Month: November 2020

Enlarge / Voters in Michigan, one of the states where residents received misleading robocalls about the election, casting their ballots on November 3, 2020. (credit: Elaine Cromie | Getty Images)

Both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission are investigating a series of suspicious robocalls that warned recipients to "stay home" on Election Day in an apparent attempt at voter suppression.

Voters around the nation have received approximately 10 million of the automated "stay safe and stay home" calls, The Washington Post was first to report. YouMail, which offers smartphone apps for blocking spam calls, told the Post that the calls have been received in roughly 88 percent of all US area codes since the summer.

"If you wanted to cause havoc in America for the elections, one way to do it is clearly robocalling," YouMail CEO Alex Quilici told the Post. State and federal officials evidently agree.

Enlarge / Sometimes it seems like Widevine is the DNS of Digital Rights Management. "It can't be Widevine!" It was Widevine. It's always Widevine... (credit: Jim Salter)

In August, HBO broke its customers' access to the HBO Max streaming service by cranking up the settings on its Widevine DRM service—most likely by enabling a Verified Media Path requirement. When Ars reached out to HBO Max at the time, service representatives brushed us off with a boilerplate response:

You may be able to stream HBO Max on Linux platforms, though it is not officially supported for HBO Max at this time. For supported browsers and devices, see HBO Max supported devices or visit the HBO Max Help Center for additional support.

HBO Max representatives did not respond to a request for comment on whether the service had enabled the VMP requirement under Widevine, which is what broke CBS All Access for Linux users in January of this year.

We never did hear anything more from HBO Max, but as reader etarts pointed out to us this week, someone eventually fixed the issue with Widevine. The service is once again handing out licenses to Linux subscribers whose browsers support Widevine encryption. The full, proprietary Google Chrome browser supports Widevine (which is a Google protocol) by default; it can also be enabled relatively easily on Chromium and on Mozilla Firefox.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Google has patched two zero-day vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, the third time in two weeks that the company has fixed a Chrome security flaw that’s under active exploit.

According to a Monday tweet from Ben Hawkes, the head of Google’s Project Zero vulnerability and exploit research arm, CVE-2020-16009, as the first vulnerability is tracked, is a remote code-execution bug in V8, Chrome’s open source JavaScript engine. A second security flaw, CVE-2020-16010, is a heap-based buffer overflow in Chrome for Android. Hawkes said it allows attackers to escape the Android sandbox, suggesting that hackers may have been using it in combination with a separate vulnerability.

Hawkes didn’t provide additional details, such as what desktop versions of Chrome were actively targeted, who the victims were, or how long the attacks had been going on. It also wasn’t clear if the same attack group was responsible for all three exploits. CVE-2020-16009 was in part discovered by a member of Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which focuses on government-backed hacking, suggesting that exploits of that vulnerability may be the work of a nation-state. Project Zero was involved in the discovery of all three of the zero-days.

Enlarge (credit: TLPOSCHARSKY / Flickr)

Renewable energy prices have plunged to the point where, for much of the planet, wind and solar power is now cheaper than fossil fuel-generated electricity. But the variability of these power sources can make managing them on an electric grid challenging—a challenge that can exact costs beyond their apparent price. The exact cost, however, has been heavily debated, with estimates ranging from "minimal" up to "build an entire natural gas plant to match every megawatt of wind power."

Philip Heptonstall and Robert Gross of Imperial College London decided to try to figure out what the costs actually were. After wading through hundreds of studies, the answer they came up with is somewhere between "It's complicated" and "It depends." But the key conclusion is that, even at the high end of the estimates, the added costs of renewables still leave them fairly competitive with carbon-emitting sources.

Counting costs

Heptonstall and Gross start by breaking the potential for added costs down into three categories. The first is covering for the somewhat erratic nature of renewable power, which may incur expenses if their output doesn't match their forecasted output. The second is the ability of renewables to meet the predictable daily peaks in demand—late afternoon in hotter climates, overnight in colder ones. Finally, there's the costs of integrating renewables into an existing grid, as the best sites for generation may not match up with the existing transmission capacity.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a few good leftover deals from the early Black Friday sales we highlighted last week. Though we're still weeks away from Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) itself, it seems apparent that many retailers plan to make a fair amount of their advertised discounts available in the weeks leading up to the event. Not everything in our roundup below has been explicitly marketed as a Black Friday deal, but there are still a handful of excellent discounts available today that should match the prices we'll see on Black Friday proper.

Among the most noteworthy of these offers is Bose's QuietComfort 35 II for $199, which matches Best Buy's advertised Black Friday deal. This ties the all-time lowest price for the wireless noise-canceling headphones and comes in about $100 below its typical street price online. Though it's now a few years old, the QC 35 II remains supremely comfortable to wear for hours at a time, with a pleasantly balanced sound and noise cancellation that still ranks among the strongest you can buy. The trade-offs: you have to deal with microUSB charging instead of USB-C, the audio profile and noise-canceling effect aren't as customizable as they are on other pairs like Sony's WH-1000XM4, and you lose out on some advanced features like an ambient sound mode. But while we think the XM4 is a better option overall—we expect it to drop to $278 on Black Friday—the QC 35 II is an excellent value at this deal price.

Elsewhere, a number of Amazon's Fire TV and Echo devices are down to advertised Black Friday prices, including Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K for $30. Although we saw this media streamer drop to $25 during Black Friday last year, today's deal ties the lowest price we've seen in the year since and matches its going rate during Amazon Prime Day. In any event, we still recommend the Fire TV Stick 4K for those looking to stream 4K HDR video on the cheap: it runs and loads apps quickly, it has robust voice-search functionality through Alexa, and it supports Dolby Vision HDR. Roku's Streaming Stick+ does 4K with a tidier-but-blander user interface, and Google's latest Chromecast has fewer holes in its app library, but it's possible to rectify the latter with a couple easy steps.

Enlarge / DSS43 is a 70-meter-wide radio antenna at the Deep Space Network's Canberra facility in Australia. (credit: NASA)

The Voyager 2 spacecraft has been gone from Earth for more than 43 years, and it now lies 125 astronomical units from our planet. That is 125 times the distance between the Earth and Sun.

Understandably, this distance makes it rather difficult for NASA to communicate with its far-flung spacecraft—there is a time delay of more than 17 hours. However, with Voyager 2, there is another complication in talking to the spacecraft.

After flying by Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, Voyager 2 made its final planetary flyby in August 1989 past Neptune. Scientists were also interested in flying by Neptune's intriguing moon Triton, so they commanded Voyager 2 to do so on its way beyond Neptune, flying over the north pole of Triton. This trajectory carried it along a southward path relative to the plane of the Solar System, and it has kept on booking it south.