Tag: ars

Zynga investors can sue FarmVille creator for alleged IPO fraud, judge says

Earlier this week, a judge ruled  (PDF) that Zynga would have to face a revised lawsuit over allegations that it defrauded investors by offering overly-zealous news about the company’s future at the time of its Initial Public Offering (IPO). The investors allege that Zynga knew that an upcoming platform change at Facebook would decrease the company’s ability to rake in revenue, but executives concealed that information. After the successful IPO, the complaint says, the executives sold off their Zynga shares before the stock price collapsed . The investors applied for a class-action lawsuit in July 2012 , just after Zynga shares tumbled to $3 per share from a price peak of $15.91 per share. US District Judge Jeffrey White dismissed an earlier version of the lawsuit a year ago, but ruled that the game company would have to face a revised complaint from the same investors. Although Zynga denies the investors’ claims, the plaintiffs say they have at least six confidential witnesses who had access to daily reports on Zynga’s bookings before the IPO. Those witnesses say the company was in decline before the IPO. “Although the company may have reported large bookings after the fact,” the judge’s order writes, “Plaintiff contends that the bookings declined significantly during the class period and yet Defendants continued to represent to the public that the bookings were strong.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Zynga investors can sue FarmVille creator for alleged IPO fraud, judge says

Dark Web vendors offer up “thousands” of Uber logins starting at $1 each

Two vendors on a relatively new Dark Web marketplace are selling active Uber usernames and passwords. On Saturday, Ars verified that “Courvoisier” is claiming to sell these logins for $1 each on the AlphaBay Market, which launched in late 2014. Another vendor, “ThinkingForward,” sells the same items for $5 each. As Courvoisier writes: “The credentials provided will be a valid login for the Uber website for which you can use to order phones from completely free. (You can find the guide in our store if you’re unaware on the how-to).” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Dark Web vendors offer up “thousands” of Uber logins starting at $1 each

German pro basketball team relegated to lower division due to Windows update

A second-tier German professional basketball team has been relegated to an even lower-tier as a result of being penalized for starting a recent game late—because the Windows laptop that powered the scoreboard required 17 minutes to perform system updates. The March 13 match between the Chemnitz Niners and the Paderborn Baskets was set to begin normally, when Paderborn (the host) connected its laptop to the scoreboard in the 90 minutes leading up to the game. In an interview with the German newspaper, Die Zeit (Google Translate), Patrick Seidel, the general manager of Paderborn Baskets said that at 6:00pm, an hour and a half before the scheduled start time, the laptop was connected “as usual.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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German pro basketball team relegated to lower division due to Windows update

NASA announces details of its asteroid redirection mission

Today, NASA held a press conference in which it described the latest developments in its plan to return an asteroid to an orbit close enough to Earth that it could easily be studied by a manned mission. Gone is the idea of returning an entire asteroid. In its place, a robotic probe will pluck a boulder from the surface of an asteroid and return that, testing our ability to redirect similar rocks if they threaten Earth. In fact, the entire mission is generally focused on technology development. Once the asteroid is placed in a cis-lunar orbit (orbiting Earth and closer than the Moon), it will be visited by a crewed Orion capsule that will allow detailed study and a return of samples to Earth. But the focus of this mission will be testing technology that will allow extended manned missions in space. The current timeline involves further studies of potential targets for extracting a boulder in the years leading up to 2019. Right now, three asteroids are on the menu: Itokawa (which was visited by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa), Bennu (which is planned for a sample return mission called OSIRIS-REx), and 2008 EV5. In each case, the orbit and composition are well-known, making them relatively low risk. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NASA announces details of its asteroid redirection mission

Graphene allows strange form of ice to occur at room temperature

We are all familiar with water, and we see it every day in many forms: in the bulk as a glass of water, in the crystal phase as ice, and the vapor phase as steam. While the behavior of these phases seems predictable, water is an unusual substance that behaves unlike any other small molecule we know of. This fact is particularly notable when water is viewed at small-length scales or confined to small compartments. An international team of scientists recently discovered some intriguing structural characteristics of water confined in graphene nanocapillaries. In these studies, the researchers deposited a graphene monolayer on a small grid, added a small amount of water, and then covered it with another monolayer of graphene. This sample was left overnight to allow excess water to evaporate, eventually bringing the graphene layers together so that only a small amount of adsorbed water remained between them. The water left behind showed some unusual structural properties. Structural characteristics of water are influenced by hydrogen bonding among adjacent water molecules. In the liquid state, water exhibits a partially ordered structure. In the crystal state, water molecules begin to conform to more rigid lattice structures, forming ice. As ice, the water molecules typically take on a geometry that is a three-dimensional “tetrahedral” structure, which basically looks like a square pyramid. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Graphene allows strange form of ice to occur at room temperature

New DNA construct can set off a “mutagenic chain reaction”

A technique for editing genes while they reside in intact chromosomes has been a real breakthrough. Literally . In 2013, Science magazine named it the runner-up for breakthrough-of-the-year, and its developers won the 2015 Breakthrough Prize . The system being honored is called CRISPR/Cas9, and it evolved as a way for bacteria to destroy viruses using RNA that matched the virus’ DNA sequence. But it’s turned out to be remarkably flexible, and the technique can be retargeted to any gene simply by modifying the RNA. Researchers are still figuring out new uses for the system, which means there are papers coming out nearly every week, many of them difficult to distinguish. That may be precisely why the significance of a paper published last week wasn’t immediately obvious. In it, the authors described a way of ensuring that if one copy of a gene was modified by CRISPR/Cas9, the second copy would be—useful, but not revolutionary. What may have been missed was that this process doesn’t stop once those two copies are modified. Instead, it happens in the next generation as well, and then the generation after that. In fact, the modified genes could spread throughout an entire species in a chain reaction, a fact that has raised ethical and safety concerns about the work. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New DNA construct can set off a “mutagenic chain reaction”

Google warns of unauthorized TLS certificates trusted by almost all OSes

In the latest security lapse involving the Internet’s widely used encryption system, Google said unauthorized digital certificates have been issued for several of its domains and warned misissued credentials may be impersonating other unnamed sites as well. The bogus transport layer security certificates are trusted by all major operating systems and browsers, although a fall-back mechanism known as public key pinning prevented the Chrome and Firefox browsers from accepting those that vouched for the authenticity of Google properties, Google security engineer Adam Langley wrote in a blog post published Monday . The certificates were issued by Egypt-based MCS Holdings , an intermediate certificate authority that operates under the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The Chinese domain registrar and certificate authority, in turn, is included in root stores for virtually all OSes and browsers. The issuance of the unauthorized certificates represents a major breach of rules established by certificate authorities and browser makers. Under no conditions are CAs allowed to issue certificates for domains other than those legitimately held by the customer requesting the credential. In early 2012, critics blasted US-based CA Trustwave for doing much the same thing and Langley noted an example of a France-based CA that has also run afoul of the policy. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google warns of unauthorized TLS certificates trusted by almost all OSes

All four major browsers take a stomping at Pwn2Own hacking competition

The annual Pwn2Own hacking competition wrapped up its 2015 event in Vancouver with another banner year, paying $442,000 for 21 critical bugs in all four major browsers, as well as Windows, Adobe Flash, and Adobe Reader. The crowning achievement came Thursday as contestant Jung Hoon Lee, aka lokihardt, demonstrated an exploit that felled both the stable and beta versions of Chrome, the Google-developed browser that’s famously hard to compromise . His hack started with a buffer overflow race condition in Chrome. To allow that attack to break past anti-exploit mechanisms such as the sandbox and address space layout randomization, it also targeted an information leak and a race condition in two Windows kernel drivers, an impressive feat that allowed the exploit to achieve full System access. “With all of this, lokihardt managed to get the single biggest payout of the competition, not to mention the single biggest payout in Pwn2Own history: $75,000 USD for the Chrome bug, an extra $25,000 for the privilege escalation to SYSTEM, and another $10,000 from Google for hitting the beta version for a grand total of $110,000,” Pwn2Own organizers wrote in a blog post published Thursday . “To put it another way, lokihardt earned roughly $916 a second for his two-minute demonstration.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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All four major browsers take a stomping at Pwn2Own hacking competition

Windows 10 shaves off gigabytes with selective system file compression

With the Windows 8.1 Update, Microsoft shrank the Windows 8.1 install footprint to make it suitable for low-cost tablets with just 16GB of permanent storage, a reduction from the 32GB generally required for Windows 8. Windows 10 will shrink the disk footprint further, potentially freeing as much as 6.6GB of space on OEM preinstalls. Microsoft describes two sources of savings. The first is the re-use of a time-honored technique that fell out of fashion as hard drives grew larger and larger: per-file compression. The NTFS filesystem used in Windows has long allowed individual files and folders to be compressed, reducing their on-disk size at the expense of a small processor overhead when reading them. With spinning disks getting so large as to feel almost unlimited, per-file compression felt like a relic from a bygone age by the mid-2000s. But with the rise of solid state storage and ultra-cheap devices with just a handful of gigabytes available, per-file compression has gained a new lease on life. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 shaves off gigabytes with selective system file compression

Cops are freaked out that Congress may impose license plate reader limits

Despite the fact that no federal license plate legislation has been proposed, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has sent a pre-emptive letter to top Congressional lawmakers, warning them against any future restrictions of automated license plate readers. The IACP claims to be the “world’s   oldest and largest association of law enforcement executives.” As the letter, which was published  last week, states: We are deeply concerned about efforts to portray automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology as a national real-time tracking capability for law enforcement. The fact is that this technology and the data it generates is not used to track people in real time. ALPR is used every day to generate investigative leads that help law enforcement solve murders, rapes, and serial property crimes, recover abducted children, detect drug and human trafficking rings, find stolen vehicles, apprehend violent criminal alien fugitives, and support terrorism investigations. Sarah Guy, a spokeswoman for the IACP, told Ars that current state and local restrictions have made the police lobby group concerned at the federal level. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cops are freaked out that Congress may impose license plate reader limits