Month: October 2018

Enlarge (credit: Troy Harvey/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Tesla is reportedly undergoing a "deepening criminal investigation" by the FBI into whether the company misled investors with respect to production of Model 3 vehicles, according to The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper cited "people familiar with the matter," who said that federal prosecutors based in San Francisco have "intensified" their work in recent weeks. Neither the FBI nor the United States Attorney’s Office in San Francisco immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment.

Kamran Mumtaz, a Tesla spokesman, sent Ars a statement, saying that earlier this year the company received a voluntary request for documents, which it complied with. "We have not received a formal subpoena, a request for testimony, or any other formal process, and there have been no additional document requests about this from the Department of Justice for months," the statement said. "Tesla’s philosophy has always been set to truthful targets—not sandbagged targets that we would definitely exceed and not unrealistic targets that we would never meet."

Mumtaz did not immediately answer Ars’ question as to whether any Tesla official had been interviewed by federal investigators.

Enlarge / California State Capitol building in Sacramento. (credit: Getty Images | joe chan photography)

California has agreed to delay enforcement of its net neutrality law until after litigation that will determine whether states can implement their own net neutrality rules.

California's net neutrality law was slated to take effect on January 1, 2019. But the Trump administration's Department of Justice and broadband industry sued to block the law and were seeking a preliminary injunction that would halt enforcement until litigation is over.

The DOJ and broadband industry had a good chance of winning a preliminary injunction because the Federal Communications Commission had declared that all state net neutrality rules are preempted. As the DOJ argued, the US District Court for the Eastern District of California must presume that the FCC preemption of state laws is valid since that preemption has not been overturned by any court.

Hyundai

LOS ANGELES.—A recent trip to the West Coast afforded an opportunity to drive something rather interesting: the Hyundai Nexo, the company's new hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicle. Even now I'm struggling to get my head around this obviously clever machine. Completely ignoring the elephant (element?) in the room and the fact that Hyundai still hasn't decided how much it will cost, the FCEV is very well-executed, a fine alternative power vehicle from a company that has been building some pretty good cars of late. But at some point you have to come back to the fact that it is hydrogen-fueled, bringing all the baggage that entails into play. Hence the continuing head-scratching.

Hyundai and hydrogen actually go back two decades—the Nexo is its second-generation mass-produced hydrogen vehicle and a follow-up to the Tucson FCEV launched in 2013. But the Tucson was designed to use an internal combustion engine, and shoehorning a fuel cell stack, batteries, and pressurized storage tanks into it involved compromises. The Nexo has been designed from the ground up as an FCEV with better efficiency and more range. Well, Hyundai wants it to serve as the company's new eco/tech flagship. And on those counts, it has delivered.

Enlarge (credit: Frank Lindecke / Flickr)

Several big-name Linux and BSD operating systems are vulnerable to an exploit that gives untrusted users powerful root privileges. The critical flaw in the X.org server—the open-source implementation of the X11 system that helps manage graphics displays—affects OpenBSD, widely considered to be among the most secure OSes. It also impacts some versions of the Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS distributions of Linux.

An advisory X.org developers published Thursday disclosed the 23-month-old bug that, depending on how OS developers configure it, lets hackers or untrusted users elevate very limited system rights to unfettered root. The vulnerability, which is active when OSes run X.org in privileged (setuid) mode, allows files to be overwritten using the -logfile and -modulepath parameters. It also makes it trivial for low-privilege users to escalate system rights. A variety of nuances are leading to widely divergent assessments of the bug's severity.

“Depending on whom you talk to, the reported severity will vary greatly,” Louis Dion-Marcil, a security researcher at GoSecure, told Ars. “I think most people will tell you it is very severe, and I would agree with them. The bug allows you to write arbitrary data to arbitrary files, which might seem trivial and not that dangerous, but it effectively allows regular, unprivileged users to elevate their privileges to the one of complete administrator of the system.”

Today, Facebook took down 30 pages, 33 Facebook accounts, three Facebook groups, and 16 Instagram accounts that Facebook's head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher said were tied to an influence campaign by a group of actors in Iran.

"It’s still early days, and while we have found no ties to the Iranian government, we can’t say for sure who is responsible," Gleicher said in a call with press this afternoon. He added that Facebook found some overlap in the accounts' activity with a group of Iran-linked accounts taken down by the company in August. "Given the elections, we took action as soon as we’d completed our initial investigation and shared the information with US and UK government officials, US law enforcement, Congress, other technology companies, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab," Gleicher said. He added that Facebook shared information not just with federal officials but with state and local election officials as well to keep them advised of any emerging threat.

Fantastic Fest

Halloween and horror movies go together like Ars and Linux OS reviews—it can be hard to imagine a more appropriate, occasional pairing. And while a classic scary movie (or fun innovations on the genre, like Get Out or A Quiet Place) still hits the sweet spot for many film fans, sometimes you simply want something different.

This pre-Halloween weekend, audiences lucked out. Two horror adjacent gems—the highly stylized scares of Suspiria and the supernatural thrills of Border—each open in select US theaters. The two films have been conquering film festival after film festival this year (including Fantastic Fest, where Ars caught 'em) due to very different skill sets. But for anyone looking for alternatives to the traditional holiday fare, a double-feature may be in order.

Enlarge / "Alexa, circumvent your technological protection measures." (credit: Valentina Palladino)

The Library of Congress issued new rules (PDF) Friday outlining when it's legal to circumvent copy-protection systems. Among the activities blessed by the Librarian: unlocking cell phones to move from one network to another, repairing cars and tractors, performing security research, and pulling data from medical devices. The agency also expanded an existing jailbreaking exemption to cover voice assistant devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home.

This whole process is necessary thanks to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which established a sweeping—perhaps too sweeping—ban on circumventing digital rights management systems. The law was theoretically supposed to prevent piracy of music, movies, and other digital media. But companies quickly recognized that it could become a general-purpose way to restrict the use of any consumer product that includes software on it. Now, of course, more and more of the products we buy have software in them.

For example, carmakers have sought to use the law to limit how customers can tinker with their own cars. Blind readers could run afoul of the DMCA if they had to circumvent DRM in order to use screen reader software on e-books. Have you ever tried to fast-forward through a commercial on a DVD and had your DVD player tells you that's not allowed? You can thank the DMCA for that; building a DVD player that ignores the fast-forward flag would be illegal circumvention of a DRM scheme.