Month: May 2017

The inventor of RSA's famous SecurID dongle has sued (PDF) Apple and Visa, alleging that both Apple Pay and Visa infringe four patents he owns.

Kenneth Weiss was the founder and CEO of Security Dynamics, the company that created the SecurID token used around the world to access secure computer networks. That company ultimately acquired RSA Security and took its name, then was bought by EMC.

Weiss left the company in 1996. By 2011, he had founded a new company, Universal Secure Registry, where he was working on mobile phone security.

Enlarge / Next-to-last supper? (credit: Ubisoft Montreal)

LOS ANGELES—I leaned back in a hotel-suite chair and took in a bonkers video-game pitch from an Ubisoft producer while folding and unfolding the tiny American flag I'd been given moments before. The 13-year-old Far Cry gaming series returns once more in February 2018, and, at least conceptually, this might be its most intense entry yet. While Far Cry games traditionally drop players into exotic, international locales with only a gun and a prayer, this year's entry, Far Cry 5, lands in the U-S-of-A.

Specifically, the open, rural wilds of Montana. Your mission: invade a militarized cult's massive compound and take down its gun-toting, Jesus-invoking leader.

In another time and place, I might have looked at this pitch and thought about the bygone '90s era of David Koresh and Ted Kaczynski—some distant, fuzzy memory that is finally ready for an over-the-top virtual run-and-gun video game. But Ubisoft has picked a heated time to double down on something we rarely see in the gaming world: Americans fighting Americans over the concept of what "America" is. The promotional-swag flag in my hand kept reminding me that this Far Cry, no matter how it plays, certainly won't feel far away this time.

Enlarge / Dr. Jack Gilbert, sampling a hospital room before the microbial mayhem begins. (credit: University of Chicago)

In the first few hours of a hospital stay, the microbes living on the walls and other surfaces of the hospital try to overthrow your skin microbiome. Then all hell breaks loose. Within 24 hours—and possibly as little as seven—your microbes rise up to beat back the invaders. Before the germ clouds settle, your microbiome has invaded the room.

At least, that seems to be the standard way of things, according to a new study in Science Translational Medicine. For the study, researchers at the University of Chicago, led by microbiologist Jack Gilbert, meticulously tracked the microbial comings and goings of a new hospital over the course of a year. They started from before the hospital opened and kept researching past when it was full of patients. The researchers set out to understand microbial dynamics so they can one day tweak them. Gilbert envisions future probiotics—not pills or lotions, but surface sprays and wall treatments—that can bulk up beneficial bacteria capable of ejecting deadly pathogens and even prime helpful immune defenses in patients.

The University of Chicago Medicine

Enlarge (credit: Irradiated Hound Entertainment)

News broke earlier in May that Rebellion—the games and publishing company that owns 2000AD, the world's greatest comic—has joined up with IM Global to bring more Judge Dredd to our screens. In interviews since, Rebellion's bosses have said that they hope to also adapt other 2000AD characters for live-action. But thanks to some very dedicated fans out there, we've got something to tide us over until that happens: Search/Destroy: A Strontium Dog Fan Film.

Judge Dredd may well be 2000AD's best-known character: a hard-assed lawman of the future who's more of an anti-hero than a role model. But readers of the comic will know that Strontium Dog's Johnny Alpha is at least his equal. Also created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra (who were responsible for Judge Dredd), he's a mutant from about 60 years in Dredd's future.

Alpha works as a bounty hunter for the Search/Destroy agency. SD bounty hunters are all mutants, banished from an Earth that has been ravaged by more than one nuclear war in its time—hence, they're more commonly known as "Strontium Dogs"—and Alpha's radiation-induced gift are his glowing eyes, which can see through solid objects and even read the contents of someone's mind. Together with his partner (and Viking-out-of-time) Wolf Sternhammer, Alpha travels the galaxy (and sometimes through time) to do the dirty, difficult jobs no one else can manage.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Thinkstock)

(In the wake of this spring's Senate ruling nixing FCC privacy regulations imposed on ISPs, you may be (even more) worried about how your data is used, misused, and abused. There have been a lot of opinions on this topic since, ranging from "the sky is falling" to "move along, citizen, nothing to see here." The fact is, ISPs tend to be pretty unscrupulous, sometimes even ruthless, about how they gather and use their customers' data. You may not be sure how it's a problem if your ISP gives advertisers more info to serve ads you'd like to see—but what about when your ISP literally edits your HTTP traffic, inserting more ads and possibly breaking webpages?

With a Congress that has demonstrated its lack of interest in protecting you from your ISP, and ISPs that have repeatedly demonstrated a "whatever-we-can-get-away-with" attitude toward customers' data privacy and integrity, it may be time to look into how to get your data out from under your ISP's prying eyes and grubby fingers intact. To do that, you'll need a VPN.

The scope of the problem (and of the solution)

Before you can fix this problem, you need to understand it. That means knowing what your ISP can (and cannot) detect (and modify) in your traffic. HTTPS traffic is already relatively secure—or, at least, its content is. Your ISP can't actually read the encrypted traffic that goes between you and an HTTPS website (at least, they can't unless they convince you to install a MITM certificate, like Lenovo did to unsuspecting users of its consumer laptops in 2015). However, ISPs do know that you visited that website, when you visited it, how long you stayed there, and how much data went back and forth.