The Public Internet Registry, a subsidiary of a nonprofit called the Internet Society, has managed the .org domain since 2002. Earlier this year, ICANN asked for public comment on a new contract for the organization. The most significant change was the elimination of provisions limiting price increases for .org domain owners.
According to one tally, more than 3,000 parties wrote in opposing the removal of price caps. Only six comments supported the change. Yet ICANN ignored this lopsided response and approved the contract in June. At the time, the PIR said that it had "no specific plans for any price changes."
But earlier this month, PIR announced that its parent organization, the Internet Society, was selling PIR to the private equity firm Ethos Capital.
Hat Amazon einen milliardenschweren Auftrag des US-Verteidigungsministeriums aus politischen Gründen nicht bekommen? Der Internetkonzern ist von einer unfairen Vergabe an an Microsoft überzeugt und klagt. US-Präsident Donald Trump und Amazon-Chef Jeff …
Hat Amazon einen milliardenschweren Auftrag des US-Verteidigungsministeriums aus politischen Gründen nicht bekommen? Der Internetkonzern ist von einer unfairen Vergabe an an Microsoft überzeugt und klagt. US-Präsident Donald Trump und Amazon-Chef Jeff Bezos mögen sich nicht. (Amazon, Web Service)
Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.
Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker is the newest game to bring the popular HBO series (and the endless George R.R. Martin book series) to tabletop, this time in a social deduction format. We already have a Game of Thrones “dudes-on-a-map” game, a deckbuilder, a hand-management bluffing game, and a very light set collection game, but nothing else in this lineage really gets into the social-deduction space popularized by titles like Coup or Deception: Murder in Hong Kong.
While Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker seems to start in the right place with its setup of loyalists vs. conspirators, the game lacks balance. It’s just too easy for the conspirator team (which starts with a large advantage anyway) to win. The king must play a nearly perfect game to take the crown.
The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution bars people from being forced to turn over personal passwords to police, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled this week.
In a 4-3 ruling, justices from Pennsylvania’s highest court overturned a lower-court order that required the suspect in a child-pornography case to turn over a 64-character password to his computer. The lower-court ruling had held that the compelled disclosure didn’t violate the defendant’s Fifth Amendment rights because of statements he made to police during questioning.
“It’s 64 characters and why would I give that to you,” Joseph J. Davis of Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County told investigators in response to their request for his password. “We both know what’s on there. It’s only going to hurt me. No fucking way I’m going to give it to you.”
Facebook bietet schon seit längerem Gesichtserkennung für die Nutzer seines sozialen Netzes an. Das Unternehmen hat zudem vor einigen Jahren eine Smartphone-App entwickelt, um Facebook-Nutzer auf der Straße zu erkennen. Die App war laut Facebook nur ei…
Facebook bietet schon seit längerem Gesichtserkennung für die Nutzer seines sozialen Netzes an. Das Unternehmen hat zudem vor einigen Jahren eine Smartphone-App entwickelt, um Facebook-Nutzer auf der Straße zu erkennen. Die App war laut Facebook nur ein Test und nicht zur Veröffentlichung gedacht. (Facebook, Smartphone)
Iranian hackers have carried out some of the most disruptive acts of digital sabotage of the last decade, wiping entire computer networks in waves of cyberattacks across the Middle East and occasionally even the US. But now one of Iran's most active hacker groups appears to have shifted focus. Rather than just standard IT networks, they're targeting the physical control systems used in electric utilities, manufacturing, and oil refineries.
At the CyberwarCon conference in Arlington, Virginia, on Thursday, Microsoft security researcher Ned Moran plans to present new findings from the company's threat intelligence group that show a shift in the activity of the Iranian hacker group APT33, also known by the names Holmium, Refined Kitten, or Elfin. Microsoft has watched the group carry out so-called password-spraying attacks over the past year that try just a few common passwords across user accounts at tens of thousands of organizations. That's generally considered a crude and indiscriminate form of hacking. But over the last two months, Microsoft says APT33 has significantly narrowed its password spraying to around 2,000 organizations per month, while increasing the number of accounts targeted at each of those organizations almost tenfold on average.
Microsoft ranked those targets by the number of accounts hackers tried to crack; Moran says about half of the top 25 were manufacturers, suppliers, or maintainers of industrial control system equipment. In total, Microsoft says it has seen APT33 target dozens of those industrial equipment and software firms since mid-October.
Popular Android torrent client LibreTorrent has been removed from Google Play, who informed its developer that the open-source “Free Software” tool violated the platform’s “spam policy”. The developer believes this may be due to a flood of abusive cloned copies of LibreTorrent but Google doesn’t seem interested in investigating further.
Broadly speaking, torrent clients come in two flavors; closed source (such as uTorrent or BitTorrent Mainline) or open-source, such as qBittorrent or BiglyBT, for example.
Many experienced torrent users often favor the latter, since the code of open-source clients is not only open to scrutiny but can give others the ability to learn about or further develop software. So of course, it’s never great when something bad happens to an open-source project.
Yaroslav Pronin, a student and Russia-based developer of Android torrent client LibreTorrent, is an advocate of Free Software. He informs TF that he began work on his tool in 2016 because he believed there wasn’t a “complete freedom” torrent client available for the platform.
Pronin says that he was also motivated by the fact that BitTorrent has been under pressure, with sites blocked both in Russia and overseas due to copyright issues.
“A Free Software torrent client is an important step in supporting BitTorrent technology for the free (as in Freedom) exchange of information between people,” he explains.
As a result, Pronin went down the open-source route (GNU GPLv3) for LibreTorrent and gathered a decent-sized following. But despite all his good intentions, he still found his software deleted from Google Play recently for a somewhat unusual reason.
LibreTorrent on Google Play before the deletion
What happened behind the scenes here is something of a mystery. Pronin says that he first became aware of an issue in early October when Google advised him that his software had been marked as ‘spam’, which indicates the client is considered “non-original” content.
“It was the morning of October 8, 2019, when I read the e-mail from Google that LibreTorrent was deleted. They wrote the reason: ‘Violation of Spam policy’,” Pronin explains.
“I was shocked, because I didn’t violate anything of the kind. Therefore, I turned to Google with the first appeal, so that they could clarify the situation, and also figure out that I didn’t violate the spam policy.”
It turned out that Google wasn’t interested in reconsidering its position.
Status of app LibreTorrent (org.proninyaroslav.libretorrent): Suspended from Google Play due to policy violation.
I’ve reviewed your appeal request and found that your app still violates Google Play Policy. During review, we found that your app violates the policy for Spam. We don’t allow apps that spam users or Google Play, such as apps that are duplicative and low-quality.
“As I can think, this was due to the fact that there were many LibreTorrent clones on Google Play and Google just uninstalled all the apps without understanding the essence of what was happening,” he says, commenting on the app’s deletion from Google Play.
Pronin informs TorrentFreak that thus far, Google has only responded to him once, informing him of the reason for deletion. He says he sent information confirming him as the developer of the original LibreTorrent but that achieved nothing.
“I filed an appeal, but in response I was told that they can not help in any way and the only option is to rename the application and lay it out again,” he explains.
Completely renaming an app and losing an established brand seems a draconian measure to force on a developer. Sadly, it may be that other developers who took LibreTorrent’s source and decided to abuse it may be to blame.
“Since 2016, a lot of LibreTorrent clones have appeared on Google Play. I understand that LibreTorrent is open source, but those who published these clones on Google Play didn’t modify the source code,” he says.
“They only added ads and changed the name of the application. Yes, there were authoring developments based on LibreTorrent, but there are much fewer of them than clones with advertising. Most of the clones were removed last year at my request, but they appear again and again.
“Google just decided that LibreTorrent is an application with non-original content, as many LibreTorrent clones are located on Google Play. It’s also possible that the author of one of the clones filed a complaint for the removal of the original LibreTorrent. We can only guess about it.”
Pronin is understandably upset and disappointed with Google. He says that the company has made no effort to understand the situation yet, meanwhile, leaves up actually malicious software for download until someone complains.
More importantly for him, however, is that with the removal of LibreTorrent, fewer people overall will learn about Free Software. He acknowledges that Google services are both non-free and have privacy problems but getting the Free Software message out to as many people as possible was one of his key goals.
It’s also a shame since after a year in development, LibreTorrent 2.0 is almost ready for launch. The source code has been rewritten to increase stability and there are around 20 new features, including an updated UI.
Whether Google will eventually relent remains to be seen but in the meantime, anyone wanting to download LibreTorrent can do so here and here.
NOAA’s monthly update covers a wild October and the winter outlook.
Enlarge/ The Kincade Fire burns north of California's Bay Area on October 29. (credit: NASA EO)
Each month, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) puts out an analysis of the previous month’s weather after the final tally. The most recent update covers an odd October for the US, where the month included some terrifying wildfire conditions in California. This latest analysis also provides the long-range outlook for the winter months.
October provides another good reminder to Americans that their country is not the entire planet. Courtesy of the jet stream doing its thing, the western US experienced notably cool temperatures for much of the month. A dozen states had Octobers that ranked somewhere around the 8th coldest on record. Despite warmer temperatures along the East Coast, it was ranked as the 21st coldest for the nation.
Looking globally, however, the western US was an outlier. Overall, it was the 2nd warmest October on record, behind only 2015. And with most of 2019 behind us, the final number for the year is crystallizing. NOAA puts the odds of 2019 being among the five warmest years on record at more than 99.9%. (So they’re saying there’s a chance.) More specifically, there’s now about an 85% probability of coming in second behind 2016—exactly the prediction we shared in early February.
The PinePhone is a $150 smartphone designed to run free and open source software. For the most part that probably means users will run Linux-based operating systems that have been optimized for mobile devices, like PostmartketOS, Ubuntu Touch, or KDE P…
The PinePhone is a $150 smartphone designed to run free and open source software. For the most part that probably means users will run Linux-based operating systems that have been optimized for mobile devices, like PostmartketOS, Ubuntu Touch, or KDE Plasma Mobile. But since the PinePhone is basically a cheap, low-power Linux computer, it can […]
Hat Amazon einen milliardenschweren Auftrag des US-Verteidigungsministeriums aus politischen Gründen nicht bekommen? Der Internetkonzern ist von einer unfairen Vergabe an an Microsoft überzeugt und klagt. US-Präsident Donald Trump und Amazon-Chef Jeff Bezos mögen sich nicht. (
Facebook bietet schon seit längerem Gesichtserkennung für die Nutzer seines sozialen Netzes an. Das Unternehmen hat zudem vor einigen Jahren eine Smartphone-App entwickelt, um Facebook-Nutzer auf der Straße zu erkennen. Die App war laut Facebook nur ein Test und nicht zur Veröffentlichung gedacht. (
VW hat das Aus für den Motorsport mit Verbrennungsmotor angekündigt. Der Konzern will nur noch Elektroautos ins Rennen schicken. (
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