Month: February 2018

Enlarge / Key on digital display (credit: Getty Images | D3Damon)

A new system that securely checks whether your passwords have been made public in known data breaches has been integrated into the widely used password manager, 1Password. This new tool lets customers find out if their passwords have been leaked without ever transmitting full credentials to a server.

Security researcher Troy Hunt this week announced his new version of "Pwned Passwords," a search tool and list of more than 500 million passwords that have been leaked in data breaches. Users can access it online and developers can connect applications to it via an API.

Within a day, the company AgileBits had integrated Hunt's new tool into the 1Password password manager. AgileBits' announcement describes how it works:

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Yesterday, federal prosecutors unsealed a new indictment against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. The indictment contains new evidence that Manafort hid millions of dollars in overseas income from US authorities, and it charges Manafort and his associate Richard Gates with numerous counts of tax and bank fraud.

The indictment also suggests that Manafort's lack of technology savvy helped prosecutors build a case against Manafort and Gates. The pair allegedly submitted a variety of fraudulent documents to lenders in order to borrow money against properties purchased with overseas funds—funds that were never reported to the IRS. One reason prosecutors were able to build a paper trail against the pair: Manafort needed Gates's help to convert a PDF document to Word format and back again.

In 2016, Manafort allegedly wanted to create a fake profit-and-loss statement for his company, Davis Manafort Partners, in order to inflate his income and qualify for a loan.

Enlarge / A happy Greg Wyler after a launch in 2013. (credit: JODY AMIET/AFP/Getty Images)

As Thursday's SpaceX launch of two test satellites vividly demonstrated, several companies are moving ahead with ambitious plans to design, build, and fly hardware capable of delivering broadband Internet from space. However, as intense as the battle for broadband may be in orbit, the fight is also heating up on the ground. In particular, there is a controversy quietly simmering at the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC.

In a somewhat bizarre situation, the founder and chairman of one company seeking to deliver broadband services, OneWeb, has founded a second company to compete with himself. In response, other companies proposing satellite constellations have objected, which has added considerable spice to an already heated battle for valuable spectrum.

Greg Wyler

The person at the center of the controversy is Greg Wyler, a colorful American entrepreneur who is among the most well-known people in the satellite Internet industry. More than 15 years ago, his company, Terracom, sought to bring the Internet to Rwanda through a contract to run fiber optic cables across the country. A few years later, after Terracom's targets to connect schools to the Internet were not met and amid questions about the company's business practices, Rwanda fined Terracom, and Wyler was out as its leader.

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Mobile World Congress kicks off this weekend, and to celebrate, Google is launching version 1.0 of its "ARCore" Augmented Reality framework. Just like Apple's ARKit, ARCore allows normal smartphones to run augmented reality apps. ARCore apps will either overlay 3D objects on top of the phone's camera feed or allow you to use the phone as a camera in a 3D world, moving your viewpoint around as you move the phone.

For version 1.0, Google is greatly expanding the compatible devices for ARCore. Since ARCore requires calibration and a custom setup per device model, the minimum requirements aren't based on an Android version but are instead limited to specific models. While the preview only supported the Google Pixels and Samsung Galaxy S8, today ARCore 1.0 is coming to a wide selection of flagship Android phones.

Google's blog post lists the following phones as compatible: "Google’s Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL; Samsung’s Galaxy S8, S8+, Note8, S7 and S7 edge; LGE’s V30 and V30+ (Android O only); ASUS’s Zenfone AR; and OnePlus’s OnePlus 5." All together, that's about 100 million devices that can run augmented reality apps. In the future, Google says, "Samsung, Huawei, LGE, Motorola, ASUS, Xiaomi, HMD/Nokia, ZTE, Sony Mobile, and Vivo" will bring ARCore to their upcoming smartphone releases.

We're as stunned as you are, Rey. (credit: Lucasfilm)

A federal judge in California has rejected Disney's effort to stop Redbox from reselling download codes of popular Disney titles like Frozen, Beauty and the Beast, and the latest Star Wars movies.

Judge Dean Pregerson's Tuesday ruling invoked the little-used doctrine of copyright misuse, which holds that a copyright holder loses the right to enforce a copyright if the copyright is being abused. Pregerson faulted Disney for tying digital download codes to physical ownership of discs, a practice that he argued ran afoul of copyright's first sale doctrine, which guarantees customers the right to resell used DVDs.

If the ruling were upheld on appeal, it would have sweeping implications. It could potentially force Hollywood studios to stop bundling digital download codes with physical DVDs and force video game companies to rethink their own practices.