Month: December 2017

Enlarge (credit: Legal Lean)

In July, US Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer held a press conference to denounce a chocolate-flavored energy powder meant for snorting, called Coco Loko. He dubbed it “cocaine on training wheels” and called on the Food and Drug Administration to investigate.

The agency did, it turns out. And though regulators didn’t come up with a description quite as catchy as Schumer’s, their assessment of Coco Loko was even more damning.

Regulators determined that the powder was an unapproved new drug and that its maker, Legal Lean, was unlawfully marketing it, according to a Tuesday announcement. Moreover, the agency also looked into another product by the company, Legal Lean Syrup. The agency found that it, too, was an unapproved drug. The syrup contained an undisclosed sedative, doxylamine, which is found in the over-the-counter sleep-aid Unisom.

(credit: Yuri Samoilov/Flickr)

A surprisingly big number of top-name websites—Facebook and PayPal among them—recently tested positive for a critical, 19-year-old vulnerability that allowed attackers to decrypt encrypted data and sign communications using the sites' secret encryption key.

The vulnerability in the transport layer security protocol for Web encryption was disclosed in 1998 when researcher Daniel Bleichenbacher found it in the TLS predecessor known as secure sockets layer. A flaw in the algorithm that handles RSA encryption keys responded to certain types of errors in a way that divulged potentially sensitive information. With enough specially formed queries, attackers could exploit the weakness in a way that allowed them to decrypt ciphertext even when they didn't have the secret decryption key. SSL architects responded by designing workarounds that suppressed the error messages rather than removing or rewriting the faulty RSA algorithm.

Researchers call the class of crypto vulnerability an Oracle because it provides only "yes" or "no" answers that, over time, can reveal detailed information about the contents of encrypted data. The information allows hackers to carry out what's known as an "adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack."

Enlarge / Erica Joy Baker (center), the head of engineering at Kickstarter, said of former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick: “I don’t need to see Travis back.” (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

SAN FRANCISCO—On the same day that the City by the Bay mourned the sudden passing of its tech-friendly mayor, Ed Lee, various tech leaders came together to discuss the current challenges that women and minorities face in Silicon Valley.

One of the most bold suggestions on Tuesday morning at The Atlantic’s “Inclusion in Tech” conference came from Erica Joy Baker, a senior engineering manager at Kickstarter.

“I don’t need to see Travis back,” she said, referring to the former Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, who resigned in June but remains on the board.

Net neutrality rules will be repealed by the Federal Communications Commission Thursday, barring any unlikely last-minute changes. But net neutrality advocates won't let the vote pass quietly. Today was "Break the Internet" day, in which many websites altered their appearance and urged visitors to contact members of Congress about the pending repeal (see the gallery above for examples from Reddit, Kickstarter, GitHub, Mozilla, and others).

There were also in-person protests last week, and there will be more on the way before the FCC vote. The pressure might be having some effect, as even a few Republican lawmakers are speaking out against the repeal. Democrats were already solidly behind net neutrality rules.

Enlarge / Litecoin's price has doubled in the last 24 hours. (credit: CoinMarketCap)

This month's cryptocurrency boom isn't limited to bitcoin. Over the last 24 hours, two of bitcoin's biggest rivals—Litecoin and Ethereum's ether—have enjoyed huge price gains.

Trading volume has been so intense that one of the leading cryptocurrency exchange services, Coinbase, has suffered downtime.

"Ethereum buys and sells are temporarily disabled," read a notice on the Coinbase status page around 2pm Eastern time. That issue was resolved around 45 minutes later, while trading in litecoins was disabled for about 90 minutes earlier in the day. The status page lists both ether and litecoin trading as having a "Major Outage."