, the merged operations of AOL and the acquired Internet business of Yahoo would transform into a new Verizon-owned megalith company. It shall be named... Oath.

Billion+ Consumers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017. pic.twitter.com/tM3Ac1Wi36

— Tim Armstrong (@timarmstrongaol) April 3, 2017

Perhaps the name comes from what Verizon executives swore after they heard about Yahoo's multiple data breaches. Or maybe it came from what many Yahoo employees have been uttering over the last year, as the companies wound their way through the acquisition process and accompanying layoffs. Or perhaps "Oath" came to mind when those same employees heard about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's proposed severance package.

Apparently, Armstrong decided not to take our advice to name the unit "LOL OMG WTF" or "Event Verizon" (that second one may take a moment of thought to get).

Enlarge / Shards of car glass on the street (credit: Getty | Berezko)

States that let unauthorized immigrants get driver’s licenses make their roads safer for all, a new study suggests.

After implementing one such law in January 2015, California saw a 7- to 10-percent statewide drop in hit-and-run accidents that year, Stanford researchers report Monday in PNAS. That equates to roughly 4,000 fewer hit-and-runs for the year. In that time frame, more than 600,000 unauthorized immigrants got licenses, and the numbers of accidents and traffic fatalities were unchanged by the law.

“Overall, the findings suggest that providing driver’s licenses to unauthorized immigrants led to improved traffic safety,” the authors conclude.

Enlarge (credit: fly.io)

The development model for Internet applications has weirdly followed, in many ways, the model developers have used for enterprise applications. First, there was the highly-centralized "mainframe" model of CGI. Then as browsers got beefier, next came the "client-server" model of JavaScript-laden Web pages (and code-heavy mobile apps) doing all the display-side work using Web-based APIs.

If you've followed the history of software development, you know what comes next: middleware. And that's exactly where Fly.io, founded by Kurt Mackey, comes in. Full disclosure: Mackey is Ars' former technology director. And his Fly.io platform is a "global load balancer" in that it puts gateways for programming interfaces in data centers around the world. Much like how Cloudflare uses the "Anycast" feature of the Border Gateway Protocol to provide a content delivery network, Fly.io uses Anycast to leverage routing of application requests to the nearest gateway. The gateway connects back to the back-end of the application through an encrypted SSH tunnel.

But the middleware running on the gateway can also be used to handle a lot of the work that previously would have required multiple requests from the Web browser or app client. Fly.io provides a number of middleware components that can handle many of the processing tasks currently handled either by the back-end application or script in the browser. Developers can wire together middleware components through a Web-based tool before connecting them to an agent on their application server. Multiple back-end services can be put behind a single DNS address—for example, Fly.io's own site uses Github Pages as a back-end service to provide its documentation.

On standard Nintendo hardware, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild runs at a bare bones HD resolution of 720p, or up to 900p when using the Nintendo Switch in docked mode. Using the power of a Wii U emulator called CEMU, though, devoted coders have now got the game running at a full 4K resolution on a high-end PC.

While the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild has technically been running in CEMU since shortly after its release early last month, version 1.7.4c of the emulator (released just yesterday to Patreon backers and to the public on April 9) fixes most of the outstanding graphical and gameplay issues that prevented the game from being fully playable through emulation. While there are still some issues with bugs and cutscene playback, Breath of the Wild can now be completed through the emulator with most major features intact.

As the above video shows, the emulated version lets players reset the game's internal resolution up to a full 4K 3840 x 2160 pixels at a steady 30 frames per second. To get the game looking that good, you'll need a decently beefy PC (the video was made with a reported i7 6700k @ 4.3ghz, GTX 1070, and 16GB of RAM) as well as some community-made graphics packs that resample the game's low-res textures to look acceptable when blown up to a higher resolution. You'll also probably need to play with a few GPU and emulator settings to maximize your frame rate—this Reddit thread seems like a good starting point.