Month: May 2018

Enlarge / A T9 Transporter van like this could soon shuttle Apple employees. (credit: Volkswagen)

The New York Times reported this evening that Apple entered into a partnership with Volkswagen Group to pair a number of electric T6 Transporter vans with Apple's proprietary autonomous vehicle software. The vans will reportedly be used to shuttle employees around Apple's company campus, and it's not clear whether the deal will extend from there.

The Times says that this deal only comes after Apple tried to find a partner in BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The company has shed hundreds of employees on the project, in a department that once boasted about 1,000 workers.

According to the Times' sources—"five people familiar with the negotiations who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to discuss the matter publicly"—BMW and Mercedes-Benz rejected a partnership with Apple due to requirements from the Cupertino-based firm to turn over all data and some design aspects of the car.

Enlarge (credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Russia#/media/File:Flag_of_Russia.svg)

The FBI has seized a key server used to infect more than 500,000 home and small-office routers in a move that significantly frustrates a months long attack that agents say was carried out by the Russian government, The Daily Beast reported late Wednesday.

The takedown stems from an investigation that started no later than last August and culminated in a court order issued Wedesday directing domain registrar Verisign to turn over control of ToKnowAll.com. An FBI affidavit obtained by The Daily Beast said the hacking group behind the attacks is known as Sofacy. The group, which is also known as Fancy Bear, Sednit, and Pawn Storm, is credited with a long list of attacks over the years, including the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee.

As Ars reported earlier Wednesday, Cisco researchers said the malware that infected more than 500,000 routers in 54 countries was developed by an advanced nation and implied Russia was responsible, but didn’t definitively name the country.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images)

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Donald Trump's use of the Twitter block button violated the First Amendment. The ruling has implications for any government official—federal, state, or local—who uses Twitter or other social media platforms to communicate with the public.

The block button is a key weapon in Twitter's war against trolling and harassment, and Trump has used it since long before he was president. But last year, a group of Twitter users who had been blocked by Trump's @realDonaldTrump account sued, arguing that the use of the feature by a public official violates the First Amendment.

The main effect of blocking someone is that that person's tweets no longer show up in the blocker's timeline. No one disputes that Trump has the right to do that if he wants. But blocking someone also works in the other direction: if Trump blocks another user, that user can't see Trump's tweets and (as a consequence) can't reply to them. And that, ruled Naomi Buchwald, a New York Federal judge, raises a constitutional problem.

EA and DICE's reveal event for Battlefield V concluded on Wednesday with a whopper of a "real-time" gameplay trailer—and an apparent about-face from the developer's previous microtransaction strategies.

The military shooter sequel will launch on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows PC on October 19, with pre-order and special-edition versions unlocking on October 16, while EA Access members (only on XB1/PC) get an even earlier crack on October 11. As long rumored, the game will revolve around World War II, and today's gameplay trailer, according to EA, is made entirely out of "pre-alpha game-engine footage representative of game experience."

Enlarge (credit: Sony)

Yesterday, when Sony told Japanese investors that the PS4 is "entering the end of its lifecycle" (as translated by The Wall Street Journal's Takashi Mochizuki), we held off on repeating the news until we got clarification on what exactly that meant. Today, Mochizuki reports in WSJ that it means the PS4 has at least three more years of uncontested focus from Sony's console business.

"We will use the next three years to prepare the next step, to crouch down so that we can jump higher in the future," Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Tsuyoshi Kodera told the Journal.

A 2021 release for any new PlayStation, eight years after the 2013 launch, would be slightly behind the six-to-seven-year release schedule separating previous PlayStation releases. But it wouldn't be out of line for a console that is currently outselling all previous PlayStation consoles at this point in their lifecycles.

Enlarge / A Linksys WRVS4400N, one of more than a dozen network devices targeted by VPNFilter. (credit: Linksys)

Hackers possibly working for an advanced nation have infected more than 500,000 home and small-office routers around the world with malware that can be used to collect communications, launch attacks on others, and permanently destroy the devices with a single command, researchers at Cisco warned Wednesday.

VPNFilter—as the modular, multi-stage malware has been dubbed—works on consumer-grade routers made by Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, TP-Link, and on network-attached storage devices from QNAP, Cisco researchers said in an advisory. It’s one of the few pieces of Internet-of-things malware that can survive a reboot. Infections in at least 54 countries have been slowly building since at least 2016, and Cisco researchers have been monitoring them for several months. The attacks drastically ramped up during the past three weeks, including two major assaults on devices located in Ukraine. The spike, combined with the advanced capabilities of the malware, prompted Cisco to release Wednesday’s report before the research is completed.

Expansive platform serving multiple needs

“We assess with high confidence that this malware is used to create an expansive, hard-to-attribute infrastructure that can be used to serve multiple operational needs of the threat actor,” Cisco researcher William Largent wrote. “Since the affected devices are legitimately owned by businesses or individuals, malicious activity conducted from infected devices could be mistakenly attributed to those who were actually victims of the actor. The capabilities built into the various stages and plugins of the malware are extremely versatile and would enable the actor to take advantage of devices in multiple ways.”