Month: October 2017

Enlarge / Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner on the South Lawn of the White House. (credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Days after recent revelations that Jared Kushner, a presidential advisor and the president's son-in-law, had set up a personal e-mail account to conduct White House business, someone with access to that domain (ijkamily.com) changed the domain’s mail exchange (MX) records so that they now point to a Trump Organization server.

The move, which was first reported by USA Today on Tuesday, provides clear evidence that there is not quite as much separation between the Trump Organization and the Trump White House as previously indicated.

The MX records show that they were changed from Microsoft to the Trump Organization shortly after public scrutiny of Kushner’s e-mail account intensified. A domain’s MX records specify which mail servers are allowed to send and receive mail for that domain.

(credit: Randy Stewart / Flickr)

Yahoo said a major security breach in 2013 compromised all three billion accounts the company maintained, a three-fold increase over the estimate it disclosed previously.

The revelation, contained in an updated page about the 2013 hack, is the result of new information and the forensic analysis of an unnamed security consultant. Previously, Yahoo officials said about one billion accounts were compromised. With Yahoo maintaining roughly three billion accounts at the time, the 2013 hack would be among the biggest ever reported.

"We recently obtained additional information and, after analyzing it with the assistance of outside forensic experts, we have identified additional user accounts that were affected," Yahoo officials wrote in the update. "Based on an analysis of the information with the assistance of outside forensic experts, Yahoo has determined that all accounts that existed at the time of the August 2013 theft were likely affected."

Enlarge / Samsung Odyssey headset and motion controllers. (credit: Samsung)

Microsoft announced today that yet another company is going to build a virtual reality headset for its Windows Mixed Reality platform: Samsung.

The Odyssey headset looks to be a cut above the other headsets from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo: its dual-AMOLED screens are slightly higher resolution, at 1400×1600 rather than 1400×1400, and the field of view is 110 degrees rather than 95. It's also a little more adjustable, with a flexible interpupillary distance, to match the headset to your eyes.

The device will go on sale on November 6 and cost $499 with a pair of motion controllers.

Enlarge (credit: Smith Collection Gado/Getty Images)

Just because your resume says you exposed the personal data, including Social Security numbers, of some 143 million Americans while practicing unsafe security, it doesn't mean you can't score a multi-million dollar contract with the Internal Revenue Service. That's the case even if your name is Equifax and you're being contracted by the IRS to "verify taxpayer identity" to combat fraud.

The $7.25 million no-bid contract to Equifax was posted the last day of the fiscal year, Saturday, on the government's Federal Business Opportunities database. It was awarded Friday, three weeks after Equifax announced what Ars has described as "very possibly the worst leak of personal info ever." According to the posting, Equifax will "assist in ongoing identity verification and validations" for the IRS.

The contract was a "sole source order." That means the IRS has determined that Equifax was the only company deemed capable of performing the contract, according to Politico. The IRS, which did not immediately respond for comment, said in the contract posting that "this is considered a critical service that cannot lapse."

Enlarge (credit: DonkeyHotey)

Rob Joyce, the White House cybersecurity czar, said on Tuesday that the government should end using the Social Security number as a national identification method.

"I believe the Social Security number has outlived its usefulness," said Joyce, while speaking at The Washington Post's Cybersecurity Summit. "Every time we use the Social Security number, you put it at risk."

One problem with the Social Security number, he said, is that a victim of identity theft cannot get it changed after it has been stolen.

Enlarge / The Lizardmen's "Geomantic Web" bonuses make them into fantasy landlords. (credit: Creative Assembly)

At release, Total War: Warhammer seriously benefitted from untying the strategy series from its historical roots. The wildly varied Warhammer fantasy universe allowed each of the game's factions to be unique—not just in terms of starting map location and slight differences to cavalry charge speed, but also through wholly different mechanics and campaigns. That variation only grew (and grew more expensive) over time with a glut of DLC.

The factions of Total War: Warhammer 2 aren't quite so diverse. Moment-to-moment abilities and attributes set them apart, but an identical overarching objective ties them back together in largely identical quests to fill in progress bars. Said bars represent resources players accrue, earn, or otherwise cut out of their opponents. The goal is to be the first to fill up the bar and survive subsequent, ever-more-difficult waves of Chaos that appear at specific intervals.

It all just doesn't feel very "Warhammer-y," aside from the encroaching Chaos armies. The universal "now you win" bar is awfully sterile, and the abstract objective is a bean counter's job, not something for the titanic, improbable clash of gods and nature that is Warhammer. Granted, like the rest of the Total War franchise, half of the game is still a large-scale turn-based strategy game, with the other half being colossal, real-time strategy battles you can choose to skip. So a certain amount of bean counting has always been part of the process.

Like the first Total War: Warhammer in particular, though, the economic and political sim elements are much reduced compared to something like Rome II, Empire, or Shogun. On the overworld map, the moves you make with Lizardmen, high and dark elves, or the rat-like Skaven are mostly limited to where you put your armies, whether to have them destroy or occupy settlements, and what new weapons of war to research.

Enlarge / Uber CEO Travis Kalanick delivering a speech last year in Beijing. Kalanick is likely to be on the stand if Waymo v. Uber goes to trial. (credit: Wang K'aichicn/VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—The federal judge presiding in the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit has delayed trial for another two months after castigating lawyers on both sides of the case for being dishonest and telling "half-truths."

"I'm going to give you a schedule, and we're not going to argue about it," US District Judge William Alsup said after a one-hour hearing today. "We're going to pick the jury on November 29. We will start the trial on December 4, and it will run until December 20."

The trial will decide whether Uber has misappropriated trade secrets from Waymo, Google's self-driving car spinoff. Until recently, Uber's self-driving car project was headed up by Anthony Levandowski, a former Googler who has been accused of downloading 14,000 files from Google before he left in January 2016. Levandowski, who is not a defendant in the case, hasn't answered questions about the allegations, instead pleading the Fifth Amendment.