Month: October 2019

Extreme closeup photo of a hand holding a smartphone using WhatsApp. (credit: WhatsApp)

Attorney General William Barr plans to once again make his case against end-to-end encryption for the masses, this time in a public call for Facebook to ensure that law enforcement can decrypt messages when investigating terrorists, child abusers, and other criminals.

Barr, along with counterparts from the UK and Australia, plan to publish an open letter on Friday that makes the case, BuzzFeed and later The New York Times reported on Thursday. The reports come six weeks after Barr said tech firms "can and must" backdoor encryption to keep it from degrading criminal investigations.

For more than a decade, the US Justice Department has warned encryption could hamstring its ability to fight enemies and conduct criminal investigations, a plight it describes as "going dark." In 2016, the department renewed its push when it obtained a court order requiring Apple to help the FBI unlock the iPhone of one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, Calif., mass killings. Apple fought the order—arguing the code required could be misused—and the FBI eventually found another way to access the encrypted data.

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  Jesse (Dominic Cooper) and Tulip (Ruth Negga) have a plan to rescue Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) from the Grail. [credit: AMC ]

It's Team Jesse versus the Grail, as a vengeful God vows to bring on the apocalypse, in the fourth and final season of Preacher, AMC's adaption of the DC comic series created by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. It pains me greatly to say this, since I love the show despite its flaws, but this final season is mostly an unfocused, rambling, incoherent mess. Fortunately, it's ultimately redeemed by a satisfying and surprisingly moving finale.

(Some spoilers below, especially for prior seasons.)

Preacher follows the madcap adventures of Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), the titular preacher (and former con artist) who inexplicably becomes the chosen host for Genesis, aka, the embodiment of the Word of God. This grants him the power to force people to do whatever he wants, including accidentally sending poor Eugene Root (Ian Colletti)—nicknamed "Arseface" because of a failed shotgun-suicide that left him with a badly puckered maw—to hell. Jesse is joined in his misadventures by his childhood sweetheart and partner in crime, Tulip (Ruth Negga), and a hard-partying, sweetly profane Irish vampire named Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun).

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  Yes, this Wendy's-themed tabletop RPG exists, and it's pretty robust. [credit: Wendy's ]

Unhealthy food and games have been official bedfellows for decades, beyond the snacks that line your average video- or board-gaming marathon. This includes licensed cereal characters in '70s and '80s board games, cartoon food icons as pixelated gaming mascots, and modern promotional games like Burger King's Sneak King and KFC's recent I Love You, Colonel Sanders.

It's not the subject matter we necessarily deem worthy of a brief at Ars, but this week, Wendy's got our attention by rolling a veritable D20 die down our clogged arteries and into our hearts.

On Thursday, the fast-food restaurant chain released Feast Of Legends: Rise From the Deep Freeze. This free, 97-page PDF slaps cheeseburgers, fried chicken, Frosty desserts, and French fries onto a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure that revolves around the years-old Wendy's slogan of "fresh, never frozen" (a phrase that is literally chanted by townspeople in the village of, ahem, Freshtovia).

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a discount on the 128GB variant of Apple's 10.2-inch iPad, which is currently down to $399.99 from its standard $429. While that's not a huge drop, it's worth noting since Apple only just released this seventh-gen iPad last week. So if you were thinking about picking one up from an Apple Store anyway, you might want to save a few bucks by shopping online instead.

As for the iPad itself, we haven't reviewed it, but it's not a massive update over the sixth-gen iPad. It runs on the same A10 Fusion chip, still has a non-laminated display, and still has thicker bezels than an iPad Air or iPad Pro. But it increases the display size from 9.7 inches to 10.2 inches, now works with Apple's Smart Keyboard—which remains fine as a keyboard but generally causes less friction than a Bluetooth keyboard—and bumps up the RAM from 2GB to 3GB, which makes multitasking with the new and improved iPadOS more manageable. Most importantly, it remains the most affordable tablet in Apple's lineup.

If you don't envision yourself treating your iPad like a pseudo-laptop, you can save a few bucks by picking up a sixth-gen iPad before stock runs dry, but this is a useful deal for the new model this early in its lifespan.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Close examination of lung tissue from 17 people with severe vaping-linked injuries found a type of tissue damage seen in people exposed to toxic fumes and chemical weapons, such as mustard gas.

That's according to a short report in The New England Journal of Medicine published Wednesday by doctors from the Mayo Clinic.

It's still unclear what's causing a rash of life-threatening lung injuries in some people who vape. As of October 1, there have been 1,080 confirmed or probable cases in 48 states and the US Virgin Islands, including 18 deaths in 15 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Enlarge (credit: RyanJLane / Getty Images)

In August, we wrote about a group of 22 models who sued the owners of the porn site GirlsDoPorn for fraud. The models say the company told them that pornographic videos of them would only be distributed on DVDs outside the United States. Instead, the videos were published by GirlsDoPorn, a site with plenty of American viewers.

Bianca Bruno, a reporter for Court House News, has been producing invaluable day-by-day coverage of the ongoing trial in San Diego. On Wednesday, the court heard from Matthew Wolfe, a GirlsDoPorn associate who handles day-to-day operations on the site. Wolfe said that GirlsDoPorn is still trying to recruit new models—and it's still not giving new recruits the full story about how the videos will be used.

When asked whether the contracts signed by new models mention GirlsDoPorn, Wolfe responded "No, I don't believe so." In fact, he admits that the contracts don't mention any websites at all. He said that, if models asked where the videos would be published, he would say the videos would go online but wouldn't mention a specific site.

Enlarge / Indexy was removed from Google Play after Check Point researchers discovered it was being used in a campaign to spy on Egyptian citizens. (credit: Check Point Technologies)

Hackers with likely ties to Egypt’s government used Google’s official Play Store to distribute spyware in a campaign that targeted journalists, lawyers, and opposition politicians in that country, researchers from Check Point Technologies have found.

The app, called IndexY, posed as a means for looking up details about phone numbers. It claimed to tap into a database of more than 160 million Arabic numbers. One of the permissions it required was access to a user’s call history and contacts. Despite the sensitivity of that data, those permissions were understandable, given the the app’s focus on phone numbers. It had about 5,000 installations before Google removed it from Play in August. Check Point doesn’t know when IndexY first became available in Play.

Behind the scenes, IndexY logged whether each call was incoming, outgoing, or missed as well as its date and duration. Publicly accessible files left on indexy[.]org, a domain hardcoded into the app, showed not only that the data was collected but that the developers actively analyzed and inspected that information. Analysis included the number of users per country, call-log details, and lists of calls made from one country to another.