Month: January 2024

Enlarge / “Paul Ramify loamy event false new event” was one of the lines written on two sheets of paper found in a hidden pocket. (credit: Sara Rivers Cofield)

In December 2013, a curator and archaeologist purchased an antique silk dress with an unusual feature: a hidden pocket that held two sheets of paper with mysterious coded text written on them. People have been trying to crack the code ever since, and someone finally succeeded: University of Manitoba data analyst Wayne Chan. He discovered that the text is actually coded telegraph messages describing the weather used by the US Army and (later) the weather bureau. Chan outlined all the details of his decryption in a paper published in the journal Cryptologia.

“When I first thought I cracked it, I did feel really excited,” Chan told the New York Times. “It is probably one of the most complex telegraphic codes that I’ve ever seen.”

Sara Rivers-Cofield purchased the bronze-colored silk bustle dress with striped rust velvet accents for $100 at an antique shop in Maine, noting on her blog that it was in a style that was fashionable in the mid-1880s among middle-class or well-off women. There wasn't any fitted boning in the bodice, so the dress was meant to be worn with a corset. It had a draped skirt and bustle with metal buttons decorated with an "Ophelia motif." While the dress had been machine-stitched, the original buttons had been sewn by hand. A tag with the name "Bennett" was sewn into the bodice.

Enlarge / For the NBA YouTube launched "Multiview," which is coming to Sunday Ticket. It's four games in a split screen. (credit: YouTube)

YouTube TV may finally get a configurable split-screen mode. Google's cable TV replacement service launched a 2×2 "multiview" feature in 2023, but it relied on pre-made choices cooked up by some person (or maybe AI) inside Google. It's 10 months later, and now some users on Reddit are seeing a "Build a multiview" option that would let you pick which four channels you want to watch. Cord Cutters News got confirmation from Google that the feature is now being tested.

The current multiview is a fun way to stay on top of multiple games, but getting the games you want is an awkward experience. I've been watching NFL Sunday Ticket through YouTube TV this year, and there will be times when there are nine games on simultaneously, and you get only a handful of pre-made multiview options to sift through. Is your desired combination of four games in one of those multiview options? You'd better hope so! The canned combinations only get more awkward as the day goes on: one game ends early, and the station cuts to coverage of another game, and now two of your four windows have duplicate games. If an early game runs long and you want to watch the end next to an already-started late game, that was never an option either. The canned options were always four NFL games, too. If you wanted to watch the NFL and some non-NFL content, you were out of luck. You were easily looking at hundreds of multiview possibilities, so canned selections don't scale well at all.

The Reddit user claims to have access to the feature and says that, during NBA games, the feature is limited to only selecting other NBA games, but at least that is better than scrolling through random pre-made combinations.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Ars Technica was recently used to serve second-stage malware in a campaign that used a never-before-seen attack chain to cleverly cover its tracks, researchers from security firm Mandiant reported Tuesday.

A benign image of a pizza was uploaded to a third-party website and was then linked with a URL pasted into the “about” page of a registered Ars user. Buried in that URL was a string of characters that appeared to be random—but were actually a payload. The campaign also targeted the video-sharing site Vimeo, where a benign video was uploaded and a malicious string was included in the video description. The string was generated using a technique known as Base 64 encoding. Base 64 converts text into a printable ASCII string format to represent binary data. Devices already infected with the first-stage malware used in the campaign automatically retrieved these strings and installed the second stage.

Not typically seen

“This is a different and novel way we’re seeing abuse that can be pretty hard to detect,” Mandiant researcher Yash Gupta said in an interview. “This is something in malware we have not typically seen. It’s pretty interesting for us and something we wanted to call out.”