Month: April 2018

Enlarge (credit: Dominic Lipinski/PA Images via Getty Images)

Facebook has been in contact with “several major US hospitals” as part of now-cancelled plans to combine patients’ anonymized information with Facebook’s own user data as part of a research project

However, according to CNBC, the plan has been “put on pause” in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica debacle.

“This work has not progressed past the planning phase, and we have not received, shared, or analyzed anyone’s data,” an unnamed Facebook spokesperson told CNBC.

(credit: Sean Gallagher)

This week, two separate security alerts have revealed major holes in devices from Moxa, an industrial automation networking company. In one case, attackers could potentially send commands to a device's operating system by using them as a username in a login attempt. In another, the private key for a Web server used to manage network devices could be retrieved through an HTTP GET request.

The first vulnerability, in Moxa's AWK-3131A 802.11n industrial wireless networking gear—which can act as an access point, bridge, or client device—was revealed by Cisco Talos on April 3. Because of the way user authentication for multiple features works—leveraging the "loginutils" tool of the Busybox operating system—the usernames from failed login attempts are processed in such a way that they could be leveraged to inject command-line instructions by using punctuation to separate the command from the rest of the command-line output.

"Exploitation of this vulnerability has been confirmed via Telnet, SSH, and the local console port," Patrick DeSantis and Dave McDaniel of Cisco Talos wrote in their report. "It is suspected that the web application may also be vulnerable as it relies on loginutils and examination of the iw_event_user binary reveals 'fail' messages for 'WEB,' 'TELNET,' and 'SSH.'"
Cisco Talos revealed the vulnerability to Moxa in December of 2017. There's no word on whether a patch has been issued.

Enlarge / The view of Baxter Street as seen from N. Alvarado Street, in Los Angeles. (credit: Google Maps)

It’s a common story: small towns and residents living on once-quiet streets are sometimes annoyed by the influx of traffic that Waze, traffic wayfinding apps, and ride-hailing services have wrought.

But residents along Baxter Street in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood—reportedly one of the steepest streets in America (comprising two major hills)—are now banding together to try to change local traffic patterns. Neighbors have contacted city officials and Waze’s parent company, Google, to try to mitigate the problem.

They believe that a lot of drivers are using Baxter as a way to avoid Glendale Boulevard, a nearby thoroughfare.

Enlarge / You can still buy into and blast through Lawbreakers, but Boss Key confirmed on Thursday that the game's original update "road map" has been effectively canceled. (credit: Nexon / Boss Key)

Lawbreakers, the 2017 video game that saw Cliff "cliffyb" Bleszinski (Unreal, Gears of War) come out of game-design retirement, has admitted defeat in the competitive online-shooter fray.

A Thursday announcement from developer Boss Key Productions confirmed that the game will only be "supported in its current state," meaning that it will no longer receive major content updates and perhaps not even minor tuning ones. The reason, Boss Key explained, is that Lawbreakers "failed to find enough of an audience to generate the funds necessary to keep it sustained in the manner we had originally planned for and anticipated."

The news also included a confirmation that the developer will not convert the $29.99 game to a free-to-play product. "While a pivot to free-to-play may seem like the easiest change to make, a change of this magnitude takes publishing planning and resources to do it," the developer wrote.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today the Dealmaster has a discount on a configuration of Dell's Inspiron 15 5000 laptop with a 7th-gen Intel Core i7 chip, 8GB of RAM, and a hearty 512GB SSD for $600 with the coupon code below. The main hindrance here is the display: it's 15 inches but stuck at an unimpressive 1366x768 resolution. Still, even if that chip is technically a generation old, this notebook packs a decent amount of power for the price.

If you can't get onboard there, though, we've also got deals on a well-reviewed 4K monitor from LG, SiliconDust's popular HDHomeRun tuner, a four-pack of Tile Bluetooth trackers, microSD cards, Nintendo Switch accessories, and affordable wireless headphones. There's a good variety, so have a look at the full list below.

(credit: TechBargains)

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