Month: July 2018

Enlarge / Even at the biggest Marvel Comics-related museum exhibit in the world, currently running in Seattle, WA, Steve Ditko's presence is limited by his famously reclusive nature. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

New York police confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter on Friday that one of Marvel Comics' most legendary staffers, Steve Ditko, was found dead in his apartment this week. Ditko was 90.

The creator of Dr. Strange and original artist (plus "co-creator," according to Stan Lee) of Spider-Man had been found days earlier, on June 29, and police told THR that they believed he had been dead for two days when he was found. Reports indicate Ditko left behind no family or survivors.

Ditko's impact on Marvel Comics may only be rivaled by his reclusive nature in later years. After creating and developing Spider-Man with Lee in 1961, Ditko premiered lasting hero Dr. Strange in 1963, whose stories Ditko would continue to write and draw for Marvel until 1966. Disputes over money and friction with Lee reportedly drove Ditko to leave Marvel in 1966, and Ditko shunned the public spotlight shortly thereafter, giving his last formal interview in 1968, though he continued contributing comics to other publishers.

Enlarge / The Sonos One, a Sonos smart speaker that launched with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Smart audio company Sonos has filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. In doing so, the company warned investors of potential risk factors, such as Sonos' dependence on competitors like Amazon, and US President Donald Trump's trade tariffs, which might increase costs for companies like Sonos that depend on imports from China.

However, Sonos made some impressive claims about user satisfaction and loyalty, and it positioned itself as an attractive alternative to the walled gardens that competitors have built.

Sonos has not been profitable in the past, but the filing points out that it has closed the gap more with each passing year. The company claims that while this fiscal year is not complete, it has achieved profitability over the past several months. The filing lays out the numbers:

Enlarge / Google results sent to remote servers. (credit: Robert Heaton)

Google, Mozilla, and Opera have pulled a browser extension with more than two million downloads after it was caught tracking every website its users visited—and sending the data to a remote server.

The Stylish extension allowed users to customize the look and feel of websites in a variety of ways. Among other things, it could remove clutter such as Facebook or Twitter news feeds, change normal pictures to black-and-white manga images, and change black-on-white site themes to white-on-black themes. Starting this year, Stylish started performing these useful functions at a high price: according to software engineer Robert Heaton, the extension started sending users’ complete browsing activity back to its servers by default, along with a unique identifier that in many cases could be used to correlate email addresses or other Internet attributes belonging to those users.

An updated Stylish privacy policy disclosed that the extension collected browsing histories. The version published in May, for instance, said that the information included “standard web server log information (i.e., web request) as well as data sent in response to that request, such as URL used, Internet Protocol address (trimmed and hashed for anonymization), HTTP referrer, and user agent.” Various articles from January, 2017, also noted the tracking but, citing a new owner of the extension, these articles said it would be anonymous. (This despite the fact that many URLs, particularly when stored in large quantities over a long period of time, can make it painfully obvious which individual is viewing them.)

Fox News is one of three top news websites that are not encrypting content.

In February, Emily Schechter, the Chrome Security Product Manager at Google, announced in a blog post that beginning with the release of Chrome version 68, "Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as 'not secure'." This means that Chrome users will see a visible warning next to the Web address for sites using unencrypted HTTP to serve up pages—a warning that Google has been rolling out slowly over the past few months, starting with pages that have forms requesting information.

Chrome 68 ships this month, so the deadline to avoid its "badge of shame" is looming. Some major sites are pressing to beat the deadline—the BBC recently made the move to HTTPS by default for its websites, as BBC News principal software engineer James Donohue recounted in a Medium post on July 6. But other major news sites—including Fox News, Time, and Newsweek—still leave their traffic unencrypted. As a result, they leave their Web content vulnerable to code insertion by Internet service providers or by malicious third parties that manage to place themselves between sites and their readers.

Admittedly, it's not easy for major sites to switch to secure HTTP. Ars Technica went to HTTPS by default in January 2017, after a major engineering effort. Accommodating our own static and dynamic content systems, as well as third-party content (including advertisements and content from other Condé Nast sites) complicated the task. For sites with the amount of content and traffic that Fox News, Time, and Newsweek handle, it's a big task.

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A recently discovered hole in Valve's API allowed observers to generate extremely precise and publicly accessible data for the total number of players for thousands of Steam games. While Valve has now closed this inadvertent data leak, Ars can still provide the data it revealed as a historical record of the aggregate popularity of a large portion of the Steam library.

The new data derivation method, as ably explained in a Medium post from The End Is Nigh developer Tyler Glaiel, centers on the percentage of players who have accomplished developer-defined Achievements associated with many games on the service. On the Steam web site, that data appears rounded to two decimal places. In the Steam API, however, the Achievement percentages were, until recently, provided to an extremely precise 16 decimal places.

This added precision means that many Achievement percentages can only be factored into specific whole numbers. (This is useful since each game's player count must be a whole number.) With multiple Achievements to check against, it's possible to find a common denominator that works for all the percentages with high reliability. This process allows for extremely accurate reverse engineering of the denominator representing the total player base for an Achievement percentage.