Month: September 2019

Enlarge / Traffic moves through an interchange along Interstate 580 on July 25, 2019 in Oakland, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

Four major automakers that recently reached an agreement with the state of California to hold to certain emissions standards over the next decade are now the target of a federal antitrust investigation.

Ford, Honda, BMW, and Volkswagen confirmed to media they have been contacted about the probe, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

"Honda will work cooperatively with the Department of Justice with regard to the recent emissions agreement reached between the State of California and various automotive manufacturers, including Honda," the company said. BMW and Ford also confirmed receiving a letter from the DOJ, and Volkswagen said it is in "regular contact" with US authorities.

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump references a map held by acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan on Wednesday. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

On Wednesday, when President Donald Trump was showing off a doctored hurricane forecast in the White House Oval Office, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center were mortified.

It was a critical moment for the federal tropical cyclone experts because Hurricane Dorian had begun to show signs of re-intensifying—it would later become a major hurricane again—and its track appeared increasingly likely to bring the storm's center ashore somewhere in the Carolinas. Two sources in the Miami-based hurricane center told Ars that Trump's "update" on Hurricane Dorian effectively paralyzed operations.

After Trump spoke, the forecasters' cell phones buzzed with incessant distractions. Media briefings were stopped for the afternoon. "Precious hours were wasted," one official at the center told me. "We aren’t going to put out bad forecasts, but we need to keep the eye on the ball here."

Enlarge / A Verizon logo at GSMA Mobile World Congress 2019 on February 26, 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Getty Images | David Ramos)

Verizon yesterday announced that its 5G service is available in 13 NFL stadiums but said the network is only able to cover "parts" of the seating areas. Verizon 5G signals will also be sparse or non-existent when fans walk through concourses and other areas in and around each stadium.

The rollout of 5G is more complicated than the rollout of 4G was because 5G relies heavily on millimeter-wave signals that don't travel far and are easily blocked by walls and other obstacles. While Verizon is trying to build excitement around 5G, its announcement for availability in NFL stadiums carried several caveats.

"Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband service will be available in areas of the [13] stadiums," Verizon said. "Service will be concentrated in parts of the seating areas but could be available in other locations in and around the stadium as well."

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  Young Mike Hanson (Chosen Jacobs). [credit: YouTube/Warner Bros. ]

The Losers Club is all grown up and back in Derry for a final confrontation with Pennywise in IT Chapter Two, Director Andy Muschietti's follow up to his 2017 box office hit, IT. Chapter Two isn't quite as good as its phenomenal predecessor, but it's still good, scary fun. And together, the two films comprise a deeply satisfying full adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling novel.

(Some spoilers for the 1986 novel IT and IT: Chapter Two, but no major reveals from IT: Chapter Two)

Confession: IT was the book that turned me on to Stephen King, convincing me that the horror novelist's work wasn't just about monsters, gore, and jump scares. It scared the crap out of my 20-something self; I slept with a light on for two nights after finishing it. I can't recall any other book that had that effect on me. Somehow it tapped into my most deep-seated fears from childhood—fears I wasn't aware I still possessed on some long-submerged level. The best of King plumbs the psychological depths of the best and worst of human nature, and IT is definitely one of his best.

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  This is the $699, 4,784-piece Ultimate Collector Series Imperial Star Destroyer. [credit: LEGO ]

You probably remember the first time you saw Star Wars, the first time you saw that opening crawl give way to a star field above Tatooine as the Tantive IV tried desperately to escape the clutches of an Imperial Star Destroyer as it filled the screen.

I do. I remember in particular how the sheer size of it made me feel. This was one big ship—a mile long from the pointy bit at the front to those three huge engines at the back, I'd later learn. Afterward, you may have gone straight for the Lego bricks to recreate it. If not, now's the chance, because Lego is bringing out a new Ultimate Collector Series (UCS) edition of the Devastator, the Imperial Star Destroyer from the beginning of Star Wars: A New Hope.

The specs are not for the faint-hearted. Made from 4,784 pieces, the model is 43 inches long (110cm), 26 inches (66cm) wide, and 17 inches (44cm) tall, so it will need a fair amount of room on your shelf (or above your bed). Lego says the model features a tilting radar dish and swiveling guns, and as you'll see from the images above, the build looks like it involves plenty of greebling to keep you busy for hours.

Enlarge / The bold color choices in the blocking dialog on Firefox 70 Beta make it clear that Mozilla wants users to really look at it. (credit: Jim Salter)

Mozilla turned the blocking of third-party tracking cookies on by default this week with the release of Firefox 69. Although the feature has been available since October's Firefox 63, this week's build is the first to enable the feature by default, even for existing users who are just upgrading.

Tracker blocking

Mozilla says that it's not trying to block actual ads, only trackers. For the most part, it has succeeded; in our testing, we frequently saw 30 or more tracking elements blocked on sites whose ads still display. The balance Mozilla is aiming for here is an increase in privacy for users, along with faster page load times—but without harming small websites and content creators who rely on revenue generated by ads from the same third-party networks whose trackers are being blocked.

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  Clicking the shield icon in the address bar of Firefox 69 gets you a list of cookies—both blocked and allowed. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Mozilla is clearly not done with its user-shielding efforts. Clicking the shield icon in the address bar in Firefox 69 just gives you a flat list of cookies, both allowed and blocked. Firefox 70 Beta takes things a step further by breaking them into categories, including Cross-Site Tracking Cookies, Fingerprinters, Tracking Content (which effectively means "ads" and is still allowed by default), Social Media Trackers, and Cryptominers. The beta will drop a notification down from the address bar the first time the user encounters a Social Media Tracker, inviting exploration into the settings.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

For months, security practitioners have worried about the public release of attack code exploiting Bluekeep, the critical vulnerability in older versions of Microsoft Windows that’s “wormable,” meaning it can spread from computer to computer with no user interaction. On Friday, that dreaded day arrived when the Metasploit framework—an open source tool used by white hat and black hat hackers alike—released just such an exploit into the wild.

The module, which was published as a work in progress on Github, doesn’t yet have the polish and reliability of the EternalBlue exploit that was developed by, and later stolen from, the NSA. For instance, if the people using the new module specify the wrong version of Windows they want to attack, they’ll likely wind up with a blue-screen crash. Getting the exploit to work on server machines also requires a change to default settings in the form of a registry modification that turns on audio sharing.

By contrast, the wormable EternalBlue exploit—which a still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released into the wild in April 2017—worked seamlessly against a wide range of Windows versions in their default settings. A month after the leak, EternalBlue was folded into the Wannacry ransomware worm that shut down computers worldwide. A month later, another EternalBlue driven attack called NotPetya created still more worldwide destruction.

Enlarge / We'll no longer be seeing regular monthly additions to this selection of SNES classics playable on the Switch, nor their NES counterparts.

Fans of classic Nintendo re-releases got some good news this week, as Nintendo finally released emulated versions of 20 Super NES games as part of its $20-per-year Switch Online service. But the company tempered that announcement with some less visible bad news: further releases in that collection will no longer come on their usual monthly schedule.

Since launching with 20 NES titles last September, the Switch's collection of playable classics has expanded by two or three games each month, to the point where it now includes 46 distinct NES titles. But yesterday, a blog post on Nintendo's Japanese site (machine translation) indicated that those releases would be coming "irregularly" from now on.

In a statement to Business Insider, a Nintendo representative confirmed that "More NES games will be added in the future, but those releases will not adhere to a regular schedule."