Month: December 2018

Enlarge / The 2018, 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard Folio. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple simultaneously released minor software updates for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple TV boxes today with iOS 12.1.1, macOS Mojave 10.14.2, and tvOS 12.1.1.

The focus is on bug fixes and security, so none of them introduce major new features. But iOS comes closest by expanding the haptic touch feature on iPhone XR to notification previews, making it possible to hide the sidebar in the iPad's news app while in landscape orientation, and by bringing a couple of improvements to FaceTime—namely, the ability to capture Live Photos (those brief animated pictures) from a two-person FaceTime call and a one-tap way to flip between the rear and front cameras during a call.

Just note that to take a Live Photo during a FaceTime call, the person on the other end has to have the feature enabled. The toggle is located in the FaceTime panel in the Settings app.

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a handful of standout deals, including a nice discount on CanaKit's Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ starter bundle. It's currently down to $64 on Amazon, a 20% drop from its usual $80 price.

As we noted in a recent gift guide, the Raspberry Pi has been a favorite tool of DIY hobbyists and tech tinkerers for a few years now. The mini PC can serve as the heart of countless nerdy projects, from custom retro game consoles to self-made drones. The motherboard alone costs about $35, but to get the most out of the Pi right away, it's best to at least have a microUSB power supply, heat sinks for keeping the whole thing cool, and a microSD card to provide storage space. If you don't have those things already, this kit supplies it all for you with the latest version of the Pi itself.

If you have no interest in building gadgets in your spare time, we also have deals on products made by professionals, including the Xbox One X, Apple iPad, Sonos One, Marvel's Spider-Man for the PS4, and much more. Have a look for yourself below.

Enlarge (credit: Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Two hundred fifty pages of previously secret internal documents from Facebook show that the company allowed even more companies to be "whitelisted"—granting them extended access to the company’s permissive v1.0 Graph API back in 2015—than has previously been known.

In addition, the Wednesday release by a British lawmaker also confirms what Ars previously discovered via a failure to adequately redact public court filings from last year: Facebook once considered charging for access to user data.

The documents, known as the "Six4Three files," were published by Damian Collins, a member of the UK Parliament. Collins is the chair of the Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Committee in Parliament, which has been overseeing inquiries into Facebook's practices. On November 16, the DCMS again asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before the committee via video; Zuckerberg has given no indication that he will do so.

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich)

Bacteria have plenty of ways to combat the viruses that plague them, called phages. The CRISPR-Cas system and restriction enzymes that cleave phage DNA are the best understood, but there are others. They use a variety of different mechanisms and stop phages at various stages of infection, but they all rely on biological actors: proteins and RNA. New work has just revealed, though, that bacteria can use chemical weapons as well.

Bacteria produce a wide range of active small molecules that are not essential for survival but do confer a growth advantage. Some of these small molecules, which kill their fellow microbes, are already used (by us) as antibiotics. It was also observed, more than fifty years ago, that bacteria make molecules that can inhibit the growth of phages. But it wasn't clear whether these molecules are made specifically because they slow down the phages. Only now, with the background knowledge that (a) bacteria make a lot of bioactive compounds, many of which do combat other microorganisms, and that (b) phages are a major scourge for bacteria, did researchers think to check.

Biochemists screened 4,960 compounds for their ability to protect E. coli from phage infection and found 11 that could. Nine out of the 11 were what are termed DNA-intercalating agents. The nucleotides that comprise DNA (A,T, C, and G) are flat molecules, and they're stacked parallel to each other along the DNA helix. DNA-intercalating agents slide in between them, interfering with the copying of DNA during cell division.

I’m taking a quick break from filming to tell you the best way to watch Mission: Impossible Fallout (or any movie you love) at home. pic.twitter.com/oW2eTm1IUA

— Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) December 4, 2018

Anyone who owns a high-definition TV has likely experienced the nagging sensation of something being not quite right when watching films. It's not all in your head. The effect is called video interpolation, or motion smoothing, and last night, Tom Cruise and writer/director Chris McQuarrie dropped a surprise PSA on Twitter (apparently filmed on the set of Mission Impossible: Fallout) to warn us about this evil.

Okay, so motion smoothing isn't actually evil. It's more of a double-edged sword. The feature is great for watching sports, but it makes movies look like "they were shot on high-speed video rather than film," says Cruise. In other words, your Hollywood blockbuster movie will look like a 1970s BBC TV series. That's why it's commonly called "the soap opera effect."

Why does this happen? Essentially, the feature uses image processing algorithms to insert (interpolate) "extra" frames between the actual frames. The TV will process one frame, then another, and then the algorithms will try to guess what a new frame inserted between those two frames should look like. This increases the frame rate to 120fps, to match the HDTV's 120Hz refresh rate. It will smooth out the image and make fast-paced events easier to follow, like basketball games or NASCAR races—or even the nightly news, which isn't meant to look cinematic. But it won't have that "film" feeling anymore: it feels "unnatural," or rather, a bit too real, ruining the illusion.

Enlarge / Box art for just some of the unplayable games referenced in the PlayStation Classic's source code. (credit: AlphaFoxWarfare / Twitter)

When Sony initially announced the final list of 20 games that would be available on the PlayStation Classic, we warned that the selection was full of "glaring omissions" that "might annoy you." A quick analysis of the source files for the system's open source emulator, though, suggests that many other well-remembered PlayStation games were at least considered at some point in the hardware's development.

Sony has published the source code for the many open source components of the PlayStation Classic to comply with the requirements of the GNU General Public License. That includes source files for a modified version of PCSX ReARMed, an open source PlayStation emulator with a long history. You can also see how the PlayStation Classic files differ from a "clean" install of the emulator at a glance using this Github page.

Buried in the system's "title.h" file is a list of enumerated variable names and associated PlayStation serial numbers referencing various games. That list includes all the games packaged with the PlayStation Classic (in both Western and Japanese markets), as well as dozens more that are not included in the box. Elsewhere in the source code, many of those variables (including ones for unplayable games) are used to modify certain emulator settings when that game is selected.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Security questions—the annoying shared secrets used as a secondary form of authentication—have been around forever and are used by just about everyone to deal with users who forget their password. That’s starting to change as more enlightened services—most notably Google and Facebook—have recently phased out security questions after recognizing something then vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin learned the hard way in 2008: the answers are easy for hackers to guess.

Enter Microsoft, which earlier this year added a security questions feature to Windows 10. It allows users to set up a list of security questions that can be asked in the event they later forget a password to one of their administrative accounts. By answering questions such as “What was your first car?” the users can reset the forgotten password and regain control of the account. It didn’t take long for researchers to identify weaknesses in the newly introduced feature. They presented their findings today at the Black Hat Europe Security Conference in London.

“Durable, stealthy backdoor”

The problem, the researchers said, is that the password reset questions are too easy to set and too hard to monitor in networks made up of hundreds or thousands of computers. A single person with administrator credentials can remotely turn them on or change them on any Windows 10 machine and there’s no simple way for the changes to be monitored or changed. As a result, malicious users—say a rogue employee or a hacker who briefly gains unauthorized administrative control—can use the security questions as a backdoor that will secretly allow them to regain control should they ever lose it.

Enlarge / This image carefully avoids any "female-presenting nipples" which would otherwise land it on Tumblr's naughty list. (credit: zharth)

In the run up to its total ban on pornography, Tumblr is using "algorithms" to determine if current posts are pornographic at all.

For some reason, the blogging site hopes that people running porn blogs will, after the December 17th ban, continue to use the site, but restrict their postings to the non-pornographic. As such, it isn't just banning or closing blogs that are currently used for porn; instead, it's analyzing each image and marking those it deems to be pornographic as "explicit." The display of explicit content will be suppressed, leaving behind a wasteland of effectively empty porn blogs.

This would be bad enough for Tumblr users if it were being done effectively, but naturally, it isn't. No doubt using the wonderful power of machine learning —a thing companies often do to distance themselves from any responsibility for the actions taken by their algorithms—Tumblr is flagging non-adult content as adult content, and vice versa. Twitter is filling with complaints about the poor job the algorithm is doing.