Month: July 2018

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

AT&T is raising the base price of its DirecTV Now streaming service by $5 per month, despite promising in court that its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. would lower TV prices.

AT&T confirmed the price increase to Ars and said it began informing customers of the increase this past weekend. "The $5 increase will go into effect July 26 for new customers and varies for existing customers based on their billing date," an AT&T spokesperson said.

The $5 increase will affect all DirecTV Now tiers except for a Spanish-language TV package, AT&T told Ars. That means the DirecTV Now packages that currently cost $35, $50, $60, and $70 a month will go up to $40, $55, $65, and $75.

(credit: Ron Amadeo)

In late 2016, Google’s security team scrambled to fix a critical vulnerability that allowed attackers to gain unfettered root access to Android devices by using a relatively new class of exploit that manipulates data stored in memory chips. Now, 21 months later, many of the same researchers behind the attack, dubbed Drammer, are back to say that a large number of Android phones and tablets remain vulnerable to the rooting attacks because the patches Google deployed weren’t adequate.

Both Drammer and the newly disclosed RAMpage attacks exploit Rowhammer, a class of exploit that alters data stored in memory chips by repeatedly accessing the internal rows where individual bits are stored. By “hammering” the rows thousands of times a second, the technique causes the bits to flip, meaning 0s are changed to 1s and vice versa.

The original Rowhammer attack against PCs made it possible for an untrusted computer application to gain nearly unfettered system privileges or to bypass security sandboxes designed to keep malicious code from accessing sensitive operating system resources. A later variation allowed JavaScript hosted on websites to effect the same security-sensitive bitflips.

Enlarge / United States Consulate General Guangzhou, China; this is where an employee reported experiencing unexplained sounds and pressures that led to a brain injury. (credit: US Deparment of State)

The US State Department evacuated at least 11 more Americans from China amid reports of bizarre sounds and sensations that have been associated with mild traumatic brain injury, according to The New York Times. And cases of sound attacks appear to be spreading to additional diplomatic stations throughout the country.

Meanwhile, officials reported two additional “medically confirmed” cases of similar mysterious health incidents in Cuba at the end of last month, according to a series of reports by the Associated Press.

The new cases in Cuba bring the total number of Americans affected there to 26. The older cases date as far back as late 2016, while the new cases—one confirmed last week and the other confirmed the week before that—stem from an incident in May. The newer cases occurred at a diplomatic residence in which both affected individuals were present. The two individuals were said to suffer similar neurological symptoms that others from the US diplomatic community stationed in Havana had experienced.

(credit: Sam Machkovech)

In April, Valve rolled out a privacy policy change that effectively hobbled Steam Spy in its Ars Technica-inspired method for estimating game sales data based on public user profile information. Now, Valve Head of Business Development Jan-Peter Ewert says the company is "working on new tools and new ways of getting data out of Steam" that the company hopes will be "more accurate and more useful than what Steam Spy previously offered."

In a Q&A session following a presentation at St. Petersburg's White Nights games business conference (as captured by Oleg Chumakov on Twitter), Ewert said that Steam's general position is to "provide open APIs so that when we don't offer the amount of tools that we should, the community can step in." In Steam Spy's case, however, randomly sampling user data from that API to extrapolate sales data led to "a broad variance in how accurate it was. It was very accurate for some things but very inaccurate for others."

That said, Ewert explained that he felt Steam's game makers need "something better than Steam Spy" to help them track sales and popularity trends in the Steam marketplace. "To be clear, we don't have a business selling iPhones," Ewert said in apparent contrast to Apple's model of App Store downloads supporting hardware sales. "The only way we make money is if you make good decisions in bringing the right games to the platform and finding your audience."

Microsoft has developed a dual-screen device before: Courier was cancelled in 2010. (credit: Gizmodo)

We've seen over the past few months a growing number of signs that Microsoft is developing some kind of dual-screen pocketable device, codenamed "Andromeda." There are all sorts of patents, and new Windows APIs include telephony support and support for dual-screen devices with a hinge between them. There's even a rough release schedule, with the hardware due to come later this year.

But throughout it all, I've had a consistent question: why? What value will such a device bring, and why would anyone buy one?

It appears I'm not the only one to ask such a question. Mary Jo Foley, as well connected as anyone writing about Microsoft could hope to be, has some bad news about Andromeda. At the very least, the device is probably delayed: software features that it requires apparently aren't ready for release in the next major Windows 10 update, version 1809, due in about October this year.