Month: January 2022

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday updates for Windows are generally meant to fix problems, but that isn't how it always goes. January's updates, released last week, caused a handful of problems for businesses in particular. The most serious, especially for people still dealing with pandemic-driven remote-work setups, was a bug that broke certain kinds of VPN connections. Microsoft has provided fixes for this and other issues as of today, a few days after acknowledging the problem on its Known Issues page.

According to Microsoft's documentation and reporting from Bleeping Computer, the VPN connection issues affected "IPSEC connections which contain a Vendor ID," as well as L2TP and IPSEC IKE VPN connections in Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server versions 2022, 20H2, 2019, and 2016. Windows' built-in VPN client seems to be the most commonly affected, but third-party VPN clients using these kinds of connections could also run into the error.

The latest round of Patch Tuesday updates also caused some problems for Windows Server, including unexpected reboots for domain controllers and failed boots for Hyper-V virtual machines. These problems have all been resolved by other out-of-band patches, though not before causing problems for beleaguered IT admins.

Enlarge / Tablets of ivermectin. (credit: Getty | Nurphoto)

Detainees at an Arkansas jail were given ivermectin without their knowledge or consent, a new lawsuit alleges. As early as November 2020, Dr. Robert Karas, the jail’s doctor, told inmates who had contracted COVID that he was giving them a cocktail of vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids when in fact he was administering dangerously high doses of the dewormer. Ivermectin is not authorized by the FDA to treat or prevent COVID, and the agency has repeatedly told people not to take it outside its approved use as an anti-parasitic. 

“At no point were Plaintiffs informed that the medications they were consuming included Ivermectin,” the lawsuit says. “Further, Plaintiffs were not informed of the side effects of the drug administered to them or that any results would be used for research purposes.”

Four detainees are suing Dr. Karas and his company, the Washington County sheriff, and the Washington County Detention Center and 10 of its employees, alleging that they violated the inmates’ rights to informed consent. The ACLU of Arkansas filed the lawsuit on their behalf. The plaintiffs are seeking medical evaluations by independent providers and an injunction preventing Dr. Karas from administering ivermectin to COVID patients.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Prosecutors in California have charged a Tesla driver with two counts of manslaughter as a result of a fatal crash in December 2019. According to the Associated Press, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration confirmed that the Autopilot driver-assistance feature was active at the time of the crash. That makes this case notable in that these are the first felony charges to result from a fatal crash involving a partially automated driving system.

The fatal crash took place in Gardena, California, on December 29, 2019. According to reports, the Tesla Model S owned by Kevin Riad exited I-91, failed to stop at a red light, and then collided with a Honda Civic, killing both of that car's occupants, Gilberto Alcazar Lopez and Maria Guadalupe Nieves-Lopez. Within days, the NHTSA announced it would investigate the incident—one of a growing number of cases involving Tesla Autopilot that the agency is looking into.

The AP reports that no one involved with the case is prepared to talk publicly ahead of a preliminary hearing on February 23, although it notes that Riad pleaded not guilty. The families of both victims are suing Riad and Tesla in separate lawsuits, alleging that Riad was negligent and that Tesla has sold defective vehicles. The cases are expected to reach court in 2023.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Prosecutors in California have charged a Tesla driver with two counts of manslaughter as a result of a fatal crash in December 2019. According to the Associated Press, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration confirmed that the Autopilot driver-assistance feature was active at the time of the crash. That makes this case notable in that these are the first felony charges to result from a fatal crash involving a partially automated driving system.

The fatal crash took place in Gardena, California, on December 29, 2019. According to reports, the Tesla Model S owned by Kevin Riad exited I-91, failed to stop at a red light, and then collided with a Honda Civic, killing both of that car's occupants, Gilberto Alcazar Lopez and Maria Guadalupe Nieves-Lopez. Within days, the NHTSA announced it would investigate the incident—one of a growing number of cases involving Tesla Autopilot that the agency is looking into.

The AP reports that no one involved with the case is prepared to talk publicly ahead of a preliminary hearing on February 23, although it notes that Riad pleaded not guilty. The families of both victims are suing Riad and Tesla in separate lawsuits, alleging that Riad was negligent and that Tesla has sold defective vehicles. The cases are expected to reach court in 2023.

Enlarge / The Exynos 2200. There's an AMD GPU in there. (credit: Samsung)

The bizarre story of the Exynos 2200 continues. Samsung LSI's flagship smartphone chip was supposed to be announced a week ago at a widely publicized event, but the day came and went with no announcement. Samsung made the unprecedented move of no-showing its own launch event, fueling rumors of troubled chip development and behind-the-scenes dysfunction at Samsung.

The day after the chip was supposed to launch, Samsung said, "We are planning to unveil the new application processor at the time of launching a new Samsung smartphone," which most watchers assumed was the Galaxy S22 launch in February. It turns out that wasn't the right timing for the unveiling, either, and the chip was surprise-announced last night.

Now, the Exynos 2200 is finally official. The headline feature is a new "Samsung Xclipse 920 GPU" that was co-developed by AMD. Samsung says the GPU uses AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, the same as AMD's Radeon desktop GPUs, and will bring "hardware-accelerated ray tracing" to mobile devices.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

For the past four months, Apple’s iOS and iPadOS devices and Safari browser have violated one of the Internet’s most sacrosanct security policies. The violation results from a bug that leaks user identities and browsing activity in real time.

The same-origin policy is a foundational security mechanism that forbids documents, scripts, or other content loaded from one origin—meaning the protocol, domain name, and port of a given webpage or app—from interacting with resources from other origins. Without this policy, malicious sites—say, badguy.example.com—could access login credentials for Google or another trusted site when it’s open in a different browser window or tab.

Obvious privacy violation

Since September’s release of Safari 15 and iOS and iPadOS 15, this policy has been broken wide open, research published late last week found. As a demo site graphically reveals, it’s trivial for one site to learn the domains of sites open in other tabs or windows, as well as user IDs and other identifying information associated with the other sites.

Enlarge / Peugeot's 9X8 seen testing at Aragorn in Spain in late December 2021. (credit: Peugeot)

With the introduction of the new Hypercar class, Peugeot will try to do something unheard of in more than 50 years—win the 24 Hours of Le Mans without a rear wing. The French automaker raised a few eyebrows when the first pictures of its wingless race car became public last summer, since big rear wings have been part and parcel of racing for decades. But the 9X8 took to the track last month for its first test, and as you can see, it's still sans aile.

The 9X8 is designed to compete under the new Hypercar rules, which are complicated and unfriendly to the casual fan. Not all Hypercars have to be hybrids, but the 9X8 is. Behind the cockpit and ahead of the rear wheels that it powers is a new 2.6 L Biturbo gasoline V6, good for 500 kW (670hp). Ahead of the driver's feet, you'll find a 200 kW (268 hp) electric motor-generator unit. To keep speeds safe, the total output is capped at 500 kW by the 9X8's electronic brain.

The 908 Hybrid4 should have raced against the Audi R18 e-tron quattro and the Toyota TS030 hybrids in 2012. (credit: Peugeot)

Although the 9X8's powertrain is all new, it's not actually Peugeot's first hybrid endurance racer. That honor goes to the 908 Hybrid4, which was meant to contest Le Mans in 2012. Instead, Peugeot shuttered its racing program early after an economic downturn and layoffs made such side activities untenable.