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A still image from the movie Ambition. (credit: European Space Agency)

Littlefinger, the conniving and vulpine Game of Thrones character who loves all the Stark women, got together with one of them two years ago to promote the European Space Agency's comet-chasing mission, Rosetta.

Aidan Gillen and Aisling Franciosi, who play Littlefinger and Lyanna Stark respectively, starred in the short film to hype the mission, which caught up to Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014 and later sent the small Philae spacecraft to make a soft landing in November of that year. The movie, titled Ambition, is all the more chilling after Sunday's episode of Game of Thrones, in which Franciosi (Lyanna Stark) plays a key role in finally revealing the true parentage of Jon Snow.

In the short film, Franciosi seems to be some kind of a Jedi padawan in a far future Earth. As part of one lesson, Gillen recalls the Rosetta mission that had occurred in the distant past, explaining that it was about more a comet rendezvous. "We also wanted to show what was possible," Gillen's character explained.

(credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google is preparing to release a branded phone by the end of 2016 in an effort to compete more directly with Apple's iPhone, according to a report in The Telegraph this morning. It follows a similar report from The Information (subscription required) in February that stated Google wanted to take "greater control" over the design and building of Nexus phones.

"Sources familiar with the discussions" told The Telegraph that the search giant is in discussions with operators and manufacturers that would see it leap into hardware design above and beyond its current partnerships with the likes of LG and Huawei, which make its Nexus phones. Such a move wouldn't be entirely unprecedented: the Pixel C Android tablet was developed entirely internally by Google.

Android is the operating system that powers roughly four in every five smartphones around the world, but so far Google has stuck to developing free software platforms, leaving handset design and manufacture to the likes of Samsung. The slight exception to the rule has been the company's Nexus range, which serves as both an example to manufacturers of how to build an Android device, and offer consumers an entirely stock version of the operating system. The Telegraph's report doesn't mention what will become of the initiative and phones like the well-received Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P.

(credit: David Cairns / Getty Images)

The Seychelles-based VPN provider Proxy.sh has withdrawn an exit node from its warrant canary—a statement certifying that "to the date of publication, no warrants, searches, or seizures that have not been reported in our Transparency Report, have actually taken place."

The blog post in question simply states: "We would like to inform our users that we do not wish any longer to mention France 8 (85.236.153.236) in our warrant canary until further notice." The statement implies that the France 8 node has been subject to a warrant, but that a gag order forbids Proxy.sh from revealing that fact directly. It is not clear who served the warrant, and for obvious reasons, Proxy.sh is unable to say.

However, the TorrentFreak site obtained the following comment from Proxy.sh: "We recommend our users to no longer connect to it. We are striving to do whatever it takes to include that node into our warrant canary again."

(credit: Valentina Palladino)

Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the Google Chrome browser that could allow users to bypass itscopy protection system and download content from streaming video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. According to Wired, Google was alerted to the problem on May 24, but is yet to issue a patch.

The vulnerability centers around the Widevine digital rights management system—which Google owns and has implemented into Chrome—and specifically how it handles decryption of encrypted media streams. Widevine uses two pieces of tech to protect content: the encrypted media extensions (EME), which handle key exchanges and other high-level functions, and a content decryption module (CDM), which unscrambles encrypted video for playback in the browser.

Unfortunately for Google, the researchers discovered it's possible to hijack the decrypted movie stream right after the CDM decrypts the film, before it's displayed in the browser. With the right software—and let's face it, it doesn't take long for pirating software to appear following the discovery of a vulnerability—any user would be able to download streaming content for keeps.