Month: June 2018

Enlarge (credit: Marcus Brinkmann)

For their entire existence, some of the world's most widely used email encryption tools have been vulnerable to hacks that allowed attackers to spoof the digital signature of just about any person with a public key, a researcher said Wednesday. GnuPG, Enigmail, GPGTools, and python-gnupg have all been updated to patch the critical vulnerability. Enigmail and the Simple Password Store have also received patches for two related spoofing bugs.

Digital signatures are used to prove the source of an encrypted message, data backup, or software update. Typically, the source must use a private encryption key to cause an application to show that a message or file is signed. But a series of vulnerabilities dubbed SigSpoof makes it possible in certain cases for attackers to fake signatures with nothing more than someone’s public key or key ID, both of which are often published online. The spoofed email shown at the top of this post can't be detected as malicious without doing forensic analysis that's beyond the ability of many users.

Backups and software updates affected, too

The flaw, indexed as CVE-2018-12020, means that decades' worth of email messages many people relied on for sensitive business or security matters may have in fact been spoofs. It also has the potential to affect uses that went well beyond encrypted email.

Enlarge (credit: Mark Wilson / Getty Images News)

The Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General has dropped a 500-page report detailing its investigation into the conduct of FBI personnel, including former FBI Director James Comey, during the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server (code-named "Midyear Exam") and related events just before the 2016 presidential election. The report reveals details of the FBI's internal communications, including an apparent agency-wide distaste for Lync, the mandated official messaging application for the FBI's internal networks.

Sure to be a hot summer read for some in Washington, DC, the review does not find fault with the Justice Department's decision not to pursue prosecution of Clinton or members of her staff, and it finds no evidence of political bias. But it does call out Comey and others for violations of policy and calls Comey's decision to independently announce the results of the Clinton investigation as insubordination.

Comey immediately responded to the report in a New York Times opinion piece, stating that while he did not agree with all of the OIG conclusions, "I respect the work of his office and salute its professionalism. All of our leaders need to understand that accountability and transparency are essential to the functioning of our democracy, even when it involves criticism. This is how the process is supposed to work."

The New York State Public Service Commission today ordered Charter Communications to pay a $2 million fine and complete broadband construction that was required as a condition of Charter's purchase of Time Warner Cable.

If Charter doesn't meet its merger-related obligations, the company will "face the risk of having the merger revoked," the commission said in an announcement. The commission said that state law gives it the authority to rescind merger approvals and threatened to start a proceeding to rescind or change the merger approval order if Charter refuses to comply.

The threatened action could reverse Charter's 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable's telecommunications network in New York, although Charter would likely contest such a decision in court. (This would not affect the merger in other states.)

Enlarge (credit: CD Projekt RED)

Every E3 conference has that one behind-closed-doors gameplay reveal. The one that combines holy-cow gameplay, how'd-they-do-that visual trickery, and the mystique of hiding behind an “industry-only” shield. The one that sets tongues wagging.

This year, CD Projekt RED's long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 has arguably claimed that buzzy throne. After a wild, brief tease in 2013, the William Gibson-inspired, near-future RPG went into hiding, but it has emerged at this year's E3 to answer many questions—and to inspire another zillion.

One thing is for sure: this ambitious game, which currently has no release window, doesn't resemble CDPR's famous work on the Witcher franchise in the slightest.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share.

Today's list is led by a deal on Dell's Inspiron 15 7000 laptop with an 8th-gen Core i7 chip (quad-core, not six-core), 1080p display, and 8GB RAM. It is currently available for $580. You'll have to deal with a 1TB HDD instead of a speedier SSD to start, and that 15.6-inch display won't be as vibrant as it might be on pricier devices. But this configuration still gets you more power than usual for a sub-$600 notebook.

If you're not bargain hunting for a new laptop, we still have plenty of deals left over from last-minute Father's Day and E3 sales. Those include the lowest price we've seen on the Skyrim VR bundle of Sony's PlayStation VR headset, which also includes two PlayStation Move motion controllers, at least $50 off the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, and savings on virtually every major gadget made by Amazon. Have a look for yourself below.

Enlarge / While some animals are well adapted to nocturnal living, for some, we're forcing a rapid change in lifestyle. (credit: Washington Wildlife)

When dinosaurs roamed the earth, mammals were nocturnal. They had to be to avoid being eaten. Now there are other big, bad creatures terrorizing mammals and forcing them to once again find refuge during the day and only come out at night: humans.

It is well established that we have shifted where many wild species go about their daily activities as we’ve left them fewer and fewer places to live. Any temporal disturbances we may have caused have not been as deeply studied as these spatial ones. Now, environmentalists at UC Berkeley and Boise State University have done a meta-analysis of 76 temporal studies, covering 62 mammalian species from six continents (all of the mammals in Antarctica are marine). All but five of the studies were done this century.

They found that mammal nocturnality increased by a factor of 1.36 in areas or periods with high human disturbance. This means that if an animal normally split its activity evenly between day and night, human activity is associated with an increase in the animals' proportion of nighttime activity to 68 percent. This was true across the board, for small mammals like opossums and large ones like African elephants; for apex carnivores as well as their prey; in Argentina and California and Zimbabwe and Nepal and Poland and everywhere else they looked.