Month: October 2019

Enlarge / A sign outside a Yahoo corporate building in Los Angeles. (credit: Getty Images | FG/Bauer-Griffin)

A former Yahoo software engineer has pleaded guilty to hacking into thousands of users’ accounts in search of sexually explicit images and videos and other types of private data.

Reyes Daniel Ruiz on Monday admitted to using his access as a Yahoo engineer to compromise about 6,000 user accounts, federal prosecutors said. The engineer, now 34, cracked user passwords and accessed internal Yahoo systems to access the accounts. He told prosecutors he targeted accounts belonging to younger women, including personal friends and work colleagues.

He used his access to the Yahoo accounts to compromise victims’ accounts on other services, including iCloud, Facebook, Gmail, and Dropbox, in search of additional private images and videos. After a former employer observed suspicious account activity, Ruiz admitted to destroying the computer and hard drive he used to store the private data, prosecutors said.

Enlarge / The Delta IV Heavy is the world's second-most powerful rocket. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

This week, the US Air Force made a couple of announcements about future launches of the Delta IV Heavy launch vehicle as well as the Atlas V rocket. Both vehicles, built and launched by United Launch Alliance, once held a monopoly on the launch of US national security satellites.

But now that is changing for good, said Col. Robert Bongiovi, director of Launch Enterprise for the Air Force, during a conference call with reporters. "These are the last remnants of our sole source contracts," Bongiovi said. "We look forward to embracing the competitive landscape that we have worked hard with industry to create."

Delta IV Heavy

Bongiovi said the Air Force intends to fly National Reconnaissance Office satellites on the Delta IV Heavy rocket five more times, beginning next year, with the final flight occurring in 2024. Because the Air Force is the only customer for this rocket, it will provide a total of $1.18 billion in "Launch Operations Support" funding to be spread across the launch of these five spy satellites.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Facebook's $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission this summer smashed records: the FTC had never before fined any company such a hefty amount. But even though critics immediately lambasted the deal as a comparative slap on the wrist for Facebook, which earned about $56 billion in revenue in 2018, newly released documents show that the company was working hard to avoid any penalty at all—and its arguments then are just a prelude to defenses it may mount now, as dozens of state, federal, and international probes pile up around it.

Facebook made its claims to the FTC in a February 28 memo (PDF), which was independently obtained and published Monday by both The Hill and The Washington Post.

In the memo, Facebook argued that the fine is unconstitutional, saying that it violates both the due process clause as well as the excessive fines clause of the Eighth Amendment. "No court would impose such a plainly excessive and disproportionate penalty," the company said. "The proposed penalty is wildly disproportionate to any harm suffered."

Enlarge (credit: PlayStation)

With Google prepping its Stadia streaming service for launch next month, and Microsoft rolling out a Project xCloud steaming test this month, you'd be forgiven for forgetting that Sony has been streaming hundreds of PlayStation games through its PlayStation Now service for years. Sony is doing its best to remind you of that fact, though, announcing today that it is slashing the all-you-can-stream subscription price for PlayStation Now to $9.99 a month (down from $19.99), $24.99 a quarter (down from $49.99), or $59.99 a year (down from $99.99). Current subscribers will see the reduced price on their next billing cycle.

A PlayStation Now subscription includes streaming access to over 800 games from across the PS2, PS3, and PS4 libraries on a PS4 or PC (but not mobile phones or previously supported Smart TVs). PS4 users can also download over 300 PS4 games with their subscription, and today, those streaming and downloadable libraries are expanding to include Grand Theft Auto V, God of War (2018), Uncharted 4, and Infamous: Second Son.

PlayStation Now launched in 2014 with a ridiculous a la carte rental pricing plan, but the service quickly pivoted to an all-you-can-play subscription model a few months later. Back then, the lowest price available for that subscription was $15 a month, three times the current annual rate, and the service only included access to 100 PS3 games. The service works pretty well if you have a decent Internet connection, thanks in large part to Sony's 2012 acquisition of streaming platform Gaikai.

Enlarge / Emergency rooms like this one at Fort Belvoir Community Hospital may need to transfer patients once they stabilize. (credit: health.mil)

Ten hospitals—three in Alabama and seven in Australia—have been hit with paralyzing ransomware attacks that are affecting their ability to take new patients, it was widely reported on Tuesday.

All three hospitals that make up the DCH Health System in Alabama were closed to new patients on Tuesday as officials there coped with an attack that paralyzed the health network's computer system. The hospitals—DCH Regional Medical Center in Tuscaloosa, Northport Medical Center, and Fayette Medical Center—are turning away "all but the most critical new patients" at the time this post was going live. Local ambulances were being instructed to take patients to other hospitals when possible. Patients coming to DCH emergency rooms faced the possibility of being transferred to another hospital once they were stabilized.

"A criminal is limiting our ability to use our computer systems in exchange for an as-yet unknown payment," DCH representatives wrote in a release. "Our hospitals have implemented our emergency procedures to ensure safe and efficient operations in the event technology dependent on computers is not available."

Enlarge / The D-Wave hardware is, quite literally, a black box. (credit: D-Wave)

The D-Wave quantum annealer isn't a general-purpose computer, in that it can only solve a set of problems that can be structured as energy minimizations. And even on those problems, D-Wave employees will acknowledge that the current generation of D-Wave hardware generally can't outperform algorithms implemented on standard computers (though they're optimistic that the next generation of machines may change that in some cases).

But a key reason the company has been selling time on their machines before they have a clear advantage is to give developers the chance to identify the sorts of problems where quantum annealing will prove to be effective. Last week, Ars attended a D-Wave user's group meeting, where we got a chance to talk to the people who are developing software to run on these systems. We also spoke with D-Wave's staff. What emerged was a sense of the sorts of things that people are hoping will be able to demonstrate a clear speedup when run on a sufficiently advanced quantum annealer.

Quantum annealing

D-Wave's systems work through a process called quantum annealing. This begins by placing a system's qubits in an absolute energy minimum. From there, the hardware gently alters the configuration of the system so that its energy landscape reflects the problem that needs to be solved. If everything goes well, all the qubits will end up with the lowest possible energy in the new landscape. Viewed literally, this will end up identifying the lowest energy state of that landscape. But if the energy landscape represents something else—some other problem restructured so that it looks like an energy minimization—the final state will represent a solution to that problem.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with a bunch of new deals to share. Today, our list showcases discounts and sales on items big and small, including a few new laptops from Lenovo and Dell.

Lenovo's semi-annual sale is currently underway and features the Thinkbook 14s. A model with a Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB PCIe SSD costs $919. We reviewed the slightly smaller Thinkbook 13s and found it to be a great Windows notebook for those who want to spend less than $1,000. This particular model of the 14s has the most RAM and storage you can get and typically costs over $1,500, so now's the time to snag it.

Dell is also offering discounts on its newest Alienware m15 gaming laptops—you can get an m15 with a Core i5-9300H processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB PCIe SSD, and 6GB GeForce GTX 1660 Ti for $1,189.99 by using the code "AW15." These laptops use the latest Alienware design language that Dell introduced at the beginning of 2019, making them thinner and more powerful than their predecessors.