Category: Uncategorised

A bill proposed in the Utah State House of Representatives on Monday would update and amend passages in the state's criminal code regarding "offenses committed by means of electronic or computer functions." However, in attempting to address the issue of "doxing"—meaning, publishing personally identifying information on the Internet as a way to harass or attack someone—the bill's language may consequently target free online speech.

Utah HB 255, titled "Cybercrime Amendments," counts State Representative David E. Lifferth as its lead sponsor, and it includes amendments that would penalize denial-of-service attacks and false emergency reports at specific locations (i.e. swatting). Utah state criminal code already punishes certain kinds of electronic communications "with intent to annoy, alarm, intimidate, offend, abuse, threaten, harass, frighten, or disrupt the electronic communications of another," and HB 255 would append that specific passage to count the act of "distributing personal identifying information" as actionable, should that be done with any of the aforementioned intent.

"This bill as drafted is clearly unconstitutional," Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo said to Ars Technica in a phone interview. "There may be anti-doxing legislation out there which does make sense, but this bill creates a crime if you, with the intent to annoy, publish someone else's name. If I want to say [online], 'Sam is a poo-poo head,' that's a crime under this draft."

A federal judge has dismissed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Google that alleges fraud because the media giant sometimes requires people wanting a free Gmail account to spend seconds filling out a two-word CAPTCHA—the second word of which is not for security purposes and instead provides an economic gain to Google unbeknownst to the user.

As we all know, CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." They're everywhere online, and are designed to do what they say. They usually ask online surfers to type in a word that appears on the screen to enable deeper access into a website and hopefully keep out bots.

A family of Java-based malware that has given attackers a backdoor into Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Android devices since 2013 has risen from the dead once again as a "commercial" backdoor-as-a-service. It was recently detected in an attack on a Singapore bank employee. Previously known as AlienSpy or Adawind, the malware was all but shut down in 2015 after the domains associated with its command and control network were suspended by GoDaddy. But according to Vitaly Kamluk, the director of Kaspersky Lab's Asia/Pacific research and analysis team, the malware has been modified, rebranded, and is open for service again to customers ranging from Nigerian scam operators to possible nation-state actors. Ars has confirmed that the service is offered openly through a website on the public Internet.

AlienSpy was found last spring on the Android phone of Alberto Nisman, the Argentinian prosecutor who died under suspicious circumstances just as he was apparently about to deliver a report implicating the Argentine government in the bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center in 1994. Now resurrected under the names JSocket and jRat, according to a presentation by Kamluk at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit 2016 in Tenerife, the malware is available through an open website to subscribers at prices ranging from $30 for one month to $200 for an unlimited license. Kamluk believes the service's author is a native Spanish speaker, possibly based out of Mexico.

JSocket includes a number of typical "RAT" (remote access tool) capabilities, including video capture from webcams, audio capture from microphones, the ability to detect antivirus software on a system, a keylogger to record key strokes, and a virtual private network key-stealing feature that could be used to gain access to any of the VPNs used by the victim. Kaspersky has tracked more than 150 attack campaigns against more than 60,000 targets with the latest iterations of the malware, with Nigerian e-mail-based scam operations (particularly those targeting banks) being the biggest adopters of the tool. The lion's share of the remaining subscribers to the malware appeared to come from the US, Canada, Russia, and Turkey.

Microsoft's hardware—Surface, HoloLens, and Xbox—is "absolutely essential" to its future, according to former CEO Steve Ballmer in a new interview with Business Insider. That's because of the interrelationship between devices and the cloud: so many devices are supported by and dependent on cloud software, Ballmer feels that the company needs to participate both on the cloud side and on the device side.

Consistent with this idea, Ballmer continues to believe that mobile is an essential part of this hardware lineup. He says he "put the company on a path" toward having its own mobile devices and platform but that current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has "certainly changed that" by firing most Nokia staff and greatly scaling back Microsoft's phone-building ambitions. In the ex-Microsoft man's view—one shared by industry watchers, including this author—the new CEO "needs to have a clear path forward." Ballmer is "sure he'll get there," but he's not there yet.

The lack of mobile vision becomes particularly acute with Nadella's "mobile first, cloud first" slogan, which Ballmer describes as an "important perception point" which Nadella has done a "brilliant job on." He says that he meets with Nadella "four or five times a year," both to "brainstorm" and in his role as a shareholder. His position as a large shareholder affords a certain level of access to the company, but he says he's now an outsider: no longer working at Microsoft, he isn't privy to any confidential data.

Verizon, which acquired AOL last year, is now reportedly interested in taking on Yahoo as well.

According to Bloomberg, the wireless telecom giant has tasked AOL CEO Tim Armstrong with figuring out how to make it happen.

As Ars reported late last year, Yahoo announced that it would reverse course and not sell its Alibaba investment. Rather, the board of directors said Yahoo would now work to spin off its core businesses, keeping the original company as a holding entity for the Alibaba shares. The company explained that the tax climate for spinning off Alibaba holdings was simply unfavorable for investors. CEO Marissa Mayer also noted that the move would give more "transparency" to the operations of Yahoo’s core businesses, and analysts believed that implied Yahoo would be selling itself off bit by bit.

Unravel Creative Director Martin Sahlin described the game at its unveiling at last year’s E3 as a metaphor for what binds people together. Just minutes after starting the game, it’s obvious to see how that metaphor plays out, and it's fairly easy to guess where the game is headed. As for the reality within the game, however, not everything happens exactly as expected.

More than just colorful

A large part of the game's appeal is Yarny, the cloyingly named mascot that seems to have captured so many people’s imaginations. As his name and the game’s title imply, Yarny is composed entirely of yarn, and he trails a thin line of fabric behind him wherever he goes. While this apparently limits his powers of personal expression, it does offer a bevy of convenient platforming tricks.

Besides using his omnipresent lifeline to rappel up and down cliffs, Yarny can lasso, swing from, and anchor to specially marked locations and objects in each level. When Unravel is operating at its peak, these abilities tie together obviously and quickly. You swing from one branch to the next to reach a soiled tuna can, drag it back over a yarn bridge tied between two docks, then step over it to reach the next target of your trusty lasso. The majority of the game’s puzzles are in this simple mold, asking you to rely on your assortment of yarn-based traversal to get Yarny or other detritus from one location to another.

The White House announced Monday that it is requesting $1.8 billion in emergency funding to respond to and combat the Zika virus, which is currently spreading in more than two dozen countries and territories throughout the Western Hemisphere.

“There shouldn’t be a panic on this,” President Barak Obama said in an interview aired Monday on CBS This Morning. “The good news is, this is not like Ebola,” he said. “People don’t die of Zika.” But, he went on to mention the troubling link with Zika infections and birth defects in some babies, namely microcephaly, a condition of shrunken heads and skulls. “There’s enough correlation that we have to take this very seriously,” he said of the risk for pregnant women and women planning to become pregnant.

In its Monday announcement, the White House explained that the requested funds, if approved by Congress, will “accelerate our ability to prevent, detect and respond to the Zika virus and bolster our ability to reduce the potential for future infectious disease outbreaks.”

The Star Wars universe has inspired all matter of unofficial tribute music, but the series has never come with official albums full of "inspired by" pop music from modern hitmakers. That changed on Monday with the announcement of Star Wars Headspace, a full-length dance album "infused with Star Wars sound clips and effects" launching on "all digital storefronts" on February 19 ahead of a CD release in March.

Chances are good that anybody old enough to have seen the original trilogy in theaters will not recognize a single musical contributor on Headspace, save that of its leading producer Rick Rubin—the man who helmed the Beastie Boys' Licensed To Ill sessions, among many, many other albums. His label American Recordings will release the album; the album's roster is otherwise stacked with a surprisingly hip collection of electronic producers, including Rokysopp, Flying Lotus, and Bonobo.

For the modern-techno uninitiated, this album's contributors tend more toward down-tempo, instrumentally intricate beats as opposed to the predictable climax-and-fall electric-fuzz snoozedom of Skrillex, but it's hard to pin the 15 contributors to a single electronic subgenre. From the sound of the three preview songs that Apple Music posted today, the young batch of contributors may take very different cues from their Star Wars inspirations as well. Flying Lotus' contribution sounds like a DJ Shadow beat with the sole special addition of R2D2 noises scattered all over the place, while Baauer's cut, "Cantina Boys," chops and screws the first film's cantina tunes with a big-beat drum line and liberal use of Darth Vader's breathing.