Month: July 2018

Enlarge / Want to buy these official The Onion mugs? They're only $15. Owning the full Onion and Gawker portfolios, on the other hand, may cost more. (credit: The Onion)

After a rapid acquisition of English-speaking online properties in 2016, Univision Media Co. is reversing course. On Tuesday, the Hispanic America-focused media company announced its intent to sell all assets related to two of its biggest 2016 pickups: Gizmodo Media Group (formerly Gawker Media) and The Onion.

Univision (UCI) "determined that pursuing a sale of GMG and The Onion collectively will allow UCI to focus on its core assets and further strengthen UCI's position as the No. 1 media company serving US Hispanics, while enabling both GMG and The Onion even greater opportunities to grow under new ownership," the company wrote in a Tuesday statement. This announcement of a "potential sale" comes with the caveat that a transaction may not take place.

Univision acquired Gawker Media by outbidding Ziff Davis with its $135 million offer in August 2016. Days later, Gawker.com shut down in the wake of successful litigation by Terry "Hulk Hogan" Bollea over the site's report on his mid-2000s sex tape. That court case resulted in a $115 judgement in Bollea's favor. At that time, various Gawker staffers were absorbed by other Gizmodo Media Group sites, and all of those—Gizmodo, Jezebel, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Splinter, The Root, Kotaku, Earther, and Jalopnik—are now on the auction block.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

When the Spectre and Meltdown attacks were disclosed earlier this year, the expectation was that these attacks would be the first of many, as researchers took a closer look at the way that the speculative execution in modern processors could be used to leak sensitive information and undermine the security of software running on those processors. In May, we saw the speculative store bypass, and today we have a new variant on this theme: speculative buffer overflows, discovered by Vladimir Kiriansky at MIT and independent researcher Carl Waldspurger.

All the attacks follow a common set of principles. Each processor has an architectural behavior (the documented behavior that describes how the instructions work and that programmers depend on to write their programs) and a microarchitectural behavior (the way an actual implementation of the architecture behaves). These can diverge in subtle ways. For example, architecturally, a program that loads a value from a particular address in memory will wait until the address is known before trying to perform the load. Microarchitecturally, however, the processor might try to speculatively guess at the address so that it can start loading the value from memory (which is slow) even before it's absolutely certain of which address it should use.

If the processor guesses wrong, it will ignore the guessed-at value and perform the load again, this time with the correct address. The architecturally defined behavior is thus preserved. But that faulty guess will disturb other parts of the processor—in particular the contents of the cache. These microarchitectural disturbances can be detected and measured, allowing a malicious program to make inferences about the values stored in memory.

Enlarge / L E G I T (credit: Ubisoft)

Over the years, Ubisoft has quietly and steadily built itself a reputation for supporting its games tremendously after launch. Those efforts usually pay off; most Ubisoft games released in the past few years are meaningfully bigger and better than they were at launch.

But what those games typically have (and The Crew 2 lacks) are solid foundations. Instead, the new open-world racing game feels so light on features, personality, and fundamentally enjoyable activities that I’d swear it’s an Early Access game—aside from the telltale graphical polish that comes with a big budget. It’s enough to make me wonder if the publisher is abusing its own “it gets better” model. Because this game still feels like it needs to be finished.

If you played the beta of The Crew 2, you’ve basically seen what there is to see. The “story” in particular mostly burns itself out in the first five minutes. You’re a nameless racer (both literally and figuratively) who is looking to make a name for yourself. That means teaming up with a fictional GoPro knockoff company to accumulate social media followers—The Crew 2’s in-world name for experience points. And... that’s it.

The minimalist plotting is quite the change from the first game’s tale of a brother seeking revenge against a nationwide gang. Whereas The Crew’s plot was intolerably bad—akin to a USA channel original movie you might catch late at night—The Crew 2 manages to be intolerable without even attempting anything. Disembodied and poorly acted voices occasionally spout juvenile philosophy about the freedom of freestyle racing or something equally hollow. It’s just enough to make me wish the game didn’t have dialogue at all.

Enlarge / Billy Dee Williams attends the Premiere Of Disney Pictures and Lucasfilm's Solo: A Star Wars Story. (credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

Reports have begun to trickle in about exactly which characters and actors to expect in J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: Episode IX, with some reports proving firmer than others. This week brings one of the most confident reports on the production yet: Billy Dee Williams, one of the series' biggest original actors, is set to return for his first series film appearance since 1983.

The Hollywood Reporter cites "sources" familiar with the film's production to confirm that Williams will reprise the role of Lando Calrissian in Episode IX. THR was unable to otherwise confirm any details about Calrissian's role in the upcoming film, and Lucasfilm has not yet acknowledged the report with its own confirmation.

This report follows a late-June announcement from the Saskatchewan Entertainment Expo to issue the bad news that Williams would not appear as had been previously scheduled, which immediately set tongues wagging across the Star Wars fan-osphere.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallagher)

Figuring out what information should be classified and controlling access to it has been an eternal headache for defense and national security organizations—a headache that got a lot of attention during the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of personal emails. Even people with a more clear understanding of sensitive data classification may have difficulty determining when information needs to be marked and restricted in circulation. So the Department of Defense is looking for some help from machine-learning systems.

The DOD has issued a request for information (RFI) from industry in a quest for technology that will prevent the mislabeling and accidental (or deliberate) access and sharing of sensitive documents and data. In an announcement posted in May by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the Pentagon stated that the DOD CIO's office—part of the Office of the Secretary of Defense—is "investigating the use of commercial solutions for labeling and controlling access to sensitive information."

Defense IT officials are seeking software that "must be able to make real-time decisions about the classification level of the information and an individual's ability to access, change, delete, receive, or forward the information based on the credentials of the sending and/or receiving individual, facility, and system."

Enlarge / A customer inspects the 2013 iPhone at the Wangfujing flagship store in Beijing. (credit: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

The iOS 11.4.1 update Apple released Monday was most notable for making it harder for law enforcement to access locked iPhones. On Tuesday, security researcher Patrick Wardle illuminated another fix. He said his fix addressed code Apple added likely to appease the Chinese government; this is the code that caused crashes on certain iDevices when users typed the word Taiwan or received messages containing a Taiwanese flag emoji.

“Though its impact was limited to a denial of service (NULL-pointer dereference), it made for an interesting case study of analyzing iOS code,” Wardle, a former hacker for the National Security Agency, wrote in a blog post. “And if Apple hadn’t tried to appease the Chinese government in the first place, there would be no bug!”

Wardle, who is now a macOS and iOS security expert at Digital Security, said he was perplexed when a friend first reported her fully patched, non-jailbroken device crashed every time she typed Taiwan or received a message with a Taiwanese flag. He had no trouble reproducing the remotely triggerable bug, which crashed any iOS application that processed remote messages, including iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Wardle did, however, find that only devices with certain region-specific configurations were affected.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today we're highlighting a sweeping, one-day sale at eBay that takes 10% almost any electronics or video game purchase of at least $50 with the coupon code "PRIMOTECH".

There is a bit of fine print to the sale, per usual: eBay says it'll only last until 11pm PT on Tuesday, that the discount can only be applied once, and that it can only take up to $100 off a given purchase. Again, that purchase has to be worth at least $50. We'll make the usual disclaimer that you should only buy from a trusted, highly-rated seller with an actual return policy on eBay, too.

That said, the discount does allow for a few worthwhile deals. You could take $30 off a Nintendo Switch, for instance, or $65 off a new Roku TV. If you're interested, you can have a look through the selection below. If you'd rather take your business elsewhere, we also have deals on true wireless earbuds, Google's Chromecast dongles, Dell laptops, and much more.