Enlarge / A Redflex red light camera at the intersection of Sylvan and Coffee in Modesto, California as seen in 2013. (credit: Cyrus Farivar) A former Chicago transportation official has been sentenced to a decade in prison. He was found guilty in January on 20 counts of mail and wire fraud , bribery, extortion, and many other charges stemming from a corrupt contract involving Redflex, a major red light camera company. During the Monday hearing, US District Judge Virginia M. Kendall also ordered John Bills to pay over $2 million in restitution. According to the Chicago Tribune , “Bills’ voice broke with emotion as he acknowledged ‘ethical and moral’ mistakes, but he denied masterminding the massive bribery scheme in exchange for growing the city’s controversial network of red light cameras into the largest in the nation.” As Ars has reported previously, Bills, who was the managing deputy commissioner at the Department of Transportation, helped steer a lucrative city contract  to Redflex. After Bills urged his colleagues to approve the deal, the city hired the embattled Australian firm to provide automated enforcement cameras, known formally as its Digital Automated Red Light Enforcement Program (DARLEP), from October 2003 until February 2013. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chicago official gets 10 years for role in dirty red light camera deal

Since Edward Snowden stepped into the limelight from a hotel room in Hong Kong three years ago, use of the Tor anonymity network has grown massively. Journalists and activists have embraced the anonymity the network provides as a way to evade the mass surveillance under which we all now live, while citizens in countries with restrictive Internet censorship, like Turkey or Saudi Arabia, have turned to Tor in order to circumvent national firewalls. Law enforcement has been less enthusiastic, worrying that online anonymity also enables criminal activity. Tor’s growth in users has not gone unnoticed, and today the network first dubbed “The Onion Router” is under constant strain from those wishing to identify anonymous Web users. The NSA and GCHQ have been studying Tor for a decade, looking for ways to penetrate online anonymity, at least according to these Snowden docs . In 2014, the US government paid Carnegie Mellon University to run a series of poisoned Tor relays to de-anonymise Tor users. A 2015 research paper outlined an attack effective, under certain circumstances, at decloaking Tor hidden services (now rebranded as “onion services”). Most recently, 110 poisoned Tor hidden service directories were discovered probing .onion sites for vulnerabilities, most likely in an attempt to de-anonymise both the servers and their visitors. Who can forget the now-famous “Tor stinks” slide that was part of the Snowden trove of leaked docs. Cracks are beginning to show; a 2013 analysis by researchers at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), who helped develop Tor in the first place, concluded that “80 percent of all types of users may be de-anonymised by a relatively moderate Tor-relay adversary within six months.” Read 62 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Building a new Tor that can resist next-generation state surveillance

Enlarge / VMware Fusion 8.5 for Mac, with tab support. (credit: VMware) Today, VMware announced upgrades to its desktop virtualization products for Windows, Mac, and Linux. But this time existing users won’t have to pay for the new software. VMware and its rival Parallels have been charging for upgrades every year, and last year both companies required users to upgrade if they wanted VMWare and Parallels to fully support Windows 10. But none of the operating system changes this year are likely to break anything in last year’s virtualization software. This makes it hard to convince customers that they should pay again. VMware has heard complaints from customers about the yearly paid upgrades. Customers say, “ah, geez, you’re going to charge me to upgrade every year because you added OS support,” according to VMware product line marketing manager Michael Roy. “We hear that loud and clear,” Roy told Ars. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VMware says, “We’re not dead,” updates Fusion and Workstation for free

Enlarge / The updated Outlook.com experience that many of us don’t have yet. (credit: Microsoft) In May 2015, Microsoft announced a big overhaul was coming to its Outlook.com free mail service. The new look Outlook.com looked a lot closer to the Outlook Web Access component in Exchange. It had Exchange features like the Clutter folder for handling all those e-mails that aren’t quite spam but aren’t quite important, pinned and flagged mail, new calendar views, and a better mobile interface that supports swipe-based gestures. In February 2016, this new experience was announced as being out of beta , and Microsoft rolled it out immediately to new users in North America. Everyone else was scheduled to be upgraded by the end of summer. It looks like that’s not the plan any more. The upgrade has been partially performed, and some users have been upgraded while others have not. A new error message ( spotted by Twitter user gwydionjhr ) suggests that those who don’t have the update by now won’t get it for quite a while. While attempting to share calendars, users have noticed that sharing between non-upgraded and upgraded users isn’t possible, and this situation apparently won’t be remedied until the first half of 2017. It’s not clear what the hold-up is or why the roll-out is taking longer than expected. The rollout is a big one behind the scenes, with Microsoft saying that the new system uses “Office 365-based infrastructure” and that there are hundreds of millions of accounts to migrate. Certainly the scale of what Microsoft is doing is certainly significant, but the delays are also frustrating, especially for anyone wanting to share calendars. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Microsoft’s fancy new outlook.com, planned for this year, now delayed until next

Enlarge (credit: New York State Department of Motor Vehicles) In January, the New York State DMV enhanced its facial recognition technology by doubling the number of measurement points on a driver’s photograph, a move the state’s governor says has led to the arrest of 100 suspected identity thieves and opened 900 unsolved cases. In all, since New York implemented facial recognition technology in 2010, more than 14,000 people have been hampered trying to get multiple licenses. The newly upgraded system increases the measurement points of a driver’s license picture from 64 to 128. The DMV said this vastly improves its chances of matching new photographs with one already in a database of 16 million photos. As many as 8,000 new pictures are added each day. “Facial recognition plays a critical role in keeping our communities safer by cracking down on individuals who break the law,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement. “New York is leading the nation with this technology, and the results from our use of this enhanced technology are proof positive that its use is vital in making our roads safer and holding fraudsters accountable.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Enhanced DMV facial recognition technology helps NY nab 100 ID thieves

Enlarge / Jupiter’s north polar region as Juno was This view of Jupiter was taken on August 27, when Juno was 703,000km away, and closing fast. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS) NASA’s daring Juno spacecraft must fly into the heart of Jupiter’s deadly radiation belts to complete its mission. So far, so good. On Saturday morning, the spacecraft made its first close approach to Jupiter, flying to within 4,200km of the giant of the Solar System. That is less than the distance from New York to Los Angeles. The spacecraft shot past Jupiter at the speed of 208,000km/hr relative to the planet, and mission managers pronounced that Juno was in good health. “Early post-flyby telemetry indicates that everything worked as planned and Juno is firing on all cylinders,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Saturday’s flyby, at 9:44am ET, marked the first time Juno had activated its entire complement of nine scientific instruments and turned them toward Jupiter. Mission managers said early returns from the data were promising, but cautioned it would take several more days to download all of the information collected by the spacecraft, and to begin to assess what it means. Although photography is not the principal aim of the mission, NASA intends to release images taken during the flyby during the next week or so. The pictures are expected to include the highest-ever resolution views of Jupiter’s atmosphere, and the first good views of both the gas giant’s poles. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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On Saturday Juno flew to within 4,200km of Jupiter—and survived

One of a set of three new mouse lemur species described this year. Microbus ganzhorni hails from Madagascar—as do all lemurs. (credit: Giuseppe Donati. ) Read any estimate of the number of species present on Earth, and you’ll notice two things: the numbers vary wildly, and they’re always well above the number of species we actually know about. It’s tempting to think we’ve exhausted the exploration of the Earth, that there’s nothing new to see. But one area that we’ve barely scratched the surface of is the biological diversity that we’re a part of. There are several reasons for this. One is that some habitats, like the deep ocean, are both vast and hard to get to. Others, like caves and islands, isolate populations and generate species at a phenomenal rate. Finally, there’s just a tendency to view, say, all ants as being roughly the same. That can allow species to hide in plain sight , with nobody taking the time to look for the details that distinguish them from their close relatives. DNA sequencing is also telling us that some populations that we see as identical haven’t actually interbred in a very long time and may be separate species. As researchers gradually look more closely, the result is a steady stream of new discoveries. We thought we’d share some with you. We set a few simple guidelines for inclusion. The first is that the species had to be discovered this year. The second is that it has to be still living—paleontologists find new species almost as often as biologists do. The final thing is that we had to be able to come up with a decent photo of it. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet some of the species we’ve found in 2016

Enlarge / iPhone Spyware known as Pegasus intercepts confidential data. (credit: Lookout ) Apple has patched three high-severity iOS vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited to infect iPhones so attackers can steal confidential messages from a large number of apps, including Gmail, Facebook, and WhatsApp, security researchers said Thursday. The spyware has been dubbed Pegasus by researchers from mobile security provider Lookout; they believe it has been circulating in the wild for a significant amount of time. Working with researchers from University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab, they have determined that the spyware targeted a political dissident located in the United Arab Emirates and was launched by an US-owned company specializing in computer-based exploits. Based on the price of the attack kit—about $8 million for 300 licenses—the researchers believe it’s being actively used against other iPhone users throughout the world. “Pegasus is the most sophisticated attack we’ve seen on any endpoint because it takes advantage of how integrated mobile devices are in our lives and the combination of features only available on mobile—always connected (WiFi, 3G/4G), voice communications, camera, email, messaging, GPS, passwords, and contact lists,” Lookout and Citizen Lab researchers wrote in a blog post . “It is modular to allow for customization and uses strong encryption to evade detection.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Actively exploited iOS flaws that hijack iPhones likely spread for years