Month: August 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The FIDO2 industry standard adopted five years ago provides the most secure known way to log in to websites because it doesn’t rely on passwords and has the most secure form of  built-in two-factor authentication. Like many existing security schemes today, though, FIDO faces an ominous if distant threat from quantum computing, which one day will cause the currently rock-solid cryptography the standard uses to completely crumble.

Over the past decade, mathematicians and engineers have scrambled to head off this cryptopocalypse with the advent of PQC—short for post-quantum cryptography—a class of encryption that uses algorithms resistant to quantum-computing attacks. This week, researchers from Google announced the release of the first implementation of quantum-resistant encryption for use in the type of security keys that are the basic building blocks of FIDO2.

The best known implementation of FIDO2 is the passwordless form of authentication: passkeys. So far, there are no known ways passkeys can be defeated in credential phishing attacks. Dozens of sites and services now allow users to log in using passkeys, which use cryptographic keys stored in security keys, smartphones, and other devices.

Enlarge (credit: SanDisk/Amazon)

On Thursday, two more lawsuits were filed against Western Digital over its SanDisk Extreme series and My Passport portable SSDs. That brings the number of class-action complaints filed against Western Digital to three in two days.

In May, Ars Technica reported about customer complaints that claimed SanDisk Extreme SSDs were abruptly wiping data and becoming unmountable. Ars senior editor Lee Hutchinson also experienced this problem with two Extreme SSDs. Western Digital, which owns SanDisk, released a firmware update in late May, saying that currently shipping products weren't impacted. But the company didn't mention customer complaints of lost data, only that drives could "unexpectedly disconnect from a computer."

Further, last week The Verge claimed a replacement drive it received after the firmware update still wiped its data and became unreadable, and there are some complaints on Reddit pointing to recent problems with Extreme drives.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Throughout Twitter's rebrand into X, advertisers have started becoming more confident using the platform, CEO Linda Yaccarino recently told CNBC. To bring more advertisers back, X has added new brand safety controls to stop ads from appearing where advertisers don't want them to appear. However, amid these improvements, at least two brands have once again suspended advertising on X, CNN reported—after a Media Matters report shared screenshots of their ads appearing next to posts from a verified pro-Nazi account.

According to CNN, the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences and NCTA-The Internet and Television Association "immediately paused their ad spending on X after CNN flagged their ads on the pro-Nazi account." This account—which was verified in April and has now been suspended—"shared content celebrating Hitler and the Nazi Party," with some posts garnering "hundreds of thousands of views," CNN reported.

Before its suspension, other brands appeared in this account's feed, including The Athletic, MLB, the Atlanta Falcons, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, Amazon, and Office Depot, Media Matters reported.

Enlarge / Mike Lindell pulls a wireless sniffing device off a drone. (credit: Right Side Broadcasting Network)

Election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell claims he's going to stop voting fraud by flying drones near polling places to determine whether voting machines are connected to the Internet.

Lindell, the My Pillow CEO who helped finance Donald Trump's baseless election protests, "demonstrated" the technology at an event he hosted in Missouri this week (see video). Lindell's innovation appears to be a wireless sniffing device mounted on a drone, apparently attached with velcro.

"This was the lie that's been told to every person in our country... these electronic voting machines—from routers to printers to polling books—they're not online. Well, what if I told you there was a device that's been made for the first time in history that can tell you that that machine was online?"

Enlarge / Hello, Hungry Hippo fairing on Neutron. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Rocket Lab is having a pretty good year with a rising stock price and reaching a monthly launch cadence with its Electron vehicle for the first time. But as ever in the space business, the focus is not so much on what a company has done but what it will do. And for Rocket Lab, its future in the launch business lies with the medium-lift Neutron vehicle.

Recently, the company released an updated rendering of the rocket. It shows a slightly sleeker version of Neutron, with a more pointy nose, fins nearer to the top of the rocket, and much broader landing legs. To understand these design changes, Ars spoke with the chief executive of Rocket Lab, Peter Beck.

Asked about Neutron's snappy new design, Beck quipped, "The lesson we’ve learned here is that people take our renders far more seriously than we take our renders," he said. However, with that said, the changes highlight some important aspects about Neutron.

Enlarge (credit: Ed Reschke)

Hundreds of millions of years before anthropogenic climate change was ever a thing, life on Earth suffered mass extinctions due to climate change brought on by natural causes. Even so, there were still organisms that held on and adapted to survive an otherwise lethal lack of oxygen. Trilobites managed to make it through two devastating mass extinctions and still escape any surviving predators.

As paleobiologists Jorge Esteve of the University of Madrid and Nigel Hughes of UC Riverside found, one trilobite species, Auracopleura koninckii, was especially successful when oxygen in the ocean reached dangerously low levels. This creature persevered because of an unusual adaptation. Like most trilobites, A. koninckii curled its segmented body into a tight ball to avoid being eaten. But it also kept growing more segments with additional legs that doubled as gills.

Even though the additional segments could not roll up completely, more legs meant more breathing opportunities, which gave this species an advantage when oxygen levels were low.

Enlarge / Asus' Chromebook Flip CX5 was one of the streaming-oriented gaming Chromebooks announced late last year. (credit: Asus)

Google and some of its Chromebook partners decided to try making "gaming Chromebooks" a thing late last year. These machines included some gaming laptop features like configurable RGB keyboards and high refresh rate screens, but because they still used integrated GPUs, they were meant mostly for use with streaming services like Nvidia's GeForce Now and Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming.

But there were also apparently plans for some gaming Chromebooks with the power to play more games locally. Earlier this year, 9to5Google spotted developer comments earlier this year pointing to a Chromebook board (codenamed Hades) that would have included a dedicated GeForce RTX 4050 GPU like the one found in some Windows gaming notebooks. This board would have served as a foundation that multiple PC makers could have used to build Chromebooks.

But these models apparently won't be seeing the light of day anytime soon. Developer comments spotted by About Chromebooks this week indicate that the Hades board (plus a couple of other Nvidia-equipped boards, Agah and Herobrine) has been canceled, which means that any laptops based on that board won't be happening.

Enlarge (credit: himarkley)

Even after 140 years of its discovery, malaria remains one of the deadliest infections humans have ever encountered. It affected 247 million individuals and was responsible for over 600,000 deaths in 2022, according to the World Health Organization. What’s more shocking is that 95 percent of malaria cases and deaths are reported in Africa alone, and 80 percent of the people who die in various African countries due to malaria are children under 5.

Currently, there exists only one malaria vaccine called RTS,S, and it only offers partial protection in children. However, a newly developed vaccine elicits a much stronger immune response in children, and it could offer layered protection to everyone by targeting a different stage of the malarial parasite’s life cycle.

The RH5 vaccine

A team of researchers from the University of Oxford recently tested a new malaria vaccine on 63 participants ranging in age from 6 months to 35 years in Bagamoyo, a town in Tanzania. The vaccine is technically ChAd63-MVA RH5, but generally called the RH5 vaccine. It exclusively targets RH5, a protein that Plasmodium falciparum (malaria parasite) employs to penetrate human red blood cells.