Month: October 2019

Disney finally dropped the hotly anticipated final trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, during the Patriots vs. Jets game on Monday Night Football. It's the third installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy produced, co-written, and directed by J.J. Abrams, following The Force Awakens (2015) and The Last Jedi (2017). Disney's timing is extra special, because today was also the late Carrie Fisher's birthday, and this film was her final role. (Fisher's daughter, Billie Lourd, plays Lieutenant Connix, a resistance officer, in the new trilogy.)

Disney has been holding their cards pretty close to their chest when it comes to details about The Rise of Skywalker, but we do know it is set one year after the events of The Last Jedi. The few surviving remnants of the Resistance will be facing the First Order once again, and the "ancient conflict between the Jedi and the Sith" will reach its climax.

We got our first teaser back in April, at the annual Star Wars Celebration event. It gave us a few Millennium Falcon flights and some desert-speeder combat, plus a brief glimpse of Princess Leia, thanks to footage shot in 2016 before Carrie Fisher's untimely death. It closed with the new trilogy main cast members staring at the wreckage of a Death Star, followed by the sound of Emperor Palpatine's evil laughter (even though he's supposed to be dead).  We also learned that BB-8 has a new robotic buddy—a one-wheeled junk-heap character named Dio.

Enlarge (credit: Tony Webster)

Hackers breached a server used by popular virtual network provider NordVPN and stole encryption keys that could be used to mount decryption attacks on segments of its customer base.

A log of the commands used in the attack suggests that the hackers had root access, meaning they had almost unfettered control over the server and could read or modify just about any data stored on it. One of three private keys leaked was used to secure a digital certificate that provided HTTPS encryption for nordvpn.com. The key wasn't set to expire until October 2018, some seven months after the March 2018 breach. Attackers could have used the compromised certificate to impersonate the nordvpn.com website or mount man-in-the-middle attacks on people visiting the real one. Details of the breach have been circulating online since at least May 2018.

Based on the command log, another of the leaked secret keys appeared to secure a private certificate authority that NordVPN used to issue digital certificates. Those certificates might be issued for other servers in NordVPN's network or for a variety of other sensitive purposes. The name of the third certificate suggested it could also have been used for many different sensitive purposes, including securing the server that was compromised in the breach.

Enlarge / No operating system is an island, but macOS Catalina is named after one. (credit: Apple)

Apple has released a new version of its macOS Catalina Supplemental Update. The first iteration of the update was made available to Macs running Catalina on October 15.

Like last week's update, of which this is apparently a new version, this Supplemental Update promises to fix problems some users encountered when there was limited disk space available. It also fixes issues with saving Game Center data that users faced when playing Apple Arcade games offline, a Setup Assistant bug, and a problem that prevented users from being able to accept iCloud terms when logged into multiple iCloud accounts on the same machine.

If you prefer to hear things in Apple's own words, here are the release notes provided by the company to accompany the update:

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  Roy and Maher used a BMW M5 as their continent-crusher. [credit: Apex ]

There's a joke that the first motor race was held shortly after the second automobile was built. Humans (some of us, at least) are like that; we see someone going somewhere, and some urge—a voice deep down inside you—says, "I think we need to get there first." This urge predates the car—Romans were partial to chariots—and it will survive into a post-automobile, mobility future. It's a broad church of a sport, encompassing everything from big-factory racing programs to like-minded people hanging out at weekends, often in the middle of nowhere, frequently with beer afterward.

And then there's the unofficial side. Like the people who race from coast to coast, just to see who can do it faster. That's the subject of Apex: The Secret Race Across America.

We've delved into the world of coast-to-coast speed runs before. Earlier this year, Gareth Jones tried to set a new record across England and Scotland in an electric vehicle. And a few years back, we told you the tale of Alex Roy reaching Los Angeles from New York in record time in a Tesla. This record has since been broken three times by Model 3s; once by Roy and co., then twice on the same day.