Month: September 2019

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)

When you visit a new website, your computer probably submits a request to the domain name system (DNS) to translate the domain name (like arstechnica.com) to an IP address. Currently, most DNS queries are unencrypted, which raises privacy and security concerns. Google and Mozilla are trying to address these concerns by adding support in their browsers for sending DNS queries over the encrypted HTTPS protocol.

But major Internet service providers have cried foul. In a September 19 letter to Congress, Big Cable and other telecom industry groups warned that Google's support for DNS over HTTPS (DOH) "could interfere on a mass scale with critical Internet functions, as well as raise data-competition issues."

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the House Judiciary Committee is taking these concerns seriously. In a September 13 letter, the Judiciary Committee asked Google for details about its DOH plans—including whether Google plans to use data collected via the new protocol for commercial purposes.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bridget Bennett)

So there's a British woman who's been in the news recently for diagnosing herself with a sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation. She sleeps in a $500 EMF-blocking sack and has reportedly stayed in the sack, from time to time, for 30-hour stretches.

The woman— 70-year-old Rosi Gladwell of Totnes, Devon—helps lead a small advocacy group on the issue of EMF-related health issues, and she even got the mayor of the Spanish village where she now lives to look into ways to limit Wi-Fi access for residents. She fears that the introduction of 5G mobile networks will kill her.

Now seems like a good time to remind readers that there is no evidence to support the idea of "electromagnetic hypersensitivity." The World Health Organization calls it "idiopathic environmental intolerance with attribution to electromagnetic fields," or IEI-EMF.

In a move unlikely to surprise anyone, Netflix has officially announced that there will indeed be a fourth season of its mega-hit series Stranger Things. The announcement comes with its own brief teaser, featuring spooky imagery from the Upside Down and the phrase "We're not in Hawkins anymore" as bells ominously chime.

(Spoilers for first three seasons below.)

When we last left our plucky teenaged sleuths and their allies, they had successfully beaten back a third attempt by the so-called Mind-Flayer to escape the Upside Down and take over the town of Hawkins, Indiana, where the series has thus far been set. But that victory did not come without a cost: Eleven lost her telekinetic powers after being bitten by the Flay-Monster. And her adoptive father, fan favorite Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) sacrificed himself to save the town in the season three finale. Eleven is taken in by Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), and the entire Byers clan moves away from Hawkins—and really, who can blame them?

Enlarge / Artist's impression of a malicious hacker coding up a BlueKeep-based exploit. (credit: Getty Images / Bill Hinton)

Attackers have bombarded the Internet with more than 1 billion malicious ads in less than two months. The attackers targeted iOS and macOS users with what were zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome and Safari browsers that were recently patched, researchers said on Monday.

More than 1 billion malicious ads served in the past six weeks contained exploit code that redirected vulnerable users to malicious sites, according to a post published by security firm Confiant. The surge of malicious ads exploited a Safari vulnerability in both iOS and macOS, as well as a Chrome vulnerability in iOS.

“Staggering volume”

"If we take a snapshot of eGobbler activity from August 1 to September 23, 2019, then we see a staggering volume of impacted programmatic impressions," Confiant researcher and engineer Eliya Stein wrote. "By our estimates, we believe up to 1.16 billion impressions have been affected."

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  The Spectre isn't entirely bezel-less, but it's close—HP says it has a 90% screen-to-body ratio at every angle. [credit: HP Inc. ]

Today, HP announced that the 2019 model of Spectre x360 13 is available. This lightweight high-performance Ultrabook will compete with Dell's XPS 13.

The Spectre x360 is verified to be Intel's Project Athena standard, which (among other things) means some hellacious battery life. In order to qualify as a Project Athena laptop, a device must get nine hours or better on-battery with the screen at 250 nits brightness, out-of-the-box display and system settings, and multiple tabs and applications running.

A cynical person might say Project Athena really just means "if it doesn't have an Intel CPU, it can't have this sweet sticker." The bits about battery life are pretty great, though. (credit: Intel Inc.)

HP played its CPU selection coyly in its official release announcement. The company only talked about a "10th-generation Intel Core" instead of coming right out and bragging about using Ice Lake. HP did mention Iris Plus graphics, though, which—along with the doubled performance year-on-year with last year's Spectre and a reference to the i5-1035G4 in the footnotes—makes it clear. The Verge reports that the i7-1065G7 will also be available.

Enlarge / This is Baltimore, gentlemen. The gods will not save you...from ransomware. (credit: Alex Wroblewski / Getty)

In a report to a committee of the Baltimore City Council last week, City Auditor Josh Pasch said that the city's Information Technology department could not provide any documentation of its work toward meeting agency performance goals because the only copies of that data were kept on local hard drives and never backed up to a server or the cloud.

As the Baltimore Sun's Luke Broadwater reports, Pasch told the council:

Performance measures data were saved electronically in responsible personnel's hard drives. One of the responsible personnel's hard drive was confiscated, and the other responsible personnel's selected files were removed due to the May 2019 ransomware incident...One of the things I’ve learned in my short time here is a great number of Baltimore City employees store entity information on their local computers. And that’s it.

The lost data, Pasch said, resulted in a "loss of confidence" in whether the IT department was accomplishing anything on its to-do list.

Enlarge / Mississippi Rebels and Xavier Musketeers go head-to-head during the second round of the 2015 NCAA Men's Basketball on March 19, 2015, in Jacksonville, Florida. (credit: Getty Images | Mike Ehrmann)

California Governor Gavin Newsom today signed a bill into law allowing college athletes to get paid for endorsements, setting up a battle between the state government and the NCAA.

The NCAA strongly opposes California's Fair Play to Pay Act and has threatened to sue the state and prohibit California colleges from competing in NCAA events, even though the new law doesn't actually require colleges to pay athletes. Instead, the act allows student athletes to hire agents and get paid by third parties for sports-related endorsements.

"Colleges and universities reap billions from these student athletes' sacrifices and success but block them from earning a single dollar. That's a bankrupt model," Newsom said in his announcement of the bill signing. When it takes effect in 2023, the new law will make California "the first state in the nation to allow student athletes to receive compensation from the use of their name, image, and likeness," the announcement said.

The BBC dropped the first trailer for its upcoming adaptation of the classic H.G. Wells science fiction novel The War of the Worlds. The three-part miniseries is set in Edwardian England—just a few years after Wells published his novel—and it looks like it will be a fairly faithful treatment of the source material, as the people of Earth fight to survive in the face of a Martian invasion.

(Spoilers for the 1897 novel below.)

First serialized in 1897, The War of the Worlds was published as a book the following year and has remained in print ever since. Told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, the story opens with astronomers on Earth observing what appear to be explosions on the surface of Mars through their telescopes. Soon after, a meteor falls to Earth, which turns out to be a capsule housing large, tentacled aliens. The creatures do not come in peace; instead, they use their tripod fighting machines to destroy much of the town of Woking and its surroundings with their heat rays and poisonous black smoke.