Month: February 2019

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

The handy feature that lets Chromebook users connect to a smartphone's cellular hotspot is now coming to more devices. Google announced that Chrome OS' Instant Tethering feature will now be available on more than 15 Chromebooks and more than 30 smartphone models, including handsets from HTC, LG, Motorola, and Samsung.

Previously, Instant Tethering was only available on a handful of Chromebooks, including the Pixelbook and the new Pixel Slate. The list of supported smartphones was similarly short, initially confined to Google-made handsets like the Pixel and Nexus. The expansion is part of Google's effort to make the experience of using a Chromebook easier and more seamless for those with Android smartphones, regardless of the handset's manufacturer.

Instant Tethering, which first came to Chromebooks in 2017, requires an initial setup process that users can complete upon setting up the Chromebook or at any time from the Settings menu. Users must be signed in to the same Google account on the Chromebook and the Android smartphone in order to use Instant Tethering features.

Enlarge / Good news. For now.

With lists of billions of compromised credentials floating around on underground forums and in text-paste pages across the Internet, it's difficult for anyone to keep up with the potential threat from breached passwords. That's why, as part of its security efforts during Safer Internet Week, Google has released a new add-on for the Chrome browser that automatically and securely checks website credentials against known password breaches.

The Chrome browser extension, called Password Checkup, is available today. It securely checks credentials used to log in to websites—whether they're manually entered or stored in Chrome's password manager—against hashed credentials stored in an encrypted database of billions of compromised accounts maintained by Google. Elie Bursztein, head of Google's anti-abuse research, told Ars that the protocol behind the service is being presented as a standard for securely checking account security and that the interface may be offered as an open application interface in the future.

Checking for password breaches is a sensitive operation. Google's security team has been offering password checks for G Suite users for some time, but doing the same thing for the rest of users' credentials is a much more delicate privacy dance. Users don't want to just hand over their passwords and accounts to Google openly, and "Google has a data set we don't want to publicly share," said Kurt Thomas, staff research scientist at Google. So Password Checkup uses a combination of anonymization and cryptography to protect the exchange, using a technique called "blinding" to create a secret search index. Credentials are anonymized with an Argon2 hash function to create a search key for Google's database and encrypted with Elliptic Curve cryptography.

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How violent are the early histories of solar systems? Planets are built by the collisions of smaller bodies, so a certain amount of violence is probably unavoidable. Our own Earth-Moon system seems to have been formed by a smash-up of two planets, while Uranus seems to have been flipped on its side by a collision, and Mercury seems to have lost a lot of its material early in its history. Is this sort of history common as planets form?

Answering these questions requires a detailed understanding of the planets themselves, knowledge difficult to attain for any solar system but our own. But now, following up on observations made with the Kepler space telescope, researchers are suggesting they've found evidence of a smash-up in an exosolar system about 1,750 light years from Earth.

That's dense

Kepler-107 has a Sun-like star orbited by at least four planets. The planets are tightly packed around the star, with orbital periods ranging from three to 14 days. The lengths of the orbits of neighboring planets can be expressed as simple ratios of integers (5:2, 3:1, and so on). This creates what are called "resonant orbits," where the periodic alignment of the bodies helps stabilize and reinforce the orbits. Generally, this is thought to occur when planets that form farther from the star are migrating inward toward it; the resonances help balance things out and keep the planets from continuing on into the star.

Enlarge / There's some nitpicking about Apex Legends below, but I will say this: I dig its character designs. Even if there are only eight thus far. (credit: EA / Respawn)

A few days ago, I saw a rumor emerge about a new PC and console video game from EA called Apex Legends, which would marry the high-speed mechs-and-guns combat of Titanfall with a free-to-play economy and a battle royale gimmick.

Upon learning that the news had come from an unverified source, I laughed the whole thing off. "Why would EA stealth-release a new, online-only video game in the same month as another new, online-only video game?" I asked myself.

Why indeed.