Month: June 2019

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Google is locking down API access to Gmail data (and later, Drive data) soon, and some of your favorite third-party apps might find themselves locked out of your Google account data. The new API policy was announced back in October, but this week Google started emailing individual users of these apps, telling them the apps will no longer work starting July 15. The new policy closes off OAuth access to Gmail data, and while we by no means have a comprehensive list of what isn't affected yet, so far we've seen users of Microsoft's SwiftKey and the open source app SMS Backup+ receive notification emails.

Google's OAuth APIs have been around for years as a way for apps to get access to and control your Google data. A third-party email app, for instance, would want access to your Gmail account and the ability to send, read, and delete emails so it could control everything remotely. An IM app might just want access to your contacts and profile picture. For years this was purely an agreement between the user and the developer—the app would say what it wanted access to, and the user could deny or allow it.

In the October blog post, Google announced a major change to Gmail data access—Google would now be legislating what uses are and are not allowed. Only "appropriate" access will be allowed for some APIs, strict data-handling rules will be enacted, and access to APIs would be limited to "only the information necessary to implement your application." It sounds like Google will also be subjecting all of these apps to human review, app-store style.

Enlarge (credit: Steve Johnson / Flickr)

The US House of Representatives has voted to block Ajit Pai's attempt to kill a San Francisco ordinance designed to promote broadband competition in apartment buildings.

As we reported last week, the Federal Communications Commission chair has scheduled a July 10 vote on a measure that would preempt the San Francisco city ordinance, which lets Internet service providers use the existing wiring inside multiunit residential and commercial properties even if the wiring is already used by another ISP that serves the building. The ordinance applies only when the inside wiring belongs to the property owner, but it makes it easier for ISPs to compete in many multiunit buildings already served by another provider.

Pai claimed that the city's rule "deters broadband deployment" and infringes on the FCC's regulation of cable wiring. But US Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) proposed a budget amendment that would forbid the FCC from using any funding to implement or enforce Pai's preemption proposal.

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  WireGuard 0.0.14 pre-alpha, running on an x1.small machine at packet.net. It's uploading across a WireGuard tunnel at 1.2Gbps to a Linux machine, also at packet. [credit: Jim Salter ]

WireGuard is a new peer-to-peer VPN technology that has the potential for greater speed, smaller attack surface, and easier configuration than commonly used and better-established VPN platforms such as OpenVPN and IPSec. It has been available on Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, Android, and even iOS for quite some time now, with Windows being the one platform frustratingly missing. There are good reasons for that—lead developer Jason Donenfeld didn't want to inherit the problems of OpenVPN's OpenTAP adapter code, and when he investigated Microsoft's built-in VPN API, he didn't like that either. So his first move was to take a giant step backward on the Windows platform and develop an extremely simple virtual adapter that could be used not only for WireGuard, but also for other projects that might need the same kind of very basic, socket-and-tunnel functionality. This became Wintun.

For the moment, WireGuard for Windows is still in what creator Jason Donenfeld refers to as "pre-alpha," with an alpha build due out sometime in the next week or two. The good news is that it's an easy install now, with no dev-fu required to get it running happily on a Windows 10 (or Server 2016, as seen below) system. There are self-contained, signed MSI installers for both 64-bit and 32-bit builds there; downloading and running them just works, with no complaints from Defender about unsigned or untrusted anything. I was curious about what makes v0.0.14 "pre-alpha" rather than merely "alpha." Donenfeld told me one reason he called it pre-alpha was to keep journalists like me (as well as the generally unadventurous) from writing about it before it's ready.

Pressed for more detail, it became clear that he's laser-focused on security—and Windows as a platform diverges far more radically from Linux, Android, macOS, and iOS in that regard than any of them do from one another. There's no access to Windows kernel source code, and the documentation is insufficient for his needs. As a result, he has spent hundreds of hours in a disassembler, reverse-engineering ntoskrnl.exe and ndis.sys to make absolutely sure he understands exactly what's going on at an extremely low level most developers never bother with.

Enlarge / A Ford sign at the Ford Engine Plant in Bridgend, South Wales—one of the plants slated to be closed in the next 18 months.

Ford is planning to lay off 12,000 workers across Europe, the company announced on Thursday. Ford says it will reduce the number of manufacturing facilities in Europe from 24 at the beginning of 2019 to 18 at the end of 2020.

Ford will be closing plants in South Wales and France and three in Russia. Ford is also selling a Slovakian plant to Magna.

The 12,000 workers represent a bit less than 20% of Ford's 65,000-person European workforce. Ford says that most job reductions will be voluntary separations. About 2,000 of the layoffs will be salaried workers—part of a previously announced 7,000-person reduction in Ford's salaried global workforce.

Enlarge / The director of the German National Reference Centre for Invasive Fungus Infections holding a petri dish of the yeast Candida auris in January 2018. (credit: Getty | Nicolas Armer)

Patients infected with a deadly, drug-resistant fungus are dripping with the dangerous germ, which pours into their surroundings where it lies in wait for weeks to find a new victim. That’s according to fresh data reported from the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology recently in San Francisco.

The data fills in critical unknowns about how the fungus, Candida auris, actually spreads. The germ is a relatively new threat, considered an emerging pathogen by experts—and it's emerging quickly with an unusual ability to lurk and kill in healthcare settings.

It was first identified in 2009 in Japan. Studies since have tracked the globetrotting fungus backward and forward in time, from South Korea in 1996 to an outbreak in New York health facilities that began in 2013 and lasted until 2017. In all, C. auris has made an appearance in more than 30 countries, usually leaving a body count wherever it goes.