Month: June 2023

Enlarge (credit: General Motors)

Up until about a month ago, the electric vehicle charging landscape was finally looking pretty settled. After many years of confusion for potential buyers, the CCS1 standard had just about achieved dominance as the de facto standard for all non-Tesla EVs. But Ford, and then General Motors, upended all that, as both automakers signed deals to adapt their EVs to use Tesla's Supercharger experience. Now the charging industry is scrambling in the wake of those deals.

"From the perspective of the industry, this is the culmination of a lot of things that have happened," said Arcady Sosinov, founder and CEO of the charging company Freewire Technologies. "A combination of the legacy OEMs missing the boat on deploying of charging infrastructure and their own network. The public charging networks having failed spectacularly at reliability and ubiquity. The business model for charging is now clearly a low commodity-like margin business."

Sosinov sees medium-term turmoil when it comes to end users making sense of fast charging. "There's going to be a standards war now for a decade because you're still going to have to have legacy vehicles," Sosinov told Ars. "Clearly, this is saying that Ford and GM made a mistake four or five years ago when they said, 'We're not building out a charging network.'"

Last month we got our first glimpse of the second season of Foundation, the Apple TV+ series based on Isaac Asimov's hugely influential Foundation series of novels, via a brief teaser. Now Apple TV has dropped the full official trailer, and it looks like we're definitely in for an all-out war between the ruling Cleons and the titular Foundation.

(Some spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, Asimov's fundamental narrative arc remains intact, with the series taking place across multiple planets over 1,000 years and featuring a huge cast of characters. The biggest change from the books is the replacement of the Empire's ruling committee with a trio of Eternal Emperor clones called the Cleons—a genetic dynasty. Brother Day (Lee Pace) is the primary ruler, with Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann) serving in an advisory/legacy role. Meanwhile, Brother Dawn (played as a child by Cooper Carter and as a teenager by Cassian Bilton) is being groomed to take over as the new Brother Day. Technically, they are all perfect incarnations of the same man, at different ages, and this is both the source of their strength as a team and of their conflicts.

Last month we got our first glimpse of the second season of Foundation, the Apple TV+ series based on Isaac Asimov's hugely influential Foundation series of novels, via a brief teaser. Now Apple TV has dropped the full official trailer, and it looks like we're definitely in for an all-out war between the ruling Cleons and the titular Foundation.

(Some spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, Asimov's fundamental narrative arc remains intact, with the series taking place across multiple planets over 1,000 years and featuring a huge cast of characters. The biggest change from the books is the replacement of the Empire's ruling committee with a trio of Eternal Emperor clones called the Cleons—a genetic dynasty. Brother Day (Lee Pace) is the primary ruler, with Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann) serving in an advisory/legacy role. Meanwhile, Brother Dawn (played as a child by Cooper Carter and as a teenager by Cassian Bilton) is being groomed to take over as the new Brother Day. Technically, they are all perfect incarnations of the same man, at different ages, and this is both the source of their strength as a team and of their conflicts.

Enlarge (credit: Anjali Nair; Getty Images)

On a Wednesday morning in May, Hannah got a call from her lawyer—there was a warrant out for her husband’s arrest. Her thoughts went straight to her kids. They were going to come home from school and their father would be gone. “It burned me,” Hannah says, her voice breaking. “He hasn’t done anything to get his bond revoked, and they couldn’t prove he had.”

Hannah’s husband is now awaiting trial in jail, in part because of an anti-pornography app called Covenant Eyes. The company explicitly says the app is not meant for use in criminal proceedings, but the probation department in Indiana’s Monroe County has been using it for the past month to surveil not only Hannah’s husband but also the devices of everyone in their family. To protect their privacy, WIRED is not disclosing their surname or the names of individual family members. Hannah agreed to use her nickname.

Enlarge (credit: Anjali Nair; Getty Images)

On a Wednesday morning in May, Hannah got a call from her lawyer—there was a warrant out for her husband’s arrest. Her thoughts went straight to her kids. They were going to come home from school and their father would be gone. “It burned me,” Hannah says, her voice breaking. “He hasn’t done anything to get his bond revoked, and they couldn’t prove he had.”

Hannah’s husband is now awaiting trial in jail, in part because of an anti-pornography app called Covenant Eyes. The company explicitly says the app is not meant for use in criminal proceedings, but the probation department in Indiana’s Monroe County has been using it for the past month to surveil not only Hannah’s husband but also the devices of everyone in their family. To protect their privacy, WIRED is not disclosing their surname or the names of individual family members. Hannah agreed to use her nickname.

Enlarge / Left: a smart card reader processing the encryption key of an inserted smart card. Right: a surveillance camera video records the reader's power LED from 60 feet away. (credit: Nassi et al.)

Researchers have devised a novel attack that recovers the secret encryption keys stored in smart cards and smartphones by using cameras in iPhones or commercial surveillance systems to video record power LEDs that show when the card reader or smartphone is turned on.

The attacks enable a new way to exploit two previously disclosed side channels, a class of attack that measures physical effects that leak from a device as it performs a cryptographic operation. By carefully monitoring characteristics such as power consumption, sound, electromagnetic emissions, or the amount of time it takes for an operation to occur, attackers can assemble enough information to recover secret keys that underpin the security and confidentiality of a cryptographic algorithm.

Side-channel exploitation made simple

As Wired reported in 2008, one of the oldest known side channels was in a top-secret encrypted teletype terminal that the US Army and Navy used during World War II to transmit communications that couldn’t be read by German and Japanese spies. To the surprise of the Bell Labs engineers who designed the terminal, it caused readings from a nearby oscilloscope each time an encrypted letter was entered. While the encryption algorithm in the device was sound, the electromagnetic emissions emanating from the device were enough to provide a side channel that leaked the secret key.