Month: October 2017

DANIEL DAN SORABJI/AFP/Getty Images

Residents of England awoke on Monday morning to a sky that looked very much like a scene from the movie Blade Runner—red and hazy. Fortunately this isn't science fiction—or even pollution. Rather, it's a combination of the rare, powerful ex-hurricane Ophelia's winds and African dust.

The large, extra-tropical cyclone that brought high winds and damaging seas to Ireland on Monday also produced a huge swath of powerful southerly winds that brought Saharan dust from the west coast of Africa all the way north across the Atlantic and western Europe into the United Kingdom.

Enlarge / Android users: your Wi-Fi combo can be set to all zeros.

A paper by two Belgian researchers has cast more light on the vulnerabilities discovered in the Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) implementations on most, if not all, wireless networking devices that use the protocol. Dubbed "KRACK" (Key Reinstallation AttaCK), the attack "abuses design or implementation flaws in cryptographic protocols to reinstall an already-in-use key," wrote Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) in the paper, released today.

The report came after wide disclosure of the problems, as Ars reported Sunday night. The research is built upon previous explorations of weaknesses in WPA2's component protocols, and some of the attacks mentioned in the paper were previously acknowledged to be theoretically possible. However, the authors have turned these vulnerabilities into proof-of-concept code, "and found that every Wi-Fi device is vulnerable to some variant of our attacks. Notably, our attack is exceptionally devastating against Android 6.0: it forces the client into using a predictable all-zero encryption key."

While Windows and iOS devices are immune to one flavor of the attack, they are susceptible to others. And all major operating systems are vulnerable to at least one form of the KRACK attack. And in an addendum posted today, the researchers noted that things are worse than they appeared at the time the paper was written:

Enlarge (credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

The Supreme Court declined Monday to review a petition asserting that the term "google" has become too generic and therefore unqualified for trademark protection.

Without comment, the justices set aside a legal challenge claiming that Google had fallen victim to "genericide" and should no longer be trademarked. A lawsuit claimed the word "google" had become synonymous with the term "search the Internet" and therefore could no longer sustain a trademark. For the moment, Google will keep its trademark—unlike the manufacturers of the teleprompter, thermos, hoover, aspirin, and videotape. They were once trademarked but lost that status after they were deemed too generic.

In a petition that the high court refused to hear, the justices were told that "There is no single word other than google that conveys the action of searching the Internet using any search engine."

After busting onto the retro console re-release scene with a high-end, $500+ NES (and a slightly cheaper follow-up), Analogue is now turning its focus to a recreation of the Super NES. The newly announced Super Nt advertises lag-free 1080p HDMI output and full compatibility with more than 2,200 Super NES and Super Famicom cartridges (and controllers) at a more mass-market-friendly price of $190.

There have been plenty of other "clone" consoles designed to let you play Super NES cartridges on more modern displays, but they all rely on software-based emulation or knock-off chips. That means they're not always compatible with every game made for the original Super NES, and such consoles can make some games susceptible to glitchy or inaccurate sound and graphics (absolutely perfect SNES emulation is a surprisingly difficult lift). The Super Nt, on the other hand, runs off an Altera Cyclone V FPGA, which directly simulates the circuitry found in the original hardware for improved compatibility and accuracy. The Analogue team says it spent "thousands of hours" engineering the FPGA to be "free of compromises" for 16-bit gameplay.