Month: November 2018

Enlarge / Jason Momoa stars as Arthur Curry, aka Aquaman: half human, half Atlantean. (credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)

We're just one month away from the release of director James Wan's Aquaman, the first full-length feature film centered around Jason Momoa's Justice League superhero. Now the final trailer has dropped, with all the magical tridents, warrior princesses, and epic CGI battles you'd expect from a superhero movie about averting a mythological war between two very different worlds.

Aquaman first entered the DC Comics universe in a 1941 anthology and later turned into a solo comic book series. He was a founding member of the Justice League during the "Silver Age" of the 1950s and 1960s. But he was never among the most compelling superheroes in the DC stable, often serving as the butt of jokes because of his supposedly inferior super powers. Hey, telepathically communicating with fish is cool, right?

So there was some initial skepticism about introducing the character into DC's rebooted cinematic universe. Casting Momoa, who was so riveting as Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones' first season, was an inspired choice, and the initial artwork showing an Aquaman reimagined for the 21st century looked promising. For the reboot, DCEU wisely played down the talking-to-fish thing (it's more a form of telepathic compulsion) and focued instead on Aquaman's superhuman strength, ability to breathe underwater, super fast swimming, and so forth.

Enlarge / Russian President Vladmir Putin in St. Petersburg today for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, acknowledged today that Russian hackers may have interfered in the US election. (credit: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

Attackers suspected of working for the Russian government masqueraded as a US State Department official in an attempt to infect dozens of organizations in government, military, defense contracting, media, and other industries, researchers from security firm FireEye warned on Monday.

The spear-phishing campaign began last Wednesday. This is almost exactly two years after the Russian hacking group known under a variety of monikers, including APT29 and Cozy Bear, sent a similar barrage of emails that targeted many of the same industries, FireEye said in a blog post. The tactics and techniques used in both post-election campaigns largely overlap, leading FireEye to suspect the new one is also the work of the Russian-government-controlled hacking arm. FireEye researchers Matthew Dunwoody, Andrew Thompson, Ben Withnell, Jonathan Leathery, Michael Matonis, and Nick Carr wrote:

Analysis of this activity is ongoing, but if the APT29 attribution is strengthened, it would be the first activity uncovered from this sophisticated group in at least a year. Given the widespread nature of the targeting, organizations that have previously been targeted by APT29 should take note of this activity. For network defenders, whether or not this activity was conducted by APT29 should be secondary to properly investigating the full scope of the intrusion, which is of critical importance if the elusive and deceptive APT29 operators indeed had access to your environment.

“Secure” communications

At least 38 FireEye clients have been targeted so far in the spear-phishing campaign, Carr told Ars. The emails purport to deliver an official US State Department from a known public-affairs official at the same US agency. The messages were designed to appear as a secure communication that’s hosted on a webpage linked to the official’s personal drive. To further appear legitimate, the message delivers a legitimate State Department form.

Enlarge / Entertainment Studios Networks founder Byron Allen at Universal Studios Hollywood on April 26, 2018, in Universal City, California. (credit: Getty Images | Noel Vasquez )

A US appeals court ruling today said that cable companies do not have a First Amendment right to discriminate against minority-run TV channels.

Charter, the second-largest US cable company after Comcast, was sued in January 2016 by Byron Allen's Entertainment Studios Networks (ESN), which alleged that Charter violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866 by refusing to carry TV channels run by the African-American-owned ESN. Allen, a comedian and producer, founded ESN in 1993 and is its CEO; the lawsuit seeks more than $10 billion in damages from Charter.

Charter argued that the case should be dismissed, claiming that the First Amendment bars such claims because cable companies are allowed "editorial discretion." But Charter's motion to dismiss the case was denied by the US District Court for the Central District of California, and the District Court's denial was upheld unanimously today by a three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Enlarge / The delta within Jezero Crater. (credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/MSSS/Brown University)

On Monday, NASA announced that it had chosen a landing spot for its upcoming Mars 2020 rover. The site (more or less at center here) is called Jezero Crater, and it contains a delta formed by flowing water. NASA says that landing in its difficult terrain requires new technology that allows increased steering in the atmosphere.

Mars 2020 will be based on the design of the Curiosity rover, which is currently operating in Gale Crater, but it will have a different suite of instruments. The mission will have two focuses: to give us a better perspective on whether Mars has ever hosted life and to cache rocks for a sample return mission.

The details of how to get rocks back off the Red Planet are still being worked out. But there has been a steadily growing body of evidence that Mars had large amounts of liquid water on its surface in the distant past, and Mars 2020 will be about sampling some of what that water left behind in order to determine if it could have hosted lifeforms similar to those on Earth.

Enlarge / The Argentine sub San Juan—photographed here in May 2017, just six months before its tragic loss—has been found at the bottom of an undersea ravine. (credit: Juan Kulichevsky / Wikimedia)

Almost a year to the day after its tragic loss at sea, the Argentine Navy submarine ARA San Juan has been located. Using side-scan sonar and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), the crew of the oceanographic survey vessel Seabed Constructor found the lost sub in the bottom of an undersea ravine about 600 kilometers (approximately 375 miles) east of Comodoro Rivadavia in Argentina's Patagonia region. The submarine rests at a depth of 920 meters (more than 3,000 feet) below the surface of the South Atlantic—over three times its safe operating depth and well below the crush depth of the sub.

The San Juan was one of only two TR-1700 (or Santa Cruz) class submarines completed for the Argentine Navy by Thyssen Nordseewerke. Built in Germany, the San Juan was delivered in 1984 and underwent a major refit in 2014; other subs intended to be built for the class were put on hold or cancelled, with two unfinished subs cannibalized for parts. Much of the sub's mission in recent years was focused on surveillance operations in Argentina's exclusive economic zone in the South Atlantic, primarily to combat illegal fishing.

The announcement of the discovery came only two days after a memorial service held by family members of the crew and a day after the anniversary of the ship's loss. Recovery operations are pending, awaiting a decision by the Argentine government.

Update (March 13, 2019): Four months after its release, the latest patch notes for Spyro Reignited Trilogy note that the game has now "added subtitles in all languages (across all three games) for previously unsupported cinematics." The subtitles, which can be toggled on or off, include "character headers to identify active speakers; succinct line splits for readability; [and] colored text for improved character association in most languages," according to the notes.

Activision and Toys for Bob have yet to add similar subtitle options to 2017's Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy.

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Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share.

Hoo boy, is this a busy time for the Dealmaster. Although Black Friday is still a few days away, we're coming at you a day ahead of schedule this week, because several stores have already made a bunch of their deals available today. Right now, those include a PlayStation 4 and Spider-Man bundle for $200, $100 off Microsoft's Xbox One X, Amazon's new Fire TV Stick 4K streamer for $35, TV deals from Sony, LG, and Vizio, Samsung's Galaxy S9 for $520, and much more.

Frankly, the amount of time the Dealmaster has already spent staring at his laptop screen this week is unhealthy. But soldier on we must, since the discounts will only pick up as the week rolls on. Melodramatics aside, we've got a great assortment today, so have a look below and see if you can't get any holiday shopping done early.