Month: August 2017

"Didn't this device launch earlier this year?"

That's the overwhelming feeling I got after a test drive with the Galaxy Note8. Samsung's earlier flagship for 2017, the Galaxy S8—specifically the Galaxy S8+—is so close to the Note8 I'm not sure why anyone would wait the five months of lag time between the two devices.

(credit: Wikipedia)

In a sign of the soaring demand for zeroday attacks that target software that's becoming increasingly secure, a market-leading broker is offering serious cash for weaponized exploits that work against Signal, WhatsApp, and other mobile apps that offer confidential messaging or privacy.

Zerodium, the Washington, DC-based broker that launched in 2015, said on Wednesday that it would pay $500,000 for fully functional attacks that work against Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, Viber, WeChat, and Telegram. The broker said it would start paying the same rate for exploits against default mobile e-mail apps. Those are among the highest prices Zerodium offers. Only remote jailbreaks for Apple's iOS devices fetch a higher fee, with $1.5 million offered for those that require no user interaction and $1 million for those that do. The jailbreak fees were announced in September 2016 and September 2015, respectively.

"Overall prices are trending up—and quite significantly in many cases, and there's an increased focus on mobile," Adam Caudill, a senior application security consultant at AppSec Consulting, told Ars. "The new $500k targets for messaging and default e-mail apps show what a priority attacking individuals via their devices has become (which makes sense, given the recent increase in state-sponsored malware targeting mobile devices via SMS and the like)."

Enlarge / Even Lego clowns need therapy sometimes. (credit: Pascal / Flickr)

If you’ve ever wondered whether psychotherapy achieves meaningful, long-term change in a person’s life, wonder no more: combined evidence from multiple studies suggests that it does. A meta-analysis published recently in Psychological Bulletin reports that a variety of different therapeutic techniques result in positive changes to personality, especially when it comes to neuroticism, that last over a considerable period of time.

Personality is, as your intuition might tell you, relatively stable—people who start out gregarious and adventurous tend to stay gregarious and adventurous throughout their lives. Assessments of people’s personality traits taken at different times tend to agree pretty well with each other. But that doesn’t mean personality is static: personal growth, life experiences, and age all play their part, and people’s personalities do change somewhat throughout their lives—usually for the better.

An OCEAN of change

But it can be tricky to work out precisely what is being evaluated in measures of personality like the “Big Five” of Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism ("OCEAN"). Any personality questionnaire will come up with metrics that capture both someone's stable, long-term tendencies (their traits), as well as how they are feeling in a given moment or phase in their life (their state). So, it’s not enough to find that therapy brings about personality changes—it’s also necessary to figure out how deep those changes go.

Enlarge (credit: gofundme.com/buytwitter)

Anybody who knows that Donald Trump is president of the United States probably knows that his Twitter feed is his mouthpiece to the world. He criticizes global leaders, threatens war, berates the media, and, well, you name it. It's no understatement to suggest that the nation's 45th chief executive has assumed the Twitter Presidency.

Now there is a movement afoot to silence the @realdDonaldTrump handle, which has 36.6 million followers and has tweeted more than 35,000 times. Despite allegations that Trump is breaching Twitter's terms of service for using the service to threaten violence, Twitter isn't about to kick off its most high-profile tweeter.

Valerie Plame Wilson (credit: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images)

So a former CIA undercover operative is trying to do what Twitter won't: end the Twitter Presidency. Although her plan most likely will never come to fruition, Valerie Plame Wilson has started a GoFundMe page to raise $1 billion, which would make her Twitter's largest shareholder and give her great monetary influence over Twitter's policies.

Enlarge (credit: Gordon Plant)

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, aka version 1709, is due to be finished next month. Accordingly, the builds released to the Windows Insider Program are now heading toward stabilization, with bug-fixing the priority.

This has a somewhat greater significance than was the case for prior Windows 10 updates because of the "Skip Ahead" scheme Microsoft introduced a few weeks ago. Most members of the Insider Program will continue to receive Redstone 3 builds and head toward stabilization and finalization for the Fall Creators Update release. Those who opted in to the (limited) Skip Ahead group, however, will imminently be switched to a different Windows branch. This branch will begin development of the Redstone 4 release that's due in March 2018.

Once the Fall Creators Update release is out, all Insiders will be moved to the Redstone 4 branch, and the program will continue as before.

(credit: Brad Smith)

Major home Internet providers in the US don't typically expand into each other's territory, but this week, AT&T said it is launching high-speed Internet in parts of New York City and other major metro areas outside of its traditional wireline footprint.

The new service is for apartment and condominium buildings, so don't expect to get it if you live in a single-family house. It's also only available in cases where AT&T has gotten access into buildings, which is often a problem for competing ISPs because of exclusive arrangements between providers and landlords. But for some consumers, the new AT&T launch could provide some much-needed competition.

AT&T's new deployment uses G.fast, a technology that relies on fiber deployments into neighborhoods and copper wires to make the connection inside each building. But instead of old phone lines, AT&T said it is using coaxial cables to make the final connection to consumers.

Enlarge / A sign hanging inside a San Francisco Sprint store. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A patent-licensing entity that sued the five largest cell phone carriers has seen its biggest victory slip away.

Prism won a $30 million verdict against Sprint in 2015, when a jury found that Sprint violated US Patents No. 8,127,345 and 8,387,155, both of which describe methods of "managing access to protected computer resources." According to the complaint (PDF), filed in 2012, Sprint's Simply Everything Plan and Everything Data Plan were both methods of "controlling access to Sprint’s protected network resources" and thus infringed the patents.

Earlier this month, though, US District Judge Lyle Strom ruled (PDF) that Prism won't be able to collect on its verdict. Prism used the same patents to take on T-Mobile, which defeated the patents and prevented Prism from collecting the Sprint verdict as well.