Month: June 2019

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Nine states and the District of Columbia today filed a lawsuit against T-Mobile and Sprint in an attempt to stop the wireless carriers from merging.

New York Attorney General Letitia James and California AG Xavier Becerra are leading the way, with co-plaintiffs from Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

"When it comes to corporate power, bigger isn't always better," James said in an announcement of the lawsuit. "The T-Mobile and Sprint merger would not only cause irreparable harm to mobile subscribers nationwide by cutting access to affordable, reliable wireless service for millions of Americans, but would particularly affect lower-income and minority communities here in New York and in urban areas across the country. That's why we are going to court to stop this merger and protect our consumers, because this is exactly the sort of consumer-harming, job-killing megamerger our antitrust laws were designed to prevent."

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a sweeping set of discounts on Amazon-made devices, including various Echo speakers, Fire tablets, Fire TV media streamers, and Kindle e-readers.

Most of the deals are what we typically see when Amazon runs these periodic sales events, but they're still largely good prices for what you're getting. Highlights include a $30 discount on the latest Kindle Paperwhite, $20 off the Fire HD 8 tablet, and $10 off the 4K- and HDR-ready Fire TV 4K streamer. If you're onboard with the Echo, the latest full-size model is currently at an all-time low, and there are various deals on Amazon-owned Eero routers and Ring home security cameras as well.

The elephant in the room here—besides the fact that Amazon is an increasingly powerful behemoth that may soon face elevated antitrust scrutiny—is that the company's Prime Day sales event is likely just a month or so away. Exactly when it will occur is still unclear, but it's almost certain to bring heavy price cuts to everything in this current Father's Day sale. If you have Prime, or if you have a free trial to use on Prime Day itself, it might be best to hold off. But if not, or if you just can't wait, these are mostly good prices and mostly useful gadgets.

Enlarge / A DDR3 DIMM with error-correcting code from Samsung. ECC is no longer an absolute defense against Rowhammer attacks. (credit: Samsung)

The Rowhammer exploit that lets unprivileged attackers corrupt or change data stored in vulnerable memory chips has evolved over the past four years to take on a range of malicious capabilities, including elevating system rights and breaking out of security sandboxes, rooting Android phones, and taking control of supposedly impregnable virtual machines. Now, researchers are unveiling a new attack that uses Rowhammer to extract cryptographic keys or other secrets stored in vulnerable DRAM modules.

Like the previous Rowhammer-based attacks, the new data-pilfering RAMBleed technique exploits the ever-shrinking dimensions of DRAM chips that store data a computer needs to carry out various tasks. Rowhammer attacks work by rapidly accessing—or hammering—physical rows inside vulnerable chips in ways that cause bits in neighboring rows to flip, meaning 1s turn to 0s and vice versa. The attacks work because as capacitors become closer together, they more quickly leak the electrical charges that store the bits. At one time, these bit flips were little more than an exotic crashing phenomenon that was known to be triggered only by cosmic rays. But when induced with surgical precision, as researchers have demonstrated over the past four years, Rowhammer can have potentially serious effects on the security of the devices that use the vulnerable chips.

A new side channel

RAMBleed takes Rowhammer in a new direction. Rather than using bit flips to alter sensitive data, the new technique exploits the hardware bug to extract sensitive data stored in memory regions that are off-limits to attackers. The attacks require only that the exploit hammers memory locations the exploit code already has permission to access. What’s more, the data extraction can work even when DRAM protected by error correcting code detects and reverses a malicious bit flip.

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  Zelda's dominance in this trailer may hint to her inclusion as a playable character, if not an outright two-player mode, but Nintendo did not offer any gameplay details in this reveal.

LOS ANGELES—Nintendo announced during a Nintendo Direct presentation Tuesday morning that a sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is now in development. No release date or target window was announced.

A short teaser trailer for the game showed Zelda and Link exploring a dark cave together, lit only by torchlight, in an art style that seemed extremely similar to the Breath of the Wild engine. That suggests the possibility of a two-player mode for the upcoming sequel, though Nintendo offered absolutely nothing in the way of gameplay details. The teaser also included a zombie-style creature that turned his head with a violent cracking sound, seemingly in response to their presence.

Nintendo also announced a slight delay for its previously announced Animal Crossing game, now titled New Horizons and targeting a March 20, 2020 launch. A short trailer showed a camping theme for the game, with your tent-residing villager building fires on the beach, fishing, hanging laundry out to dry, and rolling up snowballs in the winter months. Tom Nook is also there to demand an egregious payment for your stay and help you craft items at a workbench as well. Shots of multiple villagers running around the same campsite also suggest that multiplayer gameplay will be supported.

Enlarge / Border crossing. (credit: Cole Burston/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Hackers have stolen thousands of photos of travelers and their license plates from a subcontractor of Customs and Border Protection, the agency announced on Monday. A source told the Washington Post that the data was collected at a particular port of entry on the Canadian border.

CBP agency declined to identify the subcontractor, but the agency sent the Washington Post a document with the title "CBP Perceptics Public Statement." Perceptics sells license plate reader technology, and the Register reported last month that the company's network had been hacked.

CBP says it learned of the breach on May 31, and the organization stated that its own network was not compromised. The agency says that the subcontractor violated agency policies when it copied the photos to its own network, making them more vulnerable to hacking.

SANTA MONICA—If you'd asked me ahead of E3 2019 which publisher I expected to surprise me the most this year, I wouldn't have answered "THQ Nordic." Austrian publisher Nordic changed its name in 2016 after acquiring a significant slate of defunct THQ assets, and the company has since been soldiering forward with remasters and re-releases of familiar franchises.

While this year's showing isn't up to the likes of more established publishers, their E3 2019 slate isn't so bad—especially thanks to one what-the-heck game from an entirely new IP.

This year sees the company land with a few more remasters, particularly from the Destroy All Humans! and Spongebob Squarepants game series. But the company's really impressive E3 2019 material comes in the form of three brand-new games playable on the show floor. Two of these are sequels: Darksiders Genesis, a two-player, top-down twist on the adventure series, and Desperados III, a return to a nearly forgotten cowboy-stealth series from the mid-'00s.