Month: January 2020

Enlarge (credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla has released a new version of Firefox that fixes an actively exploited zeroday that could allow attackers to take control of users' computers.

In an advisory, Mozilla rated the vulnerability critical and said it was "aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this flaw." The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said one or more exploits were "detected in the wild" and warned that attacks could be exploited to "take control of an affected system." The Mozilla advisory credited researchers at China-based Qihoo 360 with reporting the flaw.

No other details about the attacks were immediately available. Neither Mozilla nor Qihoo 360 responded immediately to emails asking for more information.

Enlarge / The Sonos One SL. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

In a move that has become the top talking point of CES and a flash point for an industry's pent-up frustrations, smart audio company Sonos has sued Google for infringement of five of its patents, The New York Times reports.

The publicly traded, Santa Barbara, California-based audio company sued Google in a federal court and the US International Trade Commission. The goal is to block sales of some of Google's products (including smart speakers and smartphones, among other things) and to collect financial damages.

According to the article, Sonos "handed over the effective blueprints to its speakers" to Google in 2013 during an effort to make Google's services work on said speakers. Sonos didn't anticipate it then, but Google later launched smart speakers that competed directly with Sonos' offerings. After Google's speakers hit the market, Sonos employees purchased some and used packet sniffing to analyze how the Google speakers worked with each other. They say they discovered that the speakers used technological solutions that Sonos has previously developed and patented. (They claim to have found the same when testing Amazon's Echo speakers, too.)

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  Boeing has completed the core stage of NASA's SLS rocket. [credit: NASA ]

On Wednesday, Boeing moved the completed core stage of NASA's Space Launch System rocket from the Michoud Assembly Facility onto the space agency's Pegasus Barge. When weather conditions are favorable, the barge will carry the 64-meter rocket from the rocket factory near New Orleans to the Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi.

"It was a beautiful day here," said John Shannon, Boeing's program manager for the SLS rocket, in a teleconference with reporters. "We had a spectacular view of this new national asset."

Finishing assembly of the core stage represents an important milestone for Boeing, which has spent most of the 2010s working with NASA on designing the SLS rocket and building the first core stage. Boeing began cutting metal on the very first barrels for this core stage, which will fly NASA's Artemis 1 mission, back in 2015 at the Louisiana-based facility. NASA has spent nearly $10 billion on the SLS rocket's core-stage development so far.

Enlarge / Colored image of coronaviruses made from a transmission electron microscopy. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

A mysterious outbreak of viral pneumonia linked to a wild-animal market in the Chinese city of Wuhan may be caused by a never-before-seen virus, according to preliminary reports.

Officials in neighboring areas, meanwhile, are screening travelers for symptoms and planning quarantine zones to try to prevent any potential spread of the mystery disease.

As of Sunday, January 5, Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported a total of 59 cases, including seven critically ill patients. There have been no reported deaths.

Enlarge / New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Busakorn Pongparnit)

The New York City government has released an "Internet Master Plan" that calls for universal broadband throughout the five boroughs, relying on open-access fiber networks that can be used by multiple ISPs.

The plan, announced by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chief Technology Officer John Paul Farmer yesterday, says New York City "will prioritize and optimize 'open-access' or 'neutral-host' infrastructure, which can be shared by multiple operators to lower costs, increase competition, minimize physical disruption to the city, and incentivize private-sector investments to reach and serve customers." New York City wants to ensure universal access to both wired and mobile Internet, with a fiber network that offers home Internet and provides bandwidth to mobile services.

The plan continues:

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

An Ars reader this week drew our attention to a news story out of Southern California. The case involved a man wanted on suspicion of attempted murder and other alleged crimes. He fled from one county to another, but according to the article, sheriff's deputies were able to locate him by "sending a 'ping' to his Sirius satellite radio," after which the suspect was found and arrested.

The mysterious "ping" grabbed the reader's attention, as well as several Ars staffers: what, exactly, did law enforcement do? How did it work? And what are the implications for everyone driving around with a SiriusXM satellite radio in their car?

The case

A representative for Sirius was unable to say if the company was involved in any specific way in this particular case or even if the case did indeed involve an actual Sirius product. Whatever happened, calling it a "Sirius radio ping" was probably a misnomer, the company told Ars, as Sirius satellite radio itself is a one-way operation. The actual radios have no geo-locating capacity and can't "ping" anything back to anyone.