Month: October 2019

Enlarge / The Yahoo Groups home page. (credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo Groups is shutting down after more than 18 years, and the Verizon-owned company is deleting all content from the site in mid-December.

"Yahoo has made the decision to no longer allow users to upload content to the Yahoo Groups site," the company said in a notice to users. "Beginning October 28, you won't be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of December 14 all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. You'll have until that date to save anything you've uploaded."

The notice links to one Yahoo webpage that provides instructions for downloading photos and files from groups that you belong to before the cutoff date, but the process sounds laborious, as it requires clicking on each photo or file you want to download. The shutdown notice also links to a page that provides instructions for requesting a download of all your Yahoo data. This page notes that "It can take up to 30 days for the request to finish processing and the download to become available."

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  The Samsung Galaxy S10. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Samsung is once again in hot water for a shoddy biometrics implementation. This time the culprit is the Galaxy S10 and its ultrasonic in-screen fingerprint reader, which apparently can be unlocked by anyone as long as there is a screen protector or some other piece of transparent plastic between a finger and the sensor.

British tabloid newspaper The Sun originally reported the news, saying a British woman discovered she could unlock her husband's phone just by adding "a £2.70 screen protector bought on eBay." After reporting the issue to Samsung, the couple says Samsung "admitted it looked like a security breach," and a spokesperson told The Sun, “We’re investigating this internally. We recommend all customers to use Samsung authorised accessories, specifically designed for Samsung products.”

Days later when the BBC picked up the story and contacted Samsung again, the company said it is "aware of the case of S10's malfunctioning fingerprint recognition and will soon issue a software patch."

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Google is temporarily increasing the rewards it pays for hacks that exploit holes in a beefed-up security protection that debuted in desktop versions of Chrome last month. Chrome for Android, meanwhile, is receiving a slimmed-down version of the same protection.

For a limited time, Google will boost its normal bounty amounts for exploits that allow one site the browser is interacting with to steal passwords or other sensitive data from another accessed site. Google is also broadening its vulnerability reward program to include bugs in Blink—the core software that Chrome uses to render HTML and other resources—that allow similar types of cross-site data thefts.

Fortress of solitude

The changes come a month after the release of Chrome 77, which quietly strengthened an existing protection known as site isolation. Google developers first added site isolation in July 2018 in a highly ambitious engineering feat that required major architectural changes to the way the browser worked under the hood.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

The Acer Swift 3 laptop is not a flagship, but its lack of anything strange, striking, or gimmicky may work in its favor. While the Swift 3 starts at $479, most of its configurations (including our review unit) cost between $699 and $999. That puts it in line with the entry-level models of the HP Envy and Dell's Inspiron 13 7000 series, and it makes it digestible for most consumers' wallets.

The tech industry places a lot of value on flagship devices, but those high-end devices aren't always what consumers are looking for—or what they're willing to pay for. Some may also come to realize that they don't need a flagship device if they can get exactly what they need in a more affordable, less flashy machine. The Acer Swift 3 is one of those laptops, and I tested it for a few days to see how well it could stand up against its mid-tier competition.

Look and feel

Acer Swift 3

$719.99 from Amazon

(Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.)

Acer usually keeps it simple when designing laptops, and it continued that trend with the Swift 3. The aluminum chassis is unmarred by grooves, metallic accents, or anything that would make it stick out among the crowd of silver laptops that inevitably congregate in most meeting rooms. At 2.87 pounds and .63-inches thick, the Swift 3 also doesn't try to be as light or thin as possible—just thin enough to tote around with you wherever you go.

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  Our gameplay time had us exploring a temple not unlike this one. [credit: EA ]

It has been far too long since Star Wars fans got a true, triple-A, single-player campaign experience. With exclusive access to the Star Wars license, publisher EA and its stable of studios have largely been content to release multiplayer games-as-a-service like Battlefront or, well, multiplayer games-as-a-service for mobile like Galaxy of Heroes. Given that the appeal of Star Wars is in the stories, places, and characters for most people, I've long found that a bit tragic.

But enter Respawn Entertainment, the original developer behind the Call of Duty franchise. The previously shooter-focused studio is coming hot off the big commercial success of free-to-play battle royale Apex Legends, as well as Titanfall 2, which many critics (myself included) deemed one of the greatest single-player shooters of all time, even though it didn't achieve widespread popularity or especially strong sales numbers.

Respawn has been working on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a third-person action-adventure game in which players play as a young Jedi attempting to rebuild the Jedi Order after the events of Revenge of the Sith. Respawn, EA, and Disney held a press preview event this week at which I played the game for almost three hours, and I'm here to share some impressions.