Month: October 2018

Enlarge / Quaaaack. (credit: flickr user: caribooooou)

Crowdfunding is big business for healthcare. GoFundMe alone has raised more than $5 billion in the last eight years, with one out of every three campaigns raising money to cover healthcare costs, according to GoFundMe’s CEO. Often, these campaigns are for the uninsured or underinsured, and help provide legitimate medical care. But other times, people are raising funds to pay for questionable treatments, according to a brief report in JAMA today.

Brain injury specialist Ford Vox and a team of three medical ethicists searched GoFundMe and three lesser-used crowdfunding sites (YouCaring, CrowdRise, and FundRazr) for campaigns involving questionable treatments: those that don’t do much at all, and others that do something potentially dangerous.

They focused on five treatments that were showing up a lot in their results, searching the sites systematically for US- and Canada-based campaigns from the last three years that were specifically for those five. They found 1,059 campaigns that fit the bill, with the collective goal of raising more than $27 million, and hitting about a quarter of that target.

Enlarge / The tank is Sony. The explosion is Warhawk players' hopes and dreams. (credit: Sony)

[Update (Nov. 2, 2018): Following the publication of the report below, Sony appears to have extended the server shutdown dates for the affected games through January.

Reddit user Ember_Rising says he received an e-mail from Sony saying, "We wanted to update you on a planned service shut down, which impacts online access for Warhawk, Twisted Metal, PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale, and Sound Shapes. This has now been extended to January 31, 2019 at 12:00 AM PT."

The changed timing isn't yet noted on the US store pages for those games (or Sony's public decommissioned servers list) but some European PS Store pages are now showing the revised shutdown dates. We've reached out to Sony for any further comment on the apparent move.

Enlarge / People ride Bird shared dockless electric scooters along Venice Beach on August 13, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Several Californians have sued electric scooter companies Bird and Lime, alleging that the startups have been negligent and are responsible for physical injuries or blocking of handicapped parking spaces.

The proposed class-action lawsuit, Borgia et al. v. Bird Rides Inc. et al., which was filed last Friday in Los Angeles county court, raises a question that has been at the heart of this ever-expanding business model: who is responsible for making sure that riders obey not only existing traffic laws but company policies as well? And if anyone gets hurt by the scooter, who pays?

While previous lawsuits have alleged the companies are liable for scooter-related injuries, this lawsuit appears to be the first proposed class-action suit.

Enlarge (credit: Brian Smithson / Flickr)

Most of us don’t think twice about installing software or updates from a trusted developer. We scrutinize the source site carefully to make sure it’s legitimate, and then we let the code run on our computers without much more thought. As developers continue to make software and webpages harder to hack, blackhats over the past few years have increasingly exploited this trust to spread malicious wares. Over the past week, two such supply-chain attacks have come to light.

The first involves VestaCP, a control-panel interface that system administrators use to manage servers. This Internet scan performed by Censys shows that there are more than 132,000 unexpired TLS certificates protecting VestaCP users at the moment. According to a post published last Thursday by security firm Eset, unknown attackers compromised VestaCP servers and used their access to make a malicious change to an installer that was available for download.

Poisoning the source

“The VestaCP installation script was altered to report back generated admin credentials to vestacp.com after a successful installation,” Eset Malware Researcher Marc-Étienne M.Léveillé told Ars. “We don’t know exactly when this happened, but the modified installation script was visible in their source code management on GitHub between May 31 and June 13.” VestaCP developer Serghey Rodin told Ars his organization is working with Eset to investigate the breach to better understand the attack.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | nevarpp)

The Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules has received support from the Republican attorneys general of Texas, Arkansas, and Nebraska.

The three states filed a brief Friday in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, urging judges to reject a lawsuit filed against the FCC by 22 other states. The action highlights a partisan split among state attorneys general: states with Democratic attorneys general are fighting to save net neutrality while states with Republican attorneys general are either fighting against net neutrality or standing on the sidelines.

The FCC's net neutrality repeal is being challenged in a lawsuit filed by all 22 US states with a Democratic attorney general as well as the District of Columbia, which also has a Democratic AG.