Month: May 2018

Enlarge / Democrats vs. Republicans. (credit: Getty Images | Linda Braucht)

The US Senate is scheduled to vote Wednesday, May 16 on whether to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules.

Republican senators were hoping to avoid the vote, but Democrats are using a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to force the full Senate to vote. The CRA resolution would nullify the FCC's December 2017 vote to deregulate broadband and kill net neutrality rules, and prevent the FCC from taking similar actions in the future.

"By passing my CRA resolution to put net neutrality back on the books, we can send a clear message to American families that we support them, not the special interest agenda of President Trump and his broadband baron allies," Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said in an announcement today.

Enlarge / This is like one of those optical illusions... isn't it?

After plans for a summer re-launch were announced last September, the NES Classic Edition will be available once again starting on June 29 in both North America and Europe, Nintendo announced via Twitter last night. While the plug-and-play hardware saw widespread shortages during a limited production run from late 2016 through early 2017, the company now says that both the NES and Super NES Classic Edition systems "are expected to be available through the end of the year."

After the NES Classic sold over 2.3 million units in just under six months, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime admitted in an interview with Gamespot that there was a "market disconnect" between Nintendo's expectations and the demand for the self-contained system, which contains 30 NES games for a $60 MSRP. He added to Time magazine that "We've got a lot going on right now and we don't have unlimited resources."

Since then, it seems the company may have learned how to commit sufficient resources to the popular line of nostalgic hardware. Fils-Aime promised "dramatically increased" production for the Super NES Classic back in September, and has since then sold nearly 5.3 million units in about six months, avoiding the shortages and secondhand markup that plagued the NES Classic's initial launch.

Enlarge / This enhanced color image shows the region surrounding the young impact crater Pwyll, a 26km diameter impact crater thought to be one of the youngest features on the surface of Europa. (credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Nearly 15 years have passed since NASA sent its Galileo spacecraft flying into Jupiter's outer atmosphere to die—eliminating the possibility of contaminating nearby Jovian moons with any traces of Earth bacteria. However, a new study seeking evidence of water plumes on the surface of Jupiter's Moon Europa demonstrates that, even now, Galileo is providing valuable information.

Since Galileo's end, the Hubble Space Telescope has periodically observed the Jovian system. Sometimes, when the telescope has looked, it has observed water vapor emissions coming from the surface of Europa. This indicates the existence of periodic jets of water emanating from the moon's interior.

The prospect of the water gushing from the moon's interior has tantalized scientists, as that warm, vast interior ocean is thought to be one of the best places in the Solar System beyond Earth—if not the best—to look for extant life. Since the ice sheet covering Europa is thought to be at least several kilometers thick, being able to sample the ocean from space or the moon's surface would greatly aid this search.

Enlarge / Donald Trump. (credit: Getty | Pool)

Last week, smartphone giant ZTE shut down its "major operating activities" after the Trump administration imposed a crippling seven-year export ban on the company. But on Sunday, Donald Trump signaled that ZTE might get a reprieve:

President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2018

It's a remarkable change of tone for a president who long railed against China for stealing American jobs.

ZTE is China's number-two smartphone maker, and as recently as last year it was the number-four smartphone vendor in the US. But the company is facing a de facto corporate death sentence after US officials caught the company covertly sending telecommunications equipment with significant American-made components to Iran and North Korea in violation of US export restrictions.

Enlarge (credit: Sebastian Schinzel)

Unfixed bugs in widely used e-mail programs make it possible for attackers to obtain the plaintext of messages that are encrypted using the PGP and S/MIME standards, researchers said early Monday morning. The attacks assume that an attacker has possession of the encrypted e-mails and can trick either the original sender or one of the recipients to open an invisible snippet of one of the intercepted messages in a new e-mail.

The flaws, some of which have existed for more than a decade, are part of a series of vulnerabilities dubbed Efail described by a team of European researchers. The vulnerabilities allow attackers to exfiltrate e-mail plaintexts by embedding the previously obtained cipher text into unviewable parts of an e-mail and combining it with HTML coding. Earlier on Monday, the researchers issued an advisory recommending PGP and S/MIME users disable the encryption in their e-mail clients but had planned to wait until Tuesday to provide technical details of the vulnerabilities. Within hours, the researchers published the paper, which is titled Efail: Breaking S/MIME and OpenPGP Email Encryption using Exfiltration Channels.

The most serious vulnerabilities have resided in Thunderbird, macOS Mail, and Outlook for more than 10 years and remain unfixed at the moment, the researchers said. Flaws in the way the programs handle e-mails with multiple body parts make it possible to embed invisible snippets of previously obtained encrypted text in new e-mails. By also including the Web address of an attacker-controlled server, the newly sent emails can cause the programs to send the corresponding plaintext to the server. The surreptitious exfiltration works against both the PGP and S/MIME standards.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.—With Google I/O winding down, we finally have a spare second to look at the newest release of Android P. The second developer preview moves the OS into "beta," and it's not just for Pixel devices, as it also runs on a host of third-party flagship phones, thanks to Project Treble.

Recent Apps, system navigation, and the settings have seen major upgrades; other than that, it looks a lot like Preview 1.

Recent Apps—Bigger, horizontal, and copy/pastable