Month: December 2017

Enlarge (credit: Dan Lunt, University of Bristol)

A central conceit of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books (and the popular HBO series Game of Thrones based on them) is that the seasons of the planet where they take place are not as predictable as the Earth’s annual cycle. Somehow the phrase “winter is coming” wouldn’t seem as foreboding if you could reply, “Yes, that usually happens in December through February.”

But how could a planet have unruly seasons? Earth’s seasons are due to the tilt of its axis. During one part of Earth’s orbit, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun, with the resulting indirect sunlight spread thin over the surface of the hemisphere, causing winter. On the opposite side of its orbit, summer comes as this hemisphere is tilted toward direct sunlight. There isn’t much room in such clockwork for randomness.

Well, if you’ve ever wanted to debate fan theories, here’s an excellent new resource for you to draw from: a real climate model simulation of Westeros and Essos.

Communists. (credit: 东方)

2016 saw a significant drop-off in cyber-espionage by China in the wake of a 2015 agreement between US President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Xi Jingping. But over the course of 2017, espionage-focused breach attempts by Chinese hackers have once again been on the rise, according to researchers at CrowdStrike. Those attempts were capped off by a series of attacks in October and November on organizations involved in research on Chinese economic policy, US-China relations, defense, and international finance. The attackers were likely companies contracted by the Chinese military, according to Adam Myers, vice president of intelligence at CrowdStrike.

The drop in Chinese cyber-espionage may have been influenced by the 2015 agreement, reached as the US considered imposing sanctions against China. The US did so in the wake of the massive breach at the Office of Management and Budget—an operation attributed to China—and a vast economic espionage campaign in which Chinese hackers were alleged to have breached more than 600 organizations in the US over a five-year period.

But Myers told Ars that the drop may also have been because of a reorganization of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA), in which "they did a rightsizing and reduced 300 positions out of PLA's cyber-operations units," Myers said.

Enlarge / Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Alphabet Inc., in Paris in 2017. (credit: Christophe Morin/IP3/Getty Images)

Alphabet Inc. issued an announcement on Thursday confirming a major executive shake-up: Eric Schmidt is out as the company's executive chairman of the board of directors, effective when the company holds its next board meeting in January 2018. At that point, he will transition to a role of "technical advisor" for Alphabet and still serve on its board as a member.

"Larry [Page], Sergey [Brin], Sundar [Pichai], and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet's evolution for this transition," Schmidt said as part of the announcement. "The Alphabet structure is working well, and Google and the Other Bets are thriving." He noted one possible explanation for the transition: to "expand" his efforts in the worlds of philanthropy and "science and technology issues." (This could, among other things, include more vocal opposition to lobbyists and other firms who deny climate change and denounce net neutrality.)

The announcement includes statements from Alphabet CEO Larry Page and independent board director John Hennessy thanking Schmidt for 17 years of contributions to Google and Alphabet. It also suggests that a "non-executive chairman" will be appointed in 2018.

Security researchers at a German security firm, SySS, have shown that the Windows Hello facial recognition can be tricked by using specially prepared printouts of photographs. Microsoft added an "enhanced anti-spoofing" mode in the Windows 10 Creators Update earlier this year that properly defeats the attack, but it's neither enabled by default nor compatible with all Windows Hello hardware.

The obvious question with any kind of facial recognition-based biometric authentication system is, how easily can it be tricked with a photograph? Since it's easy to take a picture of someone's face, often without them even knowing, a facial recognition system that can be fooled by a photo isn't much use. The Windows Hello system has two main parts: there's the physical hardware, which for Hello is a webcam with infrared illumination and detection, and the software algorithms, which are part of Microsoft's Biometric Framework. With this design, Microsoft can refine and improve the algorithms, and the improvements should work for any compatible hardware.

Windows Hello's infrared requirement should protect it from being spoofed by regular photos. So what the researchers from SySS did was use a photo taken with an infrared camera. This photo was then adjusted to change its contrast and brightness and printed at a low resolution on a laser printer. The resulting picture was successful at authenticating a user with Hello on two separate devices: a Surface Pro 4, using its integrated camera, and a laptop, using a discrete LilBit USB camera.

Enlarge / The Google Play Developer Console will stop accepting old apps in 2018. (credit: Google Play)

While Apple's app store is heavily regulated, the Google Play Store has mostly lived its life under Google's laissez-faire attitude. As long as you didn't get caught by Google's malware scanning, your app was free to do just about anything.

But lately, Google's hands-off approach seems to be changing. The company tried to restrict Android's powerful accessibility APIs only to accessibility apps, but after a power user revolt, Google is currently rethinking that plan.

The Play Store's biggest change is coming in 2018, though. Recently Google announced it will start setting a minimum API level that new and updated apps will be required to use. This is a technical change but a massive one. Basically, Google will stop accepting old app code from developers. The move won't harm support for devices running old versions of Android, but it will require developers to adopt new Android features and restrictions as they come out.