Month: April 2017

Enlarge / A white board for a potential blank-slate restart. (credit: HBO)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: On Silicon Valley, the show's main character, Richard Hendriks (Thomas Middleditch) is actually facing some small degree of success. But he panics in the face of it, then runs headlong into an awkward confrontation with his peers at tech start-up Pied Piper, before drastically changing gears.

That's exactly the quandary that Hendriks finds himself in at the beginning of Silicon Valley's new season, which premiered on Sunday. The last season ended with Richard's flailing company getting back on track by "pivoting" to a new idea: video chat, a side project invented by Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) that his coworkers mocked until it inadvertently became a success.

But this is Silicon Valley, which means good news never lasts for long. The fourth season begins with Pied Piper's video chat service running into trouble while still growing fast. Everyone else thinks this service is the company's best bet. But Richard can't focus on it. His "improvement" to the product, to his colleagues, looks worse than trivial. This leads to a personal confrontation with Dinesh.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images News)

According to a Monday report in Bloomberg Businessweek, Square has acquired the "five- to ten-person" engineering team of Yik Yak for $3 million. That leaves just a handful of employees at the Atlanta-based social networking startup. In December 2016, the company already fired 30 of its 50 employees.

Since late last year, Yik Yak has largely gone silent. Its Twitter account hasn’t posted since January 4, and its corporate blog has not posted since a month before that. According to Bloomberg, Square has not acquired any other companies since it bought the food delivery startup Caviar in 2014. (Square was founded as a mobile payment company in 2009 by Jack Dorsey, who also founded Twitter.)

Yik Yak did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

Enlarge (credit: Enesse Bhé)

Antivirus provider Webroot is causing a world of trouble for customers. A signature update just nuked hundreds of benign files needed to run Microsoft Windows, as well as apps that run on top of the operating system.

Social media sites ignited on late Monday afternoon with customers reporting that servers and computers alike stopped working as a result of the mishap. The admin and security pundit who goes by the Twitter handle SwiftOnSecurity told Ars that, at the company he or she worked for, the false positive quarantined "several hundred" files used by Windows Insider Preview. Hundreds of "line of business" apps, such as those that track patient appointments or manage office equipment, suffered the same fate. Webroot was also flagging Facebook as a phishing site.

As this post was going live, Webroot's cloud-based system for issuing commands to clients was unable to revert the quarantined files. Officials have yet to confirm they would be able to revert all the bad determinations.

Enlarge / Be a Tachikoma like us, it's bliss!

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At last month's Game Developer's conference, Nintendo set Zelda fans' imaginations running wild with screenshots from a 2D version of Breath of the Wild that was used to prototype the sprawling open-world game. Now, one fan is working to give you a taste of what it would probably be like to play that prototype.

Breath of the NES is still very much a work in progress, but the Game Maker Studio project, hosted on itch.io, is definitely very playable after just a few months' work.

Enlarge (credit: BoatingWithTR.com)

BrickerBot, the botnet that permanently incapacitates poorly secured Internet of Things devices before they can be conscripted into Internet-crippling denial-of-service armies, is back with a new squadron of foot soldiers armed with a meaner arsenal of weapons.

Pascal Geenens, the researcher who first documented what he calls the permanent denial-of-service botnet, has dubbed the fiercest new instance BrickerBot.3. It appeared out of nowhere on April 20, exactly one month after BrickerBot.1 first surfaced. Not only did BrickerBot.3 mount a much quicker number of attacks—with 1,295 attacks coming in just 15 hours—it used a modified attack script that added several "fork bomb" commands designed to more completely shock and awe its targets. BrickerBot.1, by comparison, fired 1,895 volleys during the four days it was active, and the still-active BrickerBot.2 has spit out close to 12 attacks per day.

"Just like BrickerBot.1, this attack was a short but intense burst," Geenens told Ars. "Shorter than the four days BrickerBot.1 lasted, but even more intense. The attacks from BrickerBot.3 came in on a different honeypot than the one that recorded BrickerBot.1. There is, however, no correlation between the devices used in the previous attack versus the ones in this attack."

(credit: Hades2k)

Mass hacking seems to be all the rage currently. A vigilante hacker apparently slipped secure code into vulnerable cameras and other insecure networked objects in the "Internet of Things" so that bad guys can't corral those devices into an army of zombie computers, like what happened with the record-breaking Mirai denial-of-service botnet. The Homeland Security Department issued alerts with instructions for fending off similar “Brickerbot malware,” so-named because it bricks IoT devices.

And perhaps most unusual, the FBI recently obtained a single warrant in Alaska to hack the computers of thousands of victims in a bid to free them from the global botnet, Kelihos.

On April 5, Deborah M. Smith, chief magistrate judge of the US District Court in Alaska, greenlighted this first use of a controversial court order. Critics have since likened it to a license for mass hacking.