Month: July 2019

Enlarge / The FaceApp application displayed on Apple's App Store. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called for a federal investigation into FaceApp, saying the Russian-operated mobile application "could pose national security and privacy risks for millions of US citizens."

FaceApp for iOS and Android has been around since 2017 but just recently went viral as celebrities and many other people used it to alter photographs to make themselves look 20 years older. This has raised privacy concerns, as Americans are uploading photographs and device-related data to a service operated by a company based in Russia. The image alterations performed by FaceApp—which calls itself an "AI Face Editor"—are done on the company's servers instead of on user devices.

The app now warns users that "Each photo you select for editing will be uploaded to our servers for image processing and face transformation."

Enlarge / David Marcus, head of blockchain at Facebook, speaks at a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, July 17, 2019. (credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

David Marcus, the head of Facebook's new Calibra payments division, appeared before two hostile congressional committees this week with a simple message: Facebook knows policymakers are concerned about Libra, and Facebook won't move forward with the project until their concerns are addressed.

While he didn't say so explicitly, Marcus' comments at hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday represented a dramatic shift in Facebook's conception of Libra. In Facebook's original vision, Libra would be an open and largely decentralized network, akin to Bitcoin. The core network would be beyond the reach of regulators. Regulatory compliance would be the responsibility of exchanges, wallets, and other services that are the "on ramps and off ramps" to the Libra ecosystem.

Facebook now seems to recognize its original vision was a non-starter with regulators. So this week Marcus sketched out a new vision for Libra—one in which the Libra Association will shoulder significant responsibility for ensuring compliance with laws relating to money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes.

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  It's happening... in "2020."

San Diego Comic Con's tentpole Thursday morning panel, dedicated to the Paramount and Skydance film Terminator: Dark Fate, saw an interruption from another big face at that combined film company: Tom Cruise. Tom, apparently, couldn't let Arnold Schwarzenegger have all the fun, as he used the opportunity to reveal the first public footage of next year's Top Gun: Maverick.

The two-minute trailer is at its most impressive when we see Cruise continuing his streak for performing his own stunts, as he's established in so many Mission: Impossible films up until now. Unless Cruise and company have figured out a whole new level of CGI and green-screen trickery, that sure looks like the actor himself piloting an F-18 as it takes off from a Naval aircraft carrier at sea—and then pulling some serious Gs while flying over a snowy mountainside in formation.

In terms of plot, we see a face-off with a rear admiral played by actor Ed Harris. Harris is angry about Cruise's unwillingness to retire after "30-plus years of service" and his continued status as a Navy captain. "You should at least be a two-star admiral by now," Harris says. Eventually, Harris insists that "your kind is headed for extinction," which might hint to the Navy's increased emphasis on automation or remotely controlled crafts.

Enlarge / The heartbreak of being blocked by a romance scammer. The joy of burning an account used in a criminal operation.

I've got a history with Internet scammers. I've spent hours on the phone with tech support scammers, and I've hunted down bot networks spreading fake news. But for some reason, I've lately become a magnet for an entirely different sort of scammer—a kind that uses social media platforms to run large-scale wire-fraud scams and other confidence games. Based on anecdotal evidence, Twitter has become their favorite platform for luring in suckers.

Recently, Twitter's security team has been tracking a large amount of fraudulent activity coming out of Africa, including "romance schemes"—wherein the fraudster uses an emotional appeal of friendship or promised romance to lure a victim into a scam. Thousands of accounts involved in the ongoing campaign have been suspended. But that has hardly put a dent in the efforts of scammers, who move on to set up new accounts and run new scams. And there are dozens of other fraud games being played out on Twitter and other platforms.

I've been gathering anecdotal data from a number of such accounts as they've attempted to prepare me for a lure. They follow a fairly easy-to-spot pattern for anyone who has tracked identity scams. But the scale of these efforts goes far beyond what you'd expect from what are (to those in the know) recognizable cons. This suggests that there's a high level of sophistication to this latest wave of fakers.

Pennywise the demonic clown gleefully inflicts all manner of psychological and physical torment on the grown-up members of the Losers Club in a new trailer for IT Chapter Two. The trailer was shown during New Line Cinema's "ScareDiego" event, a prelude to San Diego Comic-Con that has been happening annually for the last three years.

(Some spoilers for first film and novel below.)

Set in 1989, IT essentially adapted half of King's original novel, telling the story of a group of misfit kids calling themselves "The Losers Club." The kids discover their small town of Derry is home to an ancient, trans-dimensional evil that awakens every 27 years to prey mostly on children by taking the form of an evil clown named Pennywise. Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) loses his little brother, Georgie, to Pennywise, and the group decides to take on Pennywise and drive him into early hibernation, where he will hopefully starve. But Beverly (Sophia Lillis) has a vision warning that Pennywise will return on schedule in 27 years, and they must be ready to fight him anew.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! Just when the Dealmaster thinks Prime Day is over, the deals pull him back in. Today, we're bringing you a roundup of (mostly) leftover deals that are still live from Amazon's technically expired sales event and the various sales other retailers ran alongside it.

While the vast majority of Prime Day's better offers have drifted away—and while the majority of Prime Day's offers as a whole were middling—there are a handful of worthwhile discounts that are still kicking, including offers on a bunch of board games we like, the latest Apple AirPods, a handful of laptops and headphones, and game consoles like the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One S. Best of all, you don't need to be a Prime member to take advantage of the majority of them.

We'll delve into more detail for a couple of particular highlights below, where you can check out the rest of the rundown.

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  This is what Dropbox looks like now. It used to be a folder, now it's a file manager. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Hey Dropbox users, how has Dropbox been for you lately? Major changes are coming to the Dropbox desktop app. The company announced its "New Desktop Experience" in June, and previously it was opt-in. Recently, though, a number of users on Twitter and at the Ars Orbiting HQ have reported silently being "upgraded" to this radically different version of Dropbox.

This new version of Dropbox wants to be... a file manager? Instead of the minimal sync app, the Dropbox icon now opens a big, multi-panel, blue and white window showing all your Dropbox files. It kind of looks like Slack, if Slack was a file manager. You can now "star" folders as important so they show up in the left panel (again, like a Slack chat room). The middle panel shows your Dropbox files, and the right panel shows a file preview with options for comments and sharing. You can search for files, sort by name or date, and do all the usual file operations like cut, copy, and paste. It's a file manager.

A big part of the appeal of Dropbox is (was?) that it's a dead-simple product: it's a folder, in the cloud! Put your stuff in the folder, and it seamlessly gets backed up and synced to all your other computers. Part of using Dropbox means installing the sync app to your computer, and to keep everything fresh and up to date, Dropbox has the ability to silently update this app from time to time. Using this mechanism to silently install a bigger, more bloated, completely different version of the Dropbox app onto people's computers seems... wrong, especially with no notice whatsoever. Updates are one thing, but many users (your author included) feel like there was a lack of consent here.