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Enlarge (credit: John Karakatsanis)

Tuesday's court order compelling Apple to hack the iPhone belonging to a gunman who killed 14 people and injured 22 others has ignited an acrimonious debate. CEO Tim Cook called the order "chilling" because, he said, it requires company engineers to create the equivalent of a backdoor that could be used against any iPhone. Law enforcement officials, meanwhile, contend the order is narrowly tailored to ensure only the shooter's phone is covered.

Here's why the totality of what we know right now leans in favor of Cook and his slippery slope argument.

The order requires Apple to create a customized version of iOS that will run only on the iPhone 5C belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook. Along with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, Farook went on a deadly shooting rampage in San Bernadino. The FBI understandably wants access to the data stored on Farook's phone so investigators have a better idea of the events leading up to the deadly attack and whether the husband-and-wife team received support from unknown people. But so far investigators have been unable to unlock the device. Security measures Apple built into the iPhone limit the number of guesses they can make, and there's also concern too many guesses could cause the phone to automatically destroy the data it stores.

(credit: Lawrence Abrams, BleepingComputer)

Several security researchers have discovered a new type of malware that jumps onto the ransomware bandwagon, encrypting victims' files and then demanding a payment of half a bitcoin for the key. Named "Locky," the malware depends on a rather low-tech installation method to take root in a user's system: it arrives courtesy of a malicious macro in a Word document.

Security researchers Kevin Beaumont and Lawrence Abrams each wrote an analysis of Locky on Tuesday, detailing how it installs itself and its components. The carrier document arrives in an e-mail that claims to be delivering an invoice (with a subject line that includes an apparently random invoice number starting with the letter J). When the document is opened, if Office macros are turned on in Word, then the malware installation begins. If not, the victim sees blocks of garbled text in the Word document below the text, "Enable macro if the data encoding is incorrect"—and then infects the system if the user follows that instruction.

Somehow, this malware has already infected hundreds of computers in Europe, Russia, the US, Pakistan, and Mali. The malicious script downloads Locky's malware executable file from a Web server and stores it in the "Temp" folder associated with the active user account. Once installed, it starts scanning for attached drives (including networked drives) and encrypts document, music, video, image, archive, database, and Web application-related files. Networked drives don't need to be actively mapped to be found, however.

(credit: Samsung)

Mobile World Congress is approaching, and chip companies have already started making small announcements ahead of the show. Today, Samsung took the wraps off of the eight-core Exynos Octa 7870, a new SoC intended for midrange smartphones.

The chip itself looks solid but unexciting—it has eight 1.6GHz ARM Cortex A53 CPU cores, a 300Mbps Category 6 LTE modem, and an undisclosed GPU that supports up to 1920×1200 screens. More interesting is the fact that the chip will be made with Samsung's 14nm FinFET manufacturing process, which made the Exynos 7420 shine in Samsung's Galaxy flagships last year. Better manufacturing processes reduce the amount of heat produced and the amount of power used by these processors, which gives chipmakers the room to make the chips run faster, consume less power, or do a little of both.

The 14nm process is showing up in more and more places, which suggests that it's growing more mature—it will make an appearance in the new Exynos 8 Octa 8890 that's likely to ship in the Galaxy S7 and its variants. Qualcomm is using the same process for its upcoming Snapdragon 820 and 625 SoCs and the Snapdragon X16 modem.

Enlarge / Jillette (left) and Pitchford (center) perform a card trick on stage with an audience volunteer. (credit: Kyle Orland)

LAS VEGAS—For all the clichéd talk of the "magic of video games," we don't often think of the similarities between those games and the kind of magic tricks done on stage. But to kick off the annual DICE Summit Wednesday morning, magician Penn Jillette and Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford (who are working together on a new virtual reality version of Desert Bus) came together to discuss exactly that—how video games can learn from the tricks stage magicians use to play with audience attention.

While many people think of misdirection as essentially pointing and saying "look over there" to fool someone, Jillette stressed that's not actually the case. Instead, misdirection is about studying and learning where people's attention naturally goes and becoming an expert at controlling that. "It's not misdirection; it's direction."

"We've been playing around in VR and traditional games, and one of the challenges is precisely the same as magic," Jillette said. "How to have someone make a totally free choice—put their attention where they want—and have us know where that is."

The reaction which may have produced a tetraneutron (seen in the bottom middle). The reaction begins with two forms of helium which become beryllium and a tetraneutron. The beryllium then decays into alpha particles (helium nuclei). (credit: APS/Alan Stonebraker)

It’s tempting to call the tetraneutron a theoretical particle, as its existence has yet to be confirmed. But that would imply that it’s a consequence of some existing theoretical model, that it’s predicted by some theory. The tetraneutron, however, contradicts the relevant theories—it should be impossible.

And yet, amidst all the (deserved) excitement for the detection of gravitational waves last week, an experiment quietly turned up the strongest evidence for a tetraneutron thus far. It’s not full confirmation yet, but if the new study’s conclusions are borne out, things are going to get weird.

The Story So Far

The troublesome particle may have first appeared in 2001 after decades of speculation and a few doubtful experiments. Researchers fired beryllium-14 atoms at a carbon target to observe the resulting chaos of particles, a relatively common practice.

(credit: Getty Images)

A bizarre security flaw involving recycled phone numbers is allowing some users of the taxi-hailing app Lyft to access other riders’ accounts, exposing names, e-mail addresses, complete ride histories, and credit card information.

The bug was brought to Ars’ attention by a Lyft user named Felix, who says he signed up for the service for the first time earlier this month. He went through the normal registration process, entering his name, e-mail, credit card, and a new phone number, which was recently assigned to him by T-Mobile.

But Felix realized something was wrong when drivers kept addressing him by someone else’s name—a woman’s name he didn’t recognize. At first, he brushed it off. “I was like, uhh no, it’s Felix. But whatever, you’re here,” he told Ars, recalling some confused moments during his first week using the ridesharing service.

Yahoo's once-iconic San Francisco billboard, pictured here in 2011. (credit: Scott Schiller)

In January of 2014, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's keynote at CES in Las Vegas featured the launched Yahoo Tech, the company's technology news "digital magazine." She had hired former New York Times technology columnist David Pogue in October of 2013 as the site's architect and shining star and brought in a stable of other editorial talent to create digital magazines for other "verticals" (food, cars, music, and health among them) as part of her big turnaround strategy for the company. But the turnaround never materialized, and now the sites are being shut down or scaled down.

Dan Tynan, editor-in-chief at Yahoo Tech, revealed his departure in an e-mail to staff published by Politico today. "Well, that was not entirely unexpected," Tynan wrote in the memo. "Eight Hundred and Four days after taking the purple, my career as a Yahoo is over." Politico reported that Yahoo intended to shut down Yahoo Tech along with a flight of other sites.

However, a Yahoo spokesperson told Ars that Yahoo Tech was not being shut down—but several other brands are. And Tynan's departure is part of a broader layoff being announced today. "In early February Yahoo shared a plan for the future, with this new plan came some very difficult decisions and changes to our business," the spokesperson said. "As a result of these changes some jobs have been eliminated and those employees will be notified today. We thank those employees for their outstanding service to Yahoo and will treat these employees with the respect and fairness they deserve."