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Enlarge / Logitech's popular C920 camera. (credit: Logitech)

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update, aka version 1607, has been found to leave many webcams inoperable. The update prevents the use of webcams in applications such as Skype and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), along with all manner of custom CCTV programs. Extremely popular hardware, such as Logitech's C920 and C930e cameras, in conjunction even with Microsoft's own Skype, will fail to properly broadcast video.

People first noticed the issue earlier this month. But it's only within the last couple of days that the exact cause became clear via a post by Brad Sams on thurott.com.

Microsoft has said that a fix is in development, but has not yet said when that fix will be distributed.

Enlarge (credit: NSA)

In a revelation that shows how the National Security Agency was able to systematically spy on many Cisco Systems customers for much of the last decade, researchers have uncovered an attack that remotely extracts decryption keys from the company's now-decommissioned line of PIX firewalls.

The discovery is significant because the attack code, dubbed BenignCertain, worked on PIX versions Cisco released in 2002 and supported through 2009. Even after Cisco stopped providing PIX bug fixes in July 2009, the company continued offering limited service and support for the product for an additional four years. Unless PIX customers took special precautions, virtually all of them were vulnerable to attacks that surreptitiously eavesdropped on their VPN traffic.

BenignCertain's capabilities were tentatively revealed in this blog post from Thursday, and they were later confirmed to work on real-world PIX installations by two separate researchers. Before the confirmation came, Ars asked Cisco to investigate the exploit. The company declined, citing this policy for so-called end-of-life products. The exploit helps explain documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden and cited in a 2014 article that appeared in Der Spiegel. The article claimed the NSA had the ability to decrypt more than 1,000 VPN connections per hour.

Enlarge / Chrome apps running on an older version of Chrome OS. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Chrome OS has become a low-key success story for Google in the last few years. Because they're relatively cheap and easy to track and manage, Chromebooks has made inroads in businesses and educational institutions. But Chrome OS still has a big shortcoming compared to Windows and macOS: an app gap.

To help close that gap and augment Web apps, Google introduced the Chrome apps platform to let developers make Web apps that looked and functioned more like traditional standalone apps. Part of Google's sales pitch was that Chrome apps were universal—without any additional effort from developers, these apps would run not just on Chrome OS, but also any Windows, Mac, or Linux PC with Chrome installed.

The Chrome apps platform was an interesting experiment, but it has apparently failed. In a blog post today, Google said that "approximately 1 percent" of all Chrome users on Windows, Mac, and Linux were using Chrome apps. Arguing that Web standards have continued to evolve and become more capable and that the company is simplifying Chrome, Google says that support for Chrome apps on non-Chrome OS platforms will be phased out over the next two years.

Enlarge / Along Honey Cut Bayou, in eastern Baton Rouge, just north of Interstate 12. (credit: Louisiana Civil Air Patrol)

The first damage analysis of the slow-moving tropical system that deluged southern Louisiana last weekend is sobering. But for all the destruction it has caused, the low pressure system was not classified as a tropical storm or depression. Had it been a tropical cyclone, the storm would almost certainly rank among the 10 costliest hurricanes to strike the United States.

Louisiana newspaper The Advocate recently shared an analysis by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber. The analysis uses geographic information system data to study homes and businesses that had flooded in nine parishes in southeastern Louisiana. Some of the report's key findings include:

• About 31% of homes (a total of 110,000 residences) within the nine parishes flooded.
• The estimated value of homes located in flooded areas is $20.7 billion.
• About 280,000 Baton Rouge metropolitan statistical area residents live in flooded areas.
• As a region, a maximum of just 15% of all homes—not solely in the flood-impact areas—were insured against flooding.
• Overall, 7,364 businesses employing 73,907 individuals are located in areas affected by floods. These represent 21% of businesses in the region.
• Proportionally, businesses in Livingston experienced the most severe impact with 3,305 businesses that employ 27,653 employees in the areas of flood-impact, representing 91% of businesses and 94% of employees.

The $20.7 billion dollar figure for residential damages represents the estimated total value of residences in areas that flooded, not the actual damage. While that total will be significantly lower, this damage report does not include losses sustained to businesses, automobiles, or other personal items lost in the floodwaters. It will take some time before a total damage amount is released, which will include damage from insurers.

The Google Transparency Project is a Washington, DC group that's laser-focused on letting Americans know about Google's lobbying efforts. To get its message out, GTP has worked with journalists at Re/Code and The Intercept, which have run stories about Google's many visits to the White House, the prevalence of ex-Googlers in the US Digital Service, and other links.

What wasn't known, until today, is who was paying the bills for research by the "nonprofit watchdog" group. "The folks running the Google Transparency Project won’t say who is paying for it, which is odd for a group devoted to transparency," noted Fortune's Jeff John Roberts, one of many journalists who the group reached out to in April.

Today, Roberts has published a followup, confirming that based on a tip, he found at least one funder—Oracle. That's the same company that lost a major copyright trial to Google and continues to spar with the search giant in court.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has accused T-Mobile USA of violating net neutrality principles with a new "unlimited" data plan that throttles video. The group is weighing whether to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, and the EFF is evaluating a similar offering from Sprint.

T-Mobile's $70-per-month unlimited data plan limits video to about 480p resolution and requires customers to pay an extra $25 per month for high-definition video. Going forward, this will be the only plan offered to new T-Mobile customers, though existing subscribers can keep their current prices and data allotments.

"From what we've read thus far it seems like T-Mobile's new plan to charge its customers extra to not throttle video runs directly afoul of the principle of net neutrality," EFF Senior Staff Technologist Jeremy Gillula told the Daily Dot.