Month: January 2019

The latest Insider build of Windows 10, 18309, expands the use of a thing that Microsoft has recently introduced: passwordless Microsoft accounts. It's now possible to create a Microsoft account that uses a one-time code delivered over SMS as its primary authenticator, rather than a conventional password.

In the new Windows 10 build, these passwordless accounts can be used for logging into a machine locally. The initial sign-in will use SMS, and it will then prompt you to configure biometric or PIN authentication. Your face, fingerprint, or PIN will be used subsequently. This capability is in all the editions, from Home up to Enterprise. A few previous builds had constrained it to Home only.

While SMS-based authentication has security issues of its own, Microsoft seems to feel that it's a better bet for most home users than a likely insecure password. Removing the Windows login password is part of the company's broader efforts to switch to using a mix of one-time passwords, biometrics, and cryptographic keys.

Enlarge / The hospital in Enköping, Sweden, is pictured on January 4, 2019, as it has received a case of suspected Ebola, according to health care officials. The patient was first admitted to hospital in Enköping after being treated now in Uppsala University Hospital. The emergency room in Enköping was closed, and staff who came in contact with the patient were being cared for, a statement said. (credit: Getty | FREDRIK SANDBERG)

Medical tests have cleared a man initially suspected of being infected with Ebola in Sweden.

The man, who had recently traveled to Central Africa, made global headlines Friday and sent Swedish authorities into high alert after arriving at a local emergency department that morning with symptoms of viral hemorrhagic fever, including vomiting blood.

That emergency department—at a hospital in Enköping, which is about 80km northwest of Stockholm—was promptly shuttered, and the hospital began crisis responses. Authorities transferred the man to Uppsala University Hospital, where doctors treated him in isolation in the hospital’s infection unit.

Enlarge / The hospital in Enköping, Sweden, is pictured on January 4, 2019, as it has received a case of suspected Ebola, according to health care officials. The patient was first admitted to hospital in Enköping after being treated now in Uppsala University Hospital. The emergency room in Enköping was closed, and staff who came in contact with the patient were being cared for, a statement said. (credit: Getty | FREDRIK SANDBERG)

Medical tests have cleared a man initially suspected of being infected with Ebola in Sweden.

The man, who had recently traveled to Central Africa, made global headlines Friday and sent Swedish authorities into high alert after arriving at a local emergency department that morning with symptoms of viral hemorrhagic fever, including vomiting blood.

That emergency department—at a hospital in Enköping, which is about 80km northwest of Stockholm—was promptly shuttered, and the hospital began crisis responses. Authorities transferred the man to Uppsala University Hospital, where doctors treated him in isolation in the hospital’s infection unit.

Unreal PT

Roughly a year after Konami released P.T., a free "Silent Hills teaser" experience for the PlayStation 4, the Japanese game publisher removed its listing. Ever since, the only way to play through this eerie, atmospheric horror vignette has been to find a PS4 that had already downloaded the demo.

That changed on Friday with the release of a free, and largely authentic, replica of the experience. Unreal PT is now available for Windows PCs, and it offers a nearly identical playthrough of the PS4 original. Ars has played through the 1.6GB experience and confirmed that it delivers a remarkable version of the Hideo Kojima original.

Unreal PT

Roughly a year after Konami released P.T., a free "Silent Hills teaser" experience for the PlayStation 4, the Japanese game publisher removed its listing. Ever since, the only way to play through this eerie, atmospheric horror vignette has been to find a PS4 that had already downloaded the demo.

That changed on Friday with the release of a free, and largely authentic, replica of the experience. Unreal PT is now available for Windows PCs, and it offers a nearly identical playthrough of the PS4 original. Ars has played through the 1.6GB experience and confirmed that it delivers a remarkable version of the Hideo Kojima original.

Enlarge (credit: Endai Huedl/Getty Images)

Just before the holidays, the peer-to-peer car sharing platform Turo launched an interesting new tool. It's called the carculator, and it's aimed at helping Turo's "hosts" find out just how much they're able to make by renting out their vehicles. It's extremely simple to use: you just enter the make and model of the car you're interested in—anything from 2006 onwards—as well as your location, and it spits out an estimate of how much you'd earn renting it out per day, as well as the average number of days per month you could expect to have bookings.

"One of the promises we’ve said we’d deliver on is changing the economics of car ownership," explained Steve Webb, Turo's director of community and communications. "Uber and Lyft don’t make use of an idle vehicle, they monetize the labor of drivers. Turo is a more passive way to actually monetize your car." The company's carculator is the latest tool it's offering to help do that, something Turo developed in response to requests from some of the hundreds of thousands of users who offer up their vehicles through the platform. The company is able to offer these insights after amassing quite a wealth of data—since its launch in 2010, Turo now has 350,000 vehicles listed and has booked more than 6 million days of rentals.

Analyzing that data shows us which cars are the most popular rentals, and I'll be honest, I'm slightly surprised. Using data for the 365 days between November 1, 2017 and October 31, 2018 (and excluding vehicles that were pre-2012 or which had fewer than five completed rentals), it turns out that the most popular vehicle on the platform was… the Jeep Wrangler. These averaged 14 booked days per month, earning an average of $851 a month. That's equivalent to two and a half monthly payments for a Jeep Wrangler, according to Turo. Runners up in the "pays for itself" category are the Ford Mustang ($796 a month from 17 booked days a month) and the Fiat 500 ($474 a month from 17 booked days a month).

Enlarge / A birds-eye view of London from the south looking north (1572), one of the maps used to create an interactive map of murders in medieval London. (credit: Braun & Hogenberg/Public Domain)

In July of 1316, a priest with a hankering for fresh apples sneaked into a walled garden in the Cripplegate area of London to help himself to the fruits therein. The gardener caught him in the act, and the priest brutally stabbed him to death with a knife—hardly godly behavior, but this was the Middle Ages. A religious occupation was no guarantee of moral standing.

That's just one of the true-crime gems to be found in a new interactive digital "murder map" of London compiled by University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner. Drawing on data catalogued in the city Coroners' Rolls, the map shows the approximate location of 142 homicide cases in late medieval London. The map launched to the public in late November on the website for the university's Violence Research Center, and be forewarned—it's extremely addictive. You could easily lose yourself down the rabbit hole of medieval murder for hours, filtering the killings by year, choice of weapon, and location. (It works best with Google Chrome.)

"The events described in the Coroners' Rolls show weapons were never very far away, male honor had to be protected, and conflicts easily got out of hand," said Eisner, who embarked on the project to create an accessible resource for the public to explore the historical records. "They give us a detailed picture of how homicide was embedded in the rhythms of urban medieval life."

Enlarge / A screenshot of the Twitter account of "_0rbit" before its suspension. Over the last week of December, files with personal data of hundreds of German politicians, bloggers, and celebrities was posted via links from the account.

Over the past week, someone using the Twitter handle "_0rbit" and describing themselves as a "security researcher" and "artist" published archive files appearing to containing personal data belonging to an array of German politicians. The apparent victims include Chancellor Angela Merkel, members of the Bundestag (Germany's parliamentary body) and the European Parliament, as well as regional and local officials.

Today, a German government spokesperson acknowledged that at least some of the documents appear to be genuine, dating back to 2017. German deputy government spokesperson Martina Fietz told reporters that "personal data and documents belonging to hundreds of politicians and public figures were published on the Internet... the government is taking this incident very seriously." The data includes home addresses, mobile telephone numbers, letters, invoices, and copies of identity documents.

While the Twitter account, Blogger page, and other websites associated with the breach have been taken down, dozens of mirror sites remain up and running. Fietz said that none of the data regarding Merkel reviewed thus far contained sensitive information—Merkel's data included copies of letters she had sent and received, two email addresses apparently tied to the Chancellor, and a fax number.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Stockcam)

The IBM-owned Weather Channel app has been transmitting its users' precise geolocation data to advertisers and other third parties despite telling users that their location data was needed only for providing local weather data, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by California government officials.

When asking users for permission to turn on location tracking, the iOS and Android app does not "give users any reason to believe that their location data will be used for anything other than personalized local weather data, alerts, and forecasts," the lawsuit said.

"Unbeknownst to many users, the Weather Channel App has tracked users' detailed geolocation data for years, analyzing and/or transferring that data to third parties for a variety of commercial and advertising purposes, including for targeted advertisements based on locations users frequent, and for hedge funds interested in analyzing consumer behavior," the lawsuit said.