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Two sudden leaps in the number of advertised "hidden services" on Tor have led to rampant speculation about the cause of them. (credit: The Tor Project)

In recent weeks, the number of "hidden services"—usually Web servers and other Internet services accessible by a ".onion" address on the Tor anonymizing network—has risen dramatically. After experiencing an earlier spike in February, the number of hidden services tracked by Tor spiked to 114,000 onion addresses on March 1. They then dropped just as quickly, falling to just below 70,000 hidden services seen by Tor on Thursday—still twice the number that Tor had held steady at for most of 2015.

"We don't know what's causing this," said Kate Krauss, the director of communications and public policy for the Tor Project. "But it's not difficult for even one person—a researcher, for instance—to create a lot of new onion addresses—which is not the same as actual websites or services. In fact, we want the process of creating onion addresses to be as easy as possible to encourage the creation of more onion services. These spikes are typically temporary—and as you see from the chart, this one is already going away."

Still, there has never been this sort of wild gyration in the number of addresses in recent times—or at least as far back as the Tor Project has kept metric data. So what caused the sudden near-tripling of the size of Tor's hidden Web and its rapid contraction? Based on a deeper look at Tor's metrics and discussions with both Tor developers and security experts, the huge spike in the "size" of the hidden Web within Tor was likely caused by a perfect storm of coincidences: major Internet censorship events in at least two countries, the relatively rapid adoption of a new messaging tool, a malware explosion, and ongoing attempts to undermine the privacy of the network.

In the late 1990s, Microsoft Office macros were a favorite vehicle for surreptitiously installing malware on the computers of unsuspecting targets. Microsoft eventually disabled the automated scripts by default, a setting that forced attackers to look for new infection methods. Remotely exploiting security bugs in Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, and other widely used software soon came into favor.

Over the past two years, Office Macros have made a dramatic comeback that has reached almost a fevered pitch in the past few months. Booby-trapped Excel macros, for instance, were one of the means by which Ukrainian power authorities were infected in the weeks or months leading up to December's hacker-caused outage that affected 225,000 people. "Locky," a particularly aggressive strain of crypto ransomware that appeared out of nowhere two weeks ago, also relies on Word macros. The return of the macro-delivered malware seemed to begin in late 2014 with the advent of a then-new banking trojan called Dridex.

The return of the macro may have been a reaction to security improvements that Adobe, Microsoft, and Oracle have made to their software. Not only were the companies patching dangerous bugs more quickly, but in many cases, they fortified their code with defenses that caused exploits to simply crash the application rather than force it to execute malicious code. Streamlined update mechanisms and greater end user awareness about the importance of installing security patches right away may also have made code-execution exploits to fall out of favor.

(credit: Kirby Ferguson)

In 2014, no company filed more patent lawsuits than eDekka LLC, a Texas-based company with just one asset—US Patent No. 6,266,674. Fully 168 patent lawsuits came to a sudden halt in October, when US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap stopped the litigation campaign in its tracks.

eDekka's patent, which had been used to sue a wide array of online retailers, described nothing more than "the abstract idea of storing and labeling information," Gilstrap found. Those were "routine tasks that could be performed by a human" and didn't meet the standard for getting a patent. Gilstrap ruled the patent invalid.

Lawyers for eDekka appealed Gilstrap's decision, and the shell company's appeal brief was initially due in December. It asked for and received an extension until February 26. Instead of filing a brief blasting the lower-court results, though, eDekka's lawyers simply filed a short document asking to withdraw its appeal. Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit granted the motion.

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The Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan represents an attempt to use the Clean Air Act to limit the US' carbon emissions. But its roots trace back to a lawsuit filed during the Clinton administration and decided by the Supreme Court during the Bush years. Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, was in charge of the EPA when President Bush reneged on a campaign promise and announced he was giving up on any attempt to regulate carbon emissions.

Whitman has stayed involved in environmental issues and is now the co-chair of an organization called the CASEnergy Coalition, which is promoting nuclear power as one of the solutions for limiting our carbon emissions. She recently talked with Ars about climate issues, nuclear power, and those awkward Bush years.

Ars: You were in charge of the EPA when Massachusetts v EPA was moving through the courts. Had you already started looking into carbon emissions and the Clean Air Act?

(credit: tokyoform)

On Friday Japan’s Ministry of Transportation said that it had found discrepancies between lab and real-world emissions measurements for diesel vehicles from Toyota, Nissan, and Mitsubishi. However, the ministry said that it had not found any illegal software on the vehicles and that the automakers had not violated any of Japan’s regulations.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Toyota’s Hiace van and the Land Cruiser Prado sport-utility vehicle, as well as Nissan’s X-Trail SUV and Mitsubishi’s Delica D:5 all emitted between four and 10 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) that is allowed in Japan's real-world driving tests.

Japan has been testing vehicles sold in the country after the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) discovered that diesel vehicles sold by Volkswagen Group were emitting many times the legal limit of NO_x due to illegal software placed on the cars that let them cheat on lab testing conducted by regulators. The ensuing scandal has sent Volkswagen’s stock into a nosedive and has potentially put the company on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in fines.