Month: February 2018

Enlarge (credit: Malwarebytes)

Con artists pushing tech-support scams have an arsenal of ways to lock up the browsers of potential marks. On Tuesday, a researcher disclosed a new weapon that freezes Google Chrome, which, by most measures, is the Internet's most widely used browser.

The point of all the techniques is to render a browser unusable immediately after it displays a fake error message reporting some sort of security breach. Given the appearance of a serious crash that can't be fixed simply by exiting the site, end users are more likely to be worked into a panic and call the phone number included in the warning. Once called, the scammers—posing as representatives from Microsoft or another legitimate company—stand a better chance of tricking the caller into providing a credit card number in return for tech support to fix the non-existent security problem. The scams are often transmitted through malicious advertisements or legitimate sites that have been hacked.

A new technique reported by security provider Malwarebytes works against Chrome by abusing the programming interface known as the window.navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob. By combining the API with other functions, the scammers force the browser to save a file to disk, over and over, at intervals so fast it's impossible to see what's happening. Within five to 10 seconds, the browser becomes completely unresponsive. Users are left viewing a page that looks like the left side of this image:

Enlarge / David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, newly announced as writers and producers of another Star Wars film series. (credit: Lucasfilm)

How many Star Wars film series do you think you can stomach?

Ahead of the current trilogy's conclusion—and before we even see a glimpse of Rian Johnson's upcoming, separate-storyline trilogy project—the powers that be at Lucasfilm announced another Star Wars film series on Tuesday. The news is light on details, save an important detail: this trilogy will be helmed by current Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.

The official announcement includes praise from Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, along with Benioff and Weiss admitting to feeling a mix of "honored" and "terrified" by their newest gig. The two confirmed that their work on Star Wars films as writers and producers will begin once the final season of HBO's Game of Thrones wraps. HBO announced last month that fans will have to wait until 2019 to see that series' conclusion, so the duo has a little ways to go before going full-steam into a world of Midi-chlorians.

Enlarge / Travis Kalanick, one of Uber's co-founders, seen here in 2013. (credit: Fortune Live Media / Flickr)

SAN FRANCISCO—In highly-anticipated testimony wrapping up the second day of trial, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick confirmed that Uber's primary competitor in self-driving cars is indeed Waymo, now a division of Alphabet, Google's parent company.

"Do you believe they are in the lead?" Waymo's attorney, Charles Verhoeven, asked him.

"Yes," Kalanick said.

Enlarge / Now I'm protected, apparenty, after troubleshooting with Equifax.

Last week, I reported about the travails I and others experienced while trying to use a new service from Equifax called "Lock & Alert." The service, which is front-ended by a website and a mobile application, allows individuals to place or remove a "security lock" on their credit reports with a click or a finger-swipe. After installing the app I (and reporters from The New York Times as well) encountered some usability issues—as in, the app wasn't working at all.

On Friday afternoon, a spokesperson for Equifax reached out to me and offered to connect me with a senior technical support person to figure out what was going on. Yesterday, we got on the phone to work out the problem. Part of the fault for my issues rested between my chair and the touchscreen of my phone, and a whole bunch more rested with the application itself and Equifax's help line. The app is now functioning as intended. But what the app does, exactly, requires a reading of the website's fine print.

Data validation is hard

When I set up an account from my phone, I entered my email address with a typo at the end—".cm" instead of ".com." Instead of telling me that I had a malformed email address, the app went ahead and created the account, but then gave me a mysterious error message that instructed me to call technical support. This, I was told by the Equifax tech support representative I spoke to yesterday, was a feature, not a bug: my email address had triggered a fraud warning that a human being needed to address.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

In early January, Senator John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, called upon Apple to answer for the lack of transparency it showed surrounding its slow-down practices for aging iPhones. Today, Thune's office released Apple's response: a five-page letter in which Apple reiterates the slow-down saga. While the letter contains little new information, Apple does touch upon how it may handle customers who already paid full price for battery replacements. The company also hinted at how newer iPhone models will deal with aging battery issues, but Apple did so in a way that doesn't instill confidence that it will, in fact, be more transparent with its practices in the future.

In the letter dated February 2, 2018, Apple explains how the lithium-ion batteries found in its iPhones age over time and become less able to handle high workloads. To avoid unexpected shutdowns caused by these aging batteries, Apple issued a software update that we now know included a feature that deliberately slowed down the performance of older iPhones to prevent such shutdowns.

Apple addressed transparency only by noting that its updated iOS 10.2.1 ReadMe notes included mention of the power management feature and that it issued a statement to press outlets about seeing "positive results" from the software update.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

Amazon has announced it is dumping the lock-screen ads from its Prime Exclusive Phone program. Since 2016, the massive online retailer has been selling low-end Android phones loaded with ads and Amazon software at a discount of around $50 (and in one case, a $200 discount!). Now, the biggest advertising surface on the phones, the lock screen, is being scrubbed of advertising.

In its FAQ, Amazon spins the change as "Amazon being nice" by saying "This change allows you to personalize your Prime Exclusive Phone's lock screen and to more easily use your phone's unlock technologies, such as facial recognition and fingerprint sensors." The move is more likely related to Google's recent ban on lock-screen ads from non-lock-screen apps, though.

In December, Google added a new rule to the Google Play Developer Policy saying "Unless the exclusive purpose of the app is that of a lock screen, apps may not introduce ads or features that monetize the locked display of a device." The goal of the rule as it is written seems to be not to outright ban all lock-screen ads, but to stop apps from misleadingly displaying lock-screen ads without the user's consent. As a user, it would be very hard to identify which app was displaying lock-screen apps, since any game or app would technically be able to take over the lock screen.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today the Dealmaster is bringing you another discount on a high-end desktop PC: this time, a $165 deal on a Dell XPS machine with a Core i7-8700 processor, a Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics card, and a 512GB SSD. That should be more than enough to blast through whatever games are left in your backlog.

Beyond the premium gaming rigs, we've also got deals on a number of Amazon gadgets, including the Echo Show and Echo Spot, the ever-reliable Kindle Paperwhite, and a few Fire tablets. There's more on top of that, too, so make sure to peruse the whole list below.

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