Month: May 2018

Enlarge (credit: Ruslan Habalov)

For more than a year, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome may have leaked users’ Facebook usernames, profile pictures, and likes if the users’ browsers visited malicious websites that employed a cutting-edge hack, researchers said Thursday.

The data could be extracted through what’s known as a side-channel vulnerability in the browsers’ implementation of new standards for cascading style sheets introduced in 2016. One of the new features known as the “mix-blend-mode” leaked visual content hosted on Facebook to websites that included an iframe linking to it and some clever code to capture the data. Normally, a security concept known as the same-origin policy forbids content hosted on one domain to be available to a different domain. The vulnerability was significant because it allowed hackers to bypass this bedrock principle for two of the Internet’s most widely used browsers.

The leak was independently discovered by two different research teams, and it was fixed late last year in version 63 of Chrome and two weeks ago in Firefox 60. While the updated browsers no longer pose a threat to user privacy, one of the researchers who discovered the vulnerability said the increasingly powerful graphics capabilities being added in the HTML5 and CSS standards are likely to make similar hacks possible in the future.

Enlarge (credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hit a major milestone today in its move to roll back auto emissions standards that would have had a major impact in lowering the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, the EPA's move reportedly sets it up for conflict with California, the only state in the nation that has an exemption from the EPA's greenhouse gas rules under the Clean Air Act.

According to The New York Times, today the EPA formally submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget its proposal to roll back the fuel economy rules that former President Obama signed off on in the last months of his presidency. The rules would have pushed automakers to keep reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of their vehicles out to 2025.

Soon after President Trump took office, automakers complained to the administration that complying with the EPA's greenhouse gas standards would be too costly, despite having taken part in the negotiations that led to the Obama administration's fuel economy standards. But critics said the auto industry was overplaying the potential harm. A third-party study from the International Council on Clean Transportation found that the technology needed to achieve the 2025 fuel economy standards was even more cost-effective than it had been when the Obama-era standards were negotiated.

Enlarge / Interior of Tesla's Model 3. (credit: Tesla)

Tesla pushed out a software update to Model 3s that dramatically improved the car's braking performance in certain conditions. The update came days after Consumer Reports announced that it could not recommend the vehicle based on inconsistent—and sometimes quite poor—braking performance.

This week, after the update had gone out, Consumer reports tested its car again and found the braking had improved. As a result, the organization is now recommending the Model 3.

The update shows the power of Tesla's over-the-air software update capabilities. But it also raises questions about how much testing Tesla did to its braking systems before launching the Model 3 in the first place.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is led by a one-day sale on PC components over at Amazon. The selection includes modest discounts on graphics cards, SSDs, routers, and portable hard drives. But the highlight of the bunch is a deal on AMD's Ryzen 7 1700X processor, which is down to $215 outright but can effectively be had for $185 with a mail-in rebate. That's as cheap as we've seen the eight-core, overclockable chip on Amazon to date.

We reviewed the 1700X's slightly stronger brother, the Ryzen 7 1800X, when it debuted in early 2017 and found it to be excellent for workstations (at the time), if not quite on the level of Intel's 7th-gen Core chips from a gaming standpoint. AMD has launched a new generation of chips since then, which has contributed to the price dip here, but the updates are relatively incremental. At this mid-range price, the 1800X is good value for those looking to save cash in building decently powerful rig. Just make sure to mail in that rebate on time.

If you have no need for new PC parts, though, we also have deals on iPads, 4K TVs, the Google home Mini, Qi wireless chargers, and more. Have a look for yourself below.

(credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

AT&T has given up its years-long quest to cripple the Federal Trade Commission's authority to regulate broadband providers.

Just weeks ago, AT&T said it intended to appeal its loss in the case to the US Supreme Court before a deadline of May 29. But today, AT&T informed court officials that it has decided not to file a petition to the Supreme Court and did not ask for a deadline extension.

AT&T had been trying to limit the FTC's authority since October 2014, when the FTC sued AT&T for promising unlimited data to wireless customers and then throttling their speeds by as much as 90 percent.

Enlarge / Those finger-print like patterns are dunes on the plain adjacent to the peaks of the al-Idrisi Montes. (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

Part of the wonder of seeing new worlds is the radical difference from the planet you know. But if you know a little bit about the processes that shape our Earth, it’s also enthralling to see those same processes play out under alien conditions. It’s a marriage of exotic and familiar, like an instantly recognizable melody appearing in a style of music you’re hearing for the first time.

One familiar process is the formation of dunes. Large, repeating ridges of wind-blown sand can form in the desert, but they can also form as small ripples can on sandy stream bottoms or beaches. Wherever you have solid particles in a moving medium, dune-like landforms are possible. And we have seen plenty of them on Mars, on Titan, and even on comet 67P, despite its lack of a substantial atmosphere. In a new paper led by Plymouth University’s Matt Telfer, researchers working on the images from the New Horizons probe add another weirdo to the list of dune-bearing worlds—the dwarf planet Pluto.

Solid methane

Obviously, Pluto looks a bit different from the sand sea of the Sahara. Hanging out around -230°C, its surface is mainly covered with solid forms of substances we know as gases, like nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane. With an atmosphere that is 100,000 times thinner than ours, it’s hard to imagine winds pushing much of anything.