Author: Cyrus Farivar

A new Boston-area startup hopes to be a new on-demand ride service that will only offer rides to women, trans women, and children of any gender under 13.

Chariot for Women, which was founded by a husband-and-wife team from Charlton, Massachusetts, is set to launch nationwide on April 19. Its pricing will be much more similar to traditional taxi fares, with a base charge and a per mile rate—and with no surge pricing.

The company says that it is focusing on safety and will only employ female drivers, who will have background checks run by Safer Places. All prospective drivers must also pass Massachusetts’ Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI), according to TechCrunch.

A young American boy is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging his and others' placement on a government terrorist watchlist.

According to the civil complaint filed in federal court in Virginia on Tuesday, the boy had been given an “SSSS designation indicating that he had been designated as a ‘known or suspected terrorist'" while going through airport security.

Since he was a seven-month-old, Baby Doe, as he is referred to, was subject to “extensive searches,” including rifling through all of his diapers.

WhatsApp has enabled end-to-end encryption across all versions of its messaging and voice calling software, according to a Tuesday announcement on the company's website.

Given that WhatsApp is already in use by over 1 billion people worldwide, as users upgrade to the latest version, it will become the most widely used end-to-end crypto tool.

"We live in a world where more of our data is digitized than ever before," Jan Koum, a WhatsApp co-founder, wrote in a company blog post on Tuesday. "Every day we see stories about sensitive records being improperly accessed or stolen. And if nothing is done, more of people's digital information and communication will be vulnerable to attack in the years to come. Fortunately, end-to-end encryption protects us from these vulnerabilities."

According to Mashable, the Transportation Security Administration apparently spent $47,000 on an app that is essentially a random number generator—it was briefly used to assign travelers to left or right lanes at airports.

As the website reported: “The app was used by TSA agents to randomly assign passengers to different pre-check lines as part of a now-discontinued program called ‘managed inclusion.’”

Such an app is widely viewed to be an extremely simple program to write. Many are questioning why a government agency overpaid for the app.

Last week, a federal judge in Washington formally accepted the guilty plea of Brian Farrell, the 28-year-old who had been accused in 2015 of being the right-hand man to the head of Silk Road 2.0, the copycat website inspired by the infamous Tor-enabled drug website.

In a 2015 press release, the Department of Justice said that SR2 had generated approximately $8 million per month since it began in November 2013.

Farrell pleaded guilty in March 2016 to one count of distribution of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine last month, which carries a minimum sentence of five years in prison. He will also be required to forfeit items that were seized at his arrest in Bellevue, Washington, which included $3,900 in silver bullion bars, $35,000 in cash, and "various computer media." Both Farrell’s lawyers and prosecutors have agreed to a sentence of eight years, but the judge is allowed to impose a harsher sentence if he chooses. (By comparison, Ross Ulbricht, who was convicted of running the original Silk Road, was sentenced in 2015 to a dual life sentence.)

SAN FRANCISCO—This past week hundreds of lawyers, technologists, journalists, activists, and others from around the globe descended upon a university conference center to try to figure out the state of digital rights in 2016. The conference, appropriately dubbed "RightsCon," featured many notable speakers, including Edward Snowden via video-conference, but relatively few from those inside government.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), however, was an exception. On the first day of the conference, he gave an in-person speech, in which he argued for a "New Compact for Security and Liberty."

The Oregon senator is likely familiar to Ars readers: he’s been one of the most consistently critical voices of the expansion of government surveillance in recent years. We last spoke with him in October 2014 when he made the case that expanded active spying hurts the American economy. In December 2014, Wyden introduced the "Secure Data Act" in the United States Senate, which aims to shut down government-ordered backdoors into digital systems. However, that bill hasn’t even made it to committee yet, over a year later.

In a new two-paragraph letter to state and local law enforcement partners, the FBI reiterated its commitment to helping those agencies unlock seized encrypted devices.

The letter was first reported Friday evening and published by BuzzFeedbefore being sent to Ars and presumably other media outlets.

Earlier this week, government prosecutors formally asked a federal judge in California to cancel her prior order that would have compelled Apple to assist efforts to unlock a seized iPhone linked to the San Bernardino attacks in late 2015. US Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym did so on March 29.

On Thursday, federal prosecutors filed an amended civil complaint in the case of the California commercial fisherman who has taken an ocean science buoy from the Monterey Bay into his custody.

As Ars reported on Monday, the fisherman, Daniel Sherer, is the first named defendant in a lawsuit filed last week by federal prosecutors in California. The way the government sees it, Sherer and his fishing business partner are essentially hostage-takers, as they recovered a loose United States Geological Survey buoy, claimed ownership of it, and now demand $13,000 for its return.

For his part, Sherer claims that he merely wants adequate compensation for losses he says were caused by the buoy, which popped up out of the ocean in January 2016 and got tangled up in his boat’s propellers. As a result, his boat was out of commission for about four days. "I have no problem giving it back tomorrow—I have no problem giving it back today," Sherer told Ars earlier this week. "Just understand that you guys need to compensate us something. We've lost in this deal."

Reddit has removed the warrant canary posted on its website, suggesting that the company may have been served with some sort of secret court order or document for user information.

At the bottom of its 2014 transparency report, the company wrote: "As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user information. If we ever receive such a request, we would seek to let the public know it existed."

That language was conspicuously missing from the 2015 transparency report that was published Thursday morning. (Disclaimer: Ars and Reddit are owned by the same parent company, Advance Publications.)

An Italian father has reportedly written to Apple CEO Tim Cook, pleading for help to unlock his dead 13-year-old son’s iPhone 6 so that he can retrieve the photos stored on it.

"I cannot give up. Having lost my [son] Dama, I will fight to have the last two months of photos, thoughts and words which are held hostage in his phone," Leonardo Fabbretti wrote in the March 21 letter, which was quoted Wednesday by Agence France Presse.

"I think what’s happened should make you think about the privacy policy adopted by your company. Although I share your philosophy in general, I think Apple should offer solutions for exceptional cases like mine," he said.