Month: January 2018

Enlarge (credit: ICEBRG)

Researchers have uncovered four malicious extensions with more than 500,000 combined downloads from the Google Chrome Web Store, a finding that highlights a key weakness in what's widely considered to be the Internet's most secure browser. Google has since removed the extensions.

Researchers from security firm ICEBRG stumbled on the find after detecting a suspicious spike in outbound network traffic coming from a customer workstation. They soon discovered it was generated by a Chrome extension called HTTP Request Header as it used the infected machine to surreptitiously visit advertising-related Web links. The researchers later discovered three other Chrome extensions—Nyoogle, Stickies, and Lite Bookmarks—that did much the same thing. ICEBRG suspects the extensions were part of a click-fraud scam that generated revenue from per-click rewards. But the researchers warned that the malicious add-ons could just as easily have been used to spy on the people or organizations who installed them.

"In this case, the inherent trust of third-party Google extensions, and accepted risk of user control over these extensions, allowed an expansive fraud campaign to succeed," ICEBRG researchers wrote in a report published Friday. "In the hands of a sophisticated threat actor, the same tool and technique could have enabled a beachhead into target networks."

Enlarge / The Settings app is gaining new powers to control your PC's settings. (credit: Thurrott.com)

The Windows user interface has a certain archaeological quality to it. While the upper layers tend to be new—using the styling and conventions of the day—dig a little deeper and you can find elements that are decades old. With each Windows release, Microsoft has heaped new stuff onto the pile, but it hasn't spent much time going back and revamping the old bits. Very occasionally, the relics of yesteryear are identified and excised, but more often than not, they're left alone.

One area where this is particularly plain is Control Panel. Control Panel spans many eras of Windows development, and so Windows' settings are spread across three different styles of interface. The very oldest are the individual Control Panel applets in their tabbed dialog boxes; more recent are the Explorer-based Control Panels. The very newest is the Settings app.

With Windows 10, the company has, for the first time ever, taken serious strides toward modernizing even old parts of the operating system. With each new update, more and more settings are being moved from Control Panel into the Settings app. This creates the possibility that perhaps one day Windows will have a single application that is used for all its major settings and configurations.

Enlarge / Paragon sure can look cool, but in terms of gameplay, fans argue that updates have left something to be desired. (credit: Epic Games)

Epic Games' Fortnite proved to be one of 2017's weirdest gaming success stories. Following years of sluggish development and a half-baked "paid early access" launch in July, the game received a new, entirely free mode in an update for all PC and console versions. That mode, the incredibly PUBG-like Fortnite Battle Royale, has gone on to rack up millions of players (though exactly how many is unclear, since Epic still describes both the paid and free content as a combined number of over 40 million).

The mode's success hasn't left every Epic Games fan satisfied, however. On Tuesday, the company put an exclamation point on growing rumblings from fans of one of its other free-to-play products, the "action MOBA" game Paragon, by admitting that Fortnite BR's success may be Paragon's undoing.

In a post at Paragon's official Reddit community, an unnamed Epic staffer admits that the game's various updates since its 2016 "early access" launch have not driven "large enough" player growth. For the uninitiated, Paragon launched both as an Unreal Engine 4 showcase and as a take on games like Dota 2 and League of Legends, with a more active, behind-the-character camera angle (a formula seen in other recent F2P games, including Smite and Gigantic).

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Hans Jonatan left Denmark in 1802 and eventually started a new life as an immigrant in Iceland. But he was an unusual Icelander. Unlike most Icelanders—and even most immigrants to Iceland—Hans Jonatan was mixed-race and a former slave. By piecing together genetic information from his descendants, scientists in Iceland have now reconstructed a substantial portion of Jonatan's own genome and genetic history.

Jonatan's history has been a subject of fascination, not only because he was an unexpected person to find in 19th-century Iceland, but because of his role in Danish legal history. His journey started in the Caribbean, where he was born to an enslaved mother in the then-Danish colony of St. Croix. Jonatan and his mother were brought along when the plantation-owning family returned to Denmark, but Jonatan managed to escape and ended up joining the Danish Navy.

When he was eventually caught and imprisoned, his lawyer argued for his emancipation on the grounds that slavery was illegal in Denmark, albeit still legal in Danish colonies. Jonatan lost the case, and the judge ordered that Jonatan should be returned to the Caribbean. He escaped again and disappeared from Denmark, turning up in 1805 in Iceland.

Enlarge / FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn addresses protesters outside the Federal Communication Commission building to rally against the end of net neutrality rules on December 14, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )

Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia today kicked off a lawsuit to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules. Advocacy groups are also suing the FCC.

The states suing the FCC are New York, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. That's every US state with a Democratic attorney general. Republican state attorneys general did not join the petition.

"The petition is the first step by states to attempt to block the FCC's decision, and it will allow the attorneys general to move forward with the appeal in the future," said an announcement from Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson.

Jonathan Gitlin

DETROIT—Although we've been covering the auto industry for almost four years, probably my favorite car remains one of the first that we reviewed here at Ars: the BMW i8. What's not to like about a plug-in hybrid sports car with a carbon fiber chassis that, even when driven hard, will return more than 25mpg?

At this year's North American International Auto Show, BMW revealed the mid-life refresh for this clever machine. The engineers at BMW i have shown restraint, though. According to Alexander Kotouc, head of BMW i product management, that's in large part due to feedback from customers.