Month: May 2018

Enlarge / The Uber ride-sharing app is seen on a mobile phone on February 12, 2018. (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

San Francisco’s city attorney has issued formal subpoenas to Uber and Lyft in order to ascertain whether the ride-sharing companies classify their drivers as employees or contractors in the wake of a landmark decision handed down by the California Supreme Court earlier this month.

Under the opinion in that case, known as Dynamex, the court found that workers can only be considered contractors under a three-part test that seeks to determine exactly how independent they are.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera will now seek "proof that Uber and Lyft have lawfully classified drivers as independent contractors or provide their drivers with minimum wage, sick leave, health care contributions, and paid parental leave."

The US Department of Homeland Security recently warned that malicious hackers may have targeted US phone users by exploiting a four-decades-old networking protocol used by cell phone providers around the world, according to a spokesman for US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Meanwhile, the spokesman said, one of the nation’s major cellular carriers recently experienced a breach of that same protocol that exposed customer data.

Short for Signalling System No. 7, SS7 is the routing protocol that allows cell phone users to connect seamlessly from network to network as they travel throughout the world. With little built-in security and no way for carriers to verify one another, SS7 has always posed a potential hole that people with access could exploit to track the real-time location of individual users. In recent years, the threat has expanded almost exponentially, in part because the number of companies with access to SS7 has grown from a handful to thousands. Another key reason: hackers can now abuse the routing protocol not just to geolocate people but, in many cases, to intercept text messages and voice calls.

SS7 already being exploited

In a letter Sen. Wyden received last week, DHS officials warned that “nefarious actors may have exploited” SS7 to “target the communications of American citizens,” Wyden spokesman Keith Chu told Ars, confirming an article published Wednesday by The Washington Post. On Tuesday, Wyden sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai that heightened concerns of SS7 hacks on US infrastructure.

Enlarge / Net neutrality supporter protests the FCC's repeal outside a federal building in Los Angeles, California on November 28, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Ronen Tivony | NurPhoto)

The California State Senate today approved net neutrality rules that are even stricter than the federal regulations they're meant to replace.

The California bill would replicate the US-wide bans on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization that were implemented by the FCC in 2015, and it would go beyond the FCC rules with a ban on paid data-cap exemptions. California is one of several states trying to impose state-level net neutrality rules because the FCC's Republican leadership decided to eliminate the federal rules effective June 11.

The California Senate passed the bill by a vote of 23-12, with all 23 aye votes coming from Democrats and all 12 noes coming from Republicans. To become law in California, the bill also needs approval from the Democratic-majority State Assembly and Governor Jerry Brown, also a Democrat.

Seen here in a 2014 photo, Huston Huddleston shows off a vinyl wall panel that he rescued from the trash heap. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Huston Huddleston, the man who gained some nerd cred in August 2012 after he "saved the bridge" of a discarded Enterprise-D touring set, has been arrested in Southern California on child pornography and other related felony charges.

In total, Huddleston now faces four charges, including one under California Penal Code 311.11(c)(1), for possessing "more than 600 images." If convicted, Huddleston would face a minimum sentence of a year in county jail or at least 16 months in state prison. (It is not immediately clear why the criminal complaint, which Ars obtained at the Los Angeles courthouse, has four charges when online court records only show three.)

Huddleston is currently being held by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department on $750,000 bail. He is being represented by David Moore, of the Los Angeles Public Defender's Office. Moore did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment. On May 22, BleedingCool.com reported that Huddleston has pleaded not guilty.

At this point, we're used to modern computers being able to perform near-perfect emulation of older gaming hardware via software trickery. The latest project from Tom "Tom7" Murphy, though, seems poised to coin its own definition for "reverse emulation" by running a playable Super NES game on actual unmodified NES hardware.

Murphy breaks down this wizardry in a pair of detailed videos laying out his tinkering process. Though the NES hardware itself is untouched, the cartridge running this reverse emulation is a heavily customized circuit board (ordered from China for about $10), with a compact, multi-core Raspberry Pi 3 attached to handle the actual Super NES emulation.

The Pi essentially replaces the PPU portion of the cartridge, connecting to the NES via a custom-coded EEPROM chip that tells the system how to process and display what would normally be an overwhelming stream of graphical data coming from the miniature computer. Only the CIC "copyright" chip from the original cartridge remains unmodified to get around the hardware's lockout chip.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm on Tuesday announced the launch of a new chip explicitly designed for standalone augmented reality and virtual reality devices: the Snapdragon XR1. The chipmaking giant debuted the tech ahead of this week's Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California.

The company is staying tight-lipped on technical details about the new SoC for the time being. Qualcomm says the SoC will use a Kryo CPU and Adreno GPU, as Qualcomm chips typically do, but exactly how those and the rest of the XR1’s building blocks will be configured isn’t yet clear.

That said, Qualcomm is slotting the XR1 below its existing Snapdragon 845—the chip powering most of the year’s highest-end smartphones—in terms of memory bandwidth and GPU power. It is primarily aiming XR1 devices at “lean back” experiences like 360-degree video viewing, at least to start.

Enlarge / Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA), left, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in 2014. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

In the last couple of years, companies like Uber, Waymo, and GM's Cruise have been testing more and more self-driving vehicles on public roads. Yet important details about those tests have been kept secret.

Two Democrats senators are determined to change that. Last Friday, they sent out letters to 26 car and technology companies seeking details about their testing activities—part of a broader investigation into the safety of driverless vehicles.

"In March, a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona was tragically struck and killed by a vehicle operating under autonomous technology," wrote Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in their letter to Uber. "The latest fatality has raised many questions about the processes companies have in place to guard public safety when testing this type of technology on public roads."