Month: December 2020

Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, two of the FCC's three Republicans, talk before the start of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on August 16, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bill Clark )

The Republican-controlled US Senate today confirmed a Trump nominee to the Federal Communications Commission, ensuring that President-elect Joe Biden's FCC will be deadlocked at 2-2 upon his inauguration.

The Senate voted along party lines to confirm Nathan Simington, a Trump administration official who helped draft a petition asking the FCC to make it easier to sue social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. Democrats say he is unqualified for the position.

"During his confirmation hearing even the most basic questions about FCC issues seemed to trip up Nathan Simington. It's clear he is wholly unqualified to help lead this agency," Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote on Twitter today.

Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, two of the FCC's three Republicans, talk before the start of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on August 16, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bill Clark )

The Republican-controlled US Senate today confirmed a Trump nominee to the Federal Communications Commission, ensuring that President-elect Joe Biden's FCC will be deadlocked at 2-2 upon his inauguration.

The Senate voted along party lines to confirm Nathan Simington, a Trump administration official who helped draft a petition asking the FCC to make it easier to sue social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. Democrats say he is unqualified for the position.

"During his confirmation hearing even the most basic questions about FCC issues seemed to trip up Nathan Simington. It's clear he is wholly unqualified to help lead this agency," Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote on Twitter today.

Enlarge (credit: Lino Mirgeler/picture alliance via Getty Images)

FireEye, a $3.5 billion company that helps customers respond to some of the world’s most sophisticated cyberattacks, has itself been hacked, most likely by a well-endowed nation-state that made off with potent “red-team” attack tools used to pierce network defenses.

The revelation, made in a press release posted after the close of stock markets on Tuesday, is a stunning development. It suggests that a group that was already capable of penetrating a company with FireEye’s security prowess and resources is now in possession of new exploits, backdoor implants, or other tools, making the hackers an even greater threat to organizations all over the world.

So far, the company has seen no evidence the tools are actively being used in the wild and isn’t sure if the attackers plan to do so. Nonetheless, FireEye said it is releasing more than 300 countermeasures that customers can use to protect themselves in the event the tools are used. Such tools are used by so-called red teams, which mimic malicious hackers in training exercises that simulate real-world hack attacks.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

For more than three decades, the Internet’s most key underpinning has posed privacy and security threats to the billion-plus people who use it every day. Now, Cloudflare, Apple, and content-delivery network Fastly have introduced a novel way to fix that using a technique that prevents service providers and network snoops from seeing the addresses end users visit or send email to.

Engineers from all three companies have devised Oblivious DNS, a major change to the current domain name system that translates human-friendly domain names into the IP addresses computers need to find other computers over the Internet. The companies are working with the Internet Engineering Task Force in hopes it will become an industry-wide standard. Abbreviated as ODoH, Oblivious DNS builds off a separate DNS improvement called DNS over HTTPS, which remains in the very early stages of adoption.

The way DNS works now

When someone visits arstechnica.com—or any other website, for that matter—their browser must first obtain the IP address used by the hosting server (which at the moment is 3.128.236.93 or 52.14.190.83). To do this, the browser contacts a DNS resolver that typically is operated by either the ISP or a service such as Google’s 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1. Since the beginning, however, DNS has suffered from two key weaknesses.

• 

  Apple Fitness+ on an iPhone and Apple Watch. [credit: Apple ]

The big Apple news today was the introduction of AirPods Max, but Apple made a smaller announcement, too: Apple Fitness+ will launch next Monday, December 14.

Apple Fitness+ is a new service that incorporates music from Apple Music, the health-tracking features of the Apple Watch, and original workout videos led by accomplished trainers, according to Apple. It's the latest in a series of new services that Apple has launched to bolster its revenue over the past couple years, such as Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and Apple News+.

At launch, Fitness+ will offer the following workout programs:

Enlarge / Vice President Mike Pence, center in Mission Control Houston, has overseen all space decisions made by the Trump administration. (credit: NASA)

Vice President Mike Pence will announce a cadre of 18 astronauts from whom NASA is likely to choose the commanders, pilots, and mission specialists who will go to the Moon as part of the Artemis Program.

Multiple sources said Pence would release a list of names on Wednesday at the National Space Council meeting in Florida as part of an update on NASA's Artemis Moon program. These will not be formal crew assignments for upcoming missions but rather a cadre from which astronauts will be selected for upcoming flights. Some of the astronauts will be in attendance.

The first crewed lunar mission, Artemis II, is likely to carry four astronauts around the Moon to test the Orion spacecraft's life-support systems. This will essentially be a reprise of the Apollo 8 mission flown in December 1968, and it could fly as soon as 2023. The first Moon-landing mission, Artemis III, may carry two or four astronauts and is unlikely to fly before 2026. This will depend on the extent to which the incoming Biden administration supports Artemis.