Month: December 2018

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chris Clor)

An email intrusion targeting a key Republican campaign committee allowed unknown people to steal thousands of sensitive emails from four senior aides, Politico reported Tuesday.

The attack on the National Republican Congressional Committee, the main group that works to elect Republicans to the US House of Representatives, allowed the person or group responsible to monitor the aides’ email accounts for several months, Politico said. The intrusion was detected in April by a managed security services provider the NRCC had retained to monitor the security of its network.

The unnamed provider informed NRCC officials, who in turn alerted security firm Crowdstrike. Crowdstrike, which was called in to investigate the Russian government’s 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee, had already been retained by the NRCC when the intrusion was discovered in April, Politico said.

In our recent review of the PlayStation Classic, we expressed dismay that the $99 plug-and-play device didn't offer much in the way of visual or emulation options, despite using an off-the-shelf open source emulator at its core. Now, some users have found those kinds of emulation options are easily accessible, provided you have the right kind of USB keyboard.

The YouTubers at the Retro Gaming Arts channel seem to have been among the first to notice that plugging certain USB keyboards into the hardware and hitting the escape key brings up a "PCSX menu" with an array of emulation options. Among them: additional RAM-based save states for each game; simulated CRT-style scanlines; modifiable "frameskip" settings; a frames-per-second display; and even the ability to change the emulation "region" to force 50fps PAL games to run at the 60fps NTSC standard.

While the video initially suggested any USB keyboard would be able to activate this hidden menu, further testing from viewers seems to suggest only certain high-end Corsair and Logitech keyboards (including the Corsair K70 and K95) can activate the menu. This limitation is possibly due to holes in the USB blacklisting in the hardware itself. Testing here at Ars' Orbital HQ found the Sleep button on an old Velocity Micro keyboard could turn the console off, but no other button on a couple of tested keyboards had any effect. Digital Foundry's John Linneman says he tested more than a dozen keyboards at a local shop with no luck.

In our recent review of the PlayStation Classic, we expressed dismay that the $99 plug-and-play device didn't offer much in the way of visual or emulation options, despite using an off-the-shelf open source emulator at its core. Now, some users have found those kinds of emulation options are easily accessible, provided you have the right kind of USB keyboard.

The YouTubers at the Retro Gaming Arts channel seem to have been among the first to notice that plugging certain USB keyboards into the hardware and hitting the escape key brings up a "PCSX menu" with an array of emulation options. Among them: additional RAM-based save states for each game; simulated CRT-style scanlines; modifiable "frameskip" settings; a frames-per-second display; and even the ability to change the emulation "region" to force 50fps PAL games to run at the 60fps NTSC standard.

While the video initially suggested any USB keyboard would be able to activate this hidden menu, further testing from viewers seems to suggest only certain high-end Corsair and Logitech keyboards (including the Corsair K70 and K95) can activate the menu. This limitation is possibly due to holes in the USB blacklisting in the hardware itself. Testing here at Ars' Orbital HQ found the Sleep button on an old Velocity Micro keyboard could turn the console off, but no other button on a couple of tested keyboards had any effect. Digital Foundry's John Linneman says he tested more than a dozen keyboards at a local shop with no luck.

Razer

The Razer Blade Stealth was always intended to be a non-gaming machine from a company that calls itself a "lifestyle brand for gamers." Or at least, it's a computer that could blend in at a business meeting instead of screaming, "I am a gamer, look at all these crazy lights!" A 2018 update to the device that went on sale today has a tone-on-tone logo on the back that looks a little less attention grabbing than the bright-green Razer logo from before, and it doubles down on the previous model's ultraportable credentials with slimmer bezels.

But the biggest improvements are actually in performance. The new Razer Blade Stealth comes in three configurations at $1,399, $1,599, and $1,899, and the top two add discrete graphics (NVIDIA GeForce MX150 with 4GB of GDDR5 memory). The entry-level spec still just has integrated Intel HD Graphics 620. The second-tier spec with the MX150 (and an additional 8GB of memory over the base spec, bringing it to 16GB 2133MHz) is only $200 more than the base spec, making it a tempting upgrade for gamers.

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On Tuesday, New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission voted to set a minimum pay rate for Uber, Lyft, and other on-demand ride-hailing drivers. The new rate will be set at $17.22 after expenses, or $26.51 per hour gross.

New York is believed to be the first city in the nation to implement such a pay floor. Four months ago, the Big Apple also imposed a cap on the number of such vehicles in the city.

The Independent Drivers Guild, a local affiliate of the Machinists Union, advocated for the change.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Westend61)

Verizon-owned AOL helped advertisers track children online in order to serve targeted ads, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, and has agreed to pay a fine of $4.95 million, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced today.

"The Attorney General's Office found that AOL conducted billions of auctions for ad space on hundreds of websites the company knew were directed to children under the age of 13," Underwood's announcement said. "Through these auctions, AOL collected, used, and disclosed personal information from the websites' users in violation of COPPA [Children's Online Privacy Protection Act], enabling advertisers to track and serve targeted ads to young children."

In addition to paying the largest-ever fine for violating COPPA, the Verizon-owned company "has agreed to adopt comprehensive reforms to protect children from improper tracking," the announcement said.