Month: May 2018

Enlarge / Encrypting DNS traffic between your device and a "privacy-focused" provider can keep someone from spying on where your browser is pointed or using DNS attacks to send you somewhere else. (credit: Westend61 / Getty Images)

In this op-ed, a group of noted security researchers take aim at Ray Ozzie's plan to grant law enforcement access to encrypted devices—and to do so securely. The views here do not necessarily represent those of Ars Technica.

In the debate over law enforcement access to encrypted devices, technical details matter. The rhetoric has been stark and, dismayingly often, divorced from technical reality. For example, two years ago we were told that only Apple could write software to open the phone of the San Bernardino terrorist; the technical reality turned out to be that an FBI contractor was able to do so. More recently, the rhetoric has been about the thousands of phones that are part of criminal investigations and that law enforcement cannot unlock. Today’s reality is that Grayshift will sell law enforcement a $15,000 tool that opens 300 locked phones or online access for $30,000 to open as many phones as law enforcement has warrants for.

Into this conflict comes a Wired article suggesting that Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes and a former VP at Microsoft, has a solution to the exceptional access problem (the ability for law enforcement with a warrant to open a locked device). The article is yet another example of the wide gap between wishful rhetoric and technical reality.

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of two CubeSats at Mars. (credit: NASA)

The first CubeSats launched in 2003, and in less than a decade more than 100 had reached orbit around Earth. The aerospace industry has debated whether the 2kg to 15kg microsatellites are a fad, a toy, or more significantly a disruptive technology that will change they way we ultimately observe and study Earth and the rest of the Solar System. However, what is now beyond doubt is that the first CubeSats have gone interplanetary.

On Saturday, after the launch of the InSight probe to Mars, NASA received signals from the Mars Cube One, or MarCO-A and -B satellites. The signals indicated that the twin spacecraft had retained enough charge in their batteries to deploy their own solar arrays, stabilize themselves, pivot toward the Sun, and turn on their radios.

The twin MarCO satellites are not critical to the success of the InSight lander—rather they have their own separate mission to test the feasibility of CubeSats in deep space. They will follow InSight on its interplanetary trajectory to Mars and attempt to track the larger spacecraft's descent and landing on Mars in November.

Enlarge / Ousters's OS-1 (left) and OS-2 lidar sensors. (credit: Ouster)

Velodyne invented modern three-dimensional lidar scanners in the mid-2000s. But in recent years, the conventional wisdom has held that Velodyne's design—which involved mounting 64 lasers onto a rotating gimbal—would soon be rendered obsolete by a new generation of solid-state lidar sensors that used a single stationary laser to scan a scene.

But a startup called Ouster is seeking to challenge that view, selling Velodyne-like spinning lidar sensors at competitive prices. In late April, we talked to Ouster CEO Angus Pacala, who has special expertise on the tradeoffs between spinning and solid-state lidars. The reason: Pacala was previously a co-founder at Quanergy, one of the best-known startups working on solid-state lidar.

In our conversation, Pacala declined to badmouth his former company. But actions speak louder than words here. We can assume that as a Quanergy cofounder, Pacala became intimately familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of solid-state lidar technologies. And so it's telling that when he decided to create another lidar company, he decided not to do another solid-state one.

SEATTLE—It's day one of Microsoft's annual Build developer conference, and everything kicks off at 08:30am PDT/11:30am EDT with the opening keynote. We're expecting to hear a lot about machine learning/artificial intelligence, the "intelligent edge," and cloud computing from an array of speakers, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

The keynote is of course going to be streamed, and you'll be able to tune in and watch it right here.