Month: January 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The Red Cross on Wednesday pleaded with the threat actors behind a cyberattack that stole the personal data of about 515,000 people who used a program that works to reunite family members separated by conflict, disaster or migration.

"While we don't know who is responsible for this attack, or why they carried it out, we do have this appeal to make to them," Robert Mardini, the director-general of the International Committee for the Red Cross, said in a release. “Your actions could potentially cause yet more harm and pain to those who have already endured untold suffering. The real people, the real families behind the information you now have are among the world's least powerful. Please do the right thing. Do not share, sell, leak or otherwise use this data."

Wednesday’s release said the personal data was obtained through the hack of a Switzerland-based subcontractor that stores data for the Red Cross. The data was compiled by at least 60 different Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies worldwide. The ICRC said it has no "immediate indications as to who carried out this cyber-attack" and is so far unaware of any of the compromised information being leaked or shared publicly.

Enlarge / Rhys Darby stars as gentleman pirate Stede Bennett in the upcoming HBO Max comedy series Our Flag Means Death. (credit: YouTube/HBO Max)

It's no secret that Ars staffers are big Taika Waititi fans. He always brings his distinctly quirky sensibility to his projects, from What We Do in the Shadows, Wellington Paranormal, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, to JoJo Rabbit, Reservation Dogs, and Thor: Ragnarok. After filming wrapped on Thor: Love and Thunder last year, Waititi somehow found time to develop a new period comedy series for HBO Max.

It's called Our Flag Means Death, and HBO just dropped the first teaser. The series is about an aristocrat who abandons his comfy life to become a "gentleman pirate." Even better: the main character, Stede Bonnet (played by Rhys Darby) is based on a real person who sailed with the infamous 18th-century pirate Blackbeard (played by Waititi in the series).

The real Stede Bonnet was born on the island of Barbados in 1688 to a wealthy English family and inherited a 400-acre estate when his father died in 1694. By some accounts, he was a bookish sort, and his early life was unremarkable. He married, fathered three sons and a daughter, and briefly served in the military as a major, although there is no record that he engaged in active combat.

Enlarge / Google's Windows Android app store. (credit: Google)

As it announced in December, Google is bringing Android games to Windows. The project is simply called "Google Play Games," and the Windows version is now open for beta sign-ups. The catch is that Google Play Games is getting a very limited distribution: you'll need to be in Korea, Taiwan, or Hong Kong to sign up.

If you manage to get in the beta, Google says you'll be able to "play a catalog of Google Play games on... Windows PC via a standalone application built by Google." The company says, "We're excited to announce that some of the most popular mobile games in the world will be available at launch, including Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Summoners War, State of Survival: The Joker Collaboration, and Three Kingdoms Tactics." Games that use the Google Play Games cloud to store achievements and progress will be able to have their progress synced across PC and mobile (and Chrome OS, of course).

As for why this is happening, it's probably in response to Microsoft's plan to bring Android apps to Windows 11. Microsoft teamed up with Amazon to bring the Amazon App Store catalog to Windows, and now Google is bringing its Android game catalog along, too. This is only games though, not any other type of app. Games have an easier time scaling on bigger screens, but I can still think of some normal apps which might be useful on a PC.

Enlarge / An artist's rendering of Google's current reputation. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google says the free ride is over for early users of the company's custom domain G Suite service. Google has long offered a service that lets you use Google apps on a custom domain, allowing you to have a Google email address that ends in your domain instead of "gmail.com." For the first six years of the service's life, the basic tier allowed you to create a custom domain account for free. Now, you have to pay for the privilege of using a custom domain with a Google account. Google turned off the ability to create these accounts for free in 2012, but it wouldn't take away accounts from existing users, would it?

It would. As 9to5Google was the first to report, Google will shut down free G Suite accounts if the account holder doesn't transition to a paid account. Google is sending out emails to users of "G Suite legacy free edition" accounts, telling them they have until July 1 to start paying. A support page details how this process will work. Starting May 1, Google will try to automatically "upgrade" users to a paid account if it has available billing information. If there is no such information by July, accounts will be "suspended." After 60 days, those accounts will lose access to "core" Google services like Gmail and Calendar.

Google's custom domain started in 2006 as "Google Apps for Your Domain." The service has been through a bunch of name changes since then—"Google Apps for Work," then "G Suite," and now "Google Workspace"—but the setup has always been the same: You get Gmail and other Google apps, but they've been custom branded for your company, giving them a more professional appearance than a gmail.com email address. Today, the service starts at $6 per user, per month, with higher tiers available for higher storage needs. From 2006 to 2012, the basic tier was free.

Enlarge (credit: Western Digital)

Western Digital has patched three critical vulnerabilities—one with a severity rating of 9.8 and another with a 9.0—that make it possible for hackers to steal data or remotely hijack storage devices running version 3 of the company’s My Cloud OS.

CVE-2021-40438, as one of the vulnerabilities is tracked, allows remote attackers with no authentication to make devices forward requests to servers of the attackers’ choosing. Like the other two flaws Western Digital fixed, it resides in the Apache HTTP Server versions 2.4.48 and earlier. Attackers have already successfully exploited it to steal hashed passwords from a vulnerable system, and exploit code is readily available.

The vulnerability with a severity rating of 9 out of a maximum 10 stems from a Server-Side Request Forgery. This class of bug lets attackers funnel malicious requests to internal systems that are behind firewalls or otherwise not accessible outside a private network. It works by inducing server-side applications to make HTTP requests to an arbitrary domain of the attacker's choosing.

Enlarge / A drive-up COVID-19 vaccination site from Renown Health on December 17, 2020, in Reno, Nevada. (credit: Getty | Patrick Fallon)

Even before their rollout, a distinct feature of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines has been their "reactogenicity"—that is, their tendency to cause mild symptoms that signal immune responses firing up after a shot, particularly the second one. As vaccine supplies were unleashed in the US last year, families, friends, and coworkers swapped stories of their harrowing post-jab days, often recalling fevers, chills, fatigue, and general crumminess.

Although those experiences are unquestionably real, their connection to the vaccines may not be. As more and more results from randomized-controlled vaccine trials hit science journals, researchers kept noting that, while trial participants often reported mild symptoms after shots, so too did the participants who received placebos—and not at trivial levels.

Many people are familiar with "placebo effects," which happen when an inert intervention leads people to report health benefits that couldn't possibly have been caused by the faux treatment. Placebo effects are well-documented and real—in that people can indeed experience a certain extent of psychosomatic benefits. A placebo will not treat serious medical conditions, such as cancer, but it could, for example, lead people to feel they have more energy or less general discomfort.

Enlarge / A Boeing 777. (credit: Boeing)

The Federal Aviation Administration today said it has cleared 62 percent of US commercial airplanes to perform low-visibility landings at airports where AT&T and Verizon are deploying 5G on C-band spectrum this week.

Several international airlines previously canceled some flights to the US after Boeing issued a recommendation to not fly the 777 into airports where carriers are deploying 5G on the C-band. However, the 777 planes—or at least those that have altimeters capable of filtering out C-band transmissions—were on the FAA's new list of cleared aircraft. The FAA has been granting Alternate Means of Compliance (AMOCs) to operators with altimeters that are safe to use.

"Airplane models with one of the five cleared altimeters include some Boeing 717, 737, 747, 757, 767, 777, MD-10/-11 and Airbus A300, A310, A319, A320, A330, A340, A350 and A380 models," the FAA said in a statement issued shortly after 2 pm EST today. These airplanes are now authorized "to perform low-visibility landings at airports where wireless companies deployed 5G C-band," the FAA said. The word "some" indicates that not every plane with the mentioned model numbers has an approved altimeter.