Tag: ars

TSA may soon stop accepting drivers’ licenses from nine states

TSA screening passengers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (credit: danfinkelstein ) The citizens of several US states may soon find that they can’t use their drivers’ licenses to get into federal facilities or even board planes. Enforcement of a 2005 federal law that sets identification standards, known as “Real ID,” has been long-delayed. But now Department of Homeland Security officials say enforcement is imminent. The “Real ID” law requires states to implement certain security features before they issue IDs and verify the legal residency of anyone to whom they issue an ID card. The statute is in part a response to the suggestion of the 9/11 Commission, which noted that four of the 19 hijackers used state-issued ID cards  to board planes. Real ID also requires states to share their databases of driver information with other states. The information-sharing provisions are a big reason why some privacy groups   opposed the law , saying it would effectively be the equivalent of a national identification card. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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TSA may soon stop accepting drivers’ licenses from nine states

Self-driving Ford Fusions are coming to California next year

Apart from the sensor bar on the roof, this Ford Fusion Hybrid looks just like a normal car. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin) Even more robots are coming to California’s roads next year. Yesterday, Ford announced that it will start testing its autonomous Fusion sedans in the state now that it is officially enrolled in the California Autonomous Vehicle Testing Program . The company opened a new R&D center in Palo Alto at the beginning of the year, which among other projects has been working on virtual simulations of autonomous driving as well as sensor fusion to improve the way its cars perceive the world around them. Ford is the 11th group to obtain a California driving license for its autonomous cars, joining other OEMs (BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Nissan, Tesla, and Volkswagen Group), tier one suppliers (Bosch and Delphi ), and tech companies (Cruise Automation and Google). A condition of the self-driving car regulations requires companies to provide California’s DMV with a report any time one of their cars is involved in a collision. Since the rules went into effect in September 2014, there have been a total of 10 incidents . The first, in October 2014, involved one of Delphi’s test vehicles, although it was being driven by a human at the time. The nine other incidents all involve Google’s cars, seven of which were being driven autonomously. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Self-driving Ford Fusions are coming to California next year

Spike TV orders 10-episode series for Red Mars written by Babylon 5 creator

According to sources speaking to Variety , Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars has been green-lighted for a 10-episode TV adaptation on Spike TV. Each episode will be an hour long, and J. Michael Straczynski, creator and writer of Babylon 5 and co-creator of Sense8 will serve as Red Mars ’ writer, co-executive producer, and showrunner. Vince Gerardis, co-executive producer of Game of Thrones , will also serve as executive producer on Red Mars with Straczynski. Robinson will reportedly be an on-the-set consultant. The Red Mars project has been on Spike TV’s plate for some time , but the network only just decided to move full-speed ahead with it, according to Variety . The show will go into production this summer and premiere in January 2017. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spike TV orders 10-episode series for Red Mars written by Babylon 5 creator

New diabetes cases finally on the decline

(credit: Steven Depolo/Flickr ) After more than a quarter of a century of rising diabetes rates, the number of new cases seems to be on a downward trend. From 1980 to 2009, the annual number of new diabetes cases more than tripled in the US, going from 493,000 to 1.7 million diagnoses a year in people aged 18 to 79. But since 2009, case numbers appear to have slumped, though the decline had not registered as statistically significant. Now, using newly released data from 2014 , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that case numbers are definitely on their first sustained decline. In 2014, the number of diagnosed cases was down to 1.4 million. “It seems pretty clear that incidence rates have now actually started to drop,” said Edward Gregg, one of the CDC’s top diabetes researchers told the New York Times . “Initially it was a little surprising because I had become so used to seeing increases everywhere we looked.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New diabetes cases finally on the decline

HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive

Western Digital’s HGST division has released the world’s first helium-filled 10TB hard drive for everyday use—assuming you have about £600 burning a hole in your pocket, anyway. Meanwhile, despite reiterating that it would have a 10TB drive on the market this year, Seagate hasn’t yet moved past the 8TB mark. The Ultrastar He10 is notable for two reasons: it’s hermetically sealed and filled with helium, which is still a rather novel idea; and it has seven platters crammed into a standard-height 25.4mm (1-inch) hard drive. PMR vs. SMR. With SMR, there’s almost no guard space between tracks, which increases density but can reduce write speed (if you want to rewrite a track in the middle, you may also have to rewrite the adjacent tracks as well). (credit: Seagate) The platters themselves are impressive, too: instead of using shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to boost areal density, these platters use conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). PMR has been the standard hard drive recording tech since 2005, when it replaced longitudinal recording. The move to PMR has increased the maximum platter density by an order of magnitude—from about 100Gb per square inch to 1000Gb—but now, alas, we’re beginning to hit the limits of PMR. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive

Hey Reader’s Digest: Your site has been attacking visitors for days

Enlarge (credit: Malwarebytes ) An active hacking campaign is forcing Reader’s Digest and many other websites to host malicious code that can surreptitiously infect visitors with malware and linger for days or weeks before being cleaned up. Reader’s Digest has been infected since last week with code originating with Angler, an off-the-shelf hack-by-numbers exploit kit that saves professional criminals the hassle of developing their own attack scripts, researchers from antivirus provider Malwarebytes told Ars. People who visit the site with outdated versions of Adobe Flash, Internet Explorer, and other browsing software are silently infected with malware that gains control over their computers. Malwarebytes researchers said they sent Reader’s Digest operators e-mails and social media alerts last week warning the site was infected but never got a response. The researchers estimate that thousands of other sites have been similarly attacked in recent weeks and that the number continues to grow. “This campaign is still ongoing and we see dozens of new websites every day being leveraged to distribute malware via the Angler exploit kit,” Malwarebytes Senior Security Researcher Jérôme Segura wrote in an e-mail. “This attack may have been going on for some time but we noticed a dramatic increase in infections via WordPress sites in the past couple of weeks.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hey Reader’s Digest: Your site has been attacking visitors for days

Managing a 100-percent renewable grid, without batteries

(credit: US DOE ) Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson likes to take current thinking about renewable energy and supersize it. Rather than aiming for 50 percent renewables, like California is , he has analyzed what it would take for each of the 50 states to go fully renewable . It would apparently involve so many offshore wind turbines that hurricanes headed toward the States would be suppressed. Now, he and a few collaborators are back with a more detailed look at how to manage the grid stability issues that come with large amounts of intermittent generators, like photovoltaic panes and wind turbines. Normally, issues of intermittency are expected to be handled by fossil fuel power and batteries. But the new analysis suggests we don’t need any of that—and we don’t need biofuels or nuclear, either. Instead, it suggests we could manage a 100-percent renewable grid through a combination of hydrogen production and heat storage. None of this is entirely new. People have been talking about generating hydrogen from renewable energy for years—with a fuel cell, it can be used to power cars or generate electricity as needed. And the paper cites an existing community that’s already using solar energy to generate heat that’s stored under ground. But, as with Jacobson’s past analyses, they are taken to new scales here. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Managing a 100-percent renewable grid, without batteries

Iranian military spear-phish of State Department employees detected first by Facebook

The Facebook and email accounts of US State Department officials focused on Iran were hacked, and possibly used to gather data about US-Iranian dual citizens in Iran. More details have emerged about the hacking the computers of US State Department and other government employees, first revealed earlier this month in a Wall Street Journal report . The intrusions by hackers purported to be associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard may be tied to the arrest of an Iranian-American businessman in Tehran in October and other arrests of dual citizens in Iran. The attackers used compromised social media accounts of junior State Department staff as part of a “phishing” operation that compromised the computers of employees working in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs and Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and computers of some journalists. The first warning of the attacks came from Facebook, which alerted some of the affected users that their accounts had been compromised by a state-sponsored attack, the New York Times reports . The Iranian Revolutionary Guard hackers used the access to identify the victims’ contacts and build “spear-phishing” attacks that gave them access to targeted individuals’ e-mail accounts. The attack “was very carefully designed and showed the degree to which they understood which of our staff was working on Iran issues now that the nuclear deal is done,” an unnamed senior US official told the Times . This most recent attack, which came after a brief period of little or no Iranian activity against US targets over the summer according to data from Check Point and iSight Partners, was a change from tactics previously associated with Iranian hackers. Earlier attacks attributed to Iran were focused on taking financial services companies’ websites offline  and destroying data—such as in the attack attack on casino company Las Vegas Sands Corp. last year after its majority owner called for a nuclear attack on Iran. These attacks may not have been carried out by the Iranian government but by Iranian or pro-Iranian “hacktivists.” The State Department attack, however, was more subtle and aimed at cyber-espionage rather than simple vengeance—bearing hallmarks of tactics attributed to Chinese state-sponsored hackers. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Iranian military spear-phish of State Department employees detected first by Facebook

Tesla Model X production starts in earnest, pricing revealed

(credit: Tesla) Several months ago we found out pricing for the fully loaded “Signature” edition Tesla Model X electric SUV. Now, we’ve got a better idea of what the cheapest Model X will set you back: $80,000 before any options and tax rebates or incentives. That’s for the 70D, which has all-wheel drive (a motor for each axle) and a 70kWh battery (pricing for the 90D and P90D haven’t been announced). That’s $5000 more than the equivalent Model S sedan , which hits 60mph a little quicker and has a slightly longer range than the SUV but not the same funky rear doors. The distinctive Falcon wing doors are Tesla’s approach to making an SUV with all the utility of a minivan; that was how Elon Musk described the design brief back in September. By opening up and out, they’re supposed to give better access to the rear seats while taking up less space than a traditional door. There are three different interior layouts. The base 70D is a five seater, but there’s also a six seat version (three rows of two) for an extra $3000 and seven seats are yours for $4500. Tesla released the pricing information for the 70D Model X at the same time it told customers with preorders that they can begin configuring their vehicles. Screenshots of the online configurator provided by Tesla to Ars state that Model X deliveries will begin in early 2016, starting with range-topping P90D orders. “Lesser” 90D Model Xs follow by mid-year, with 70D deliveries before 2017. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tesla Model X production starts in earnest, pricing revealed

TrueCrypt is safer than previously reported, detailed analysis concludes

(credit: Khürt Williams ) The TrueCrypt whole-disk encryption tool used by millions of privacy and security enthusiasts is safer than some studies have suggested, according to a comprehensive security analysis conducted by the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology. The extremely detailed 77-page report comes five weeks after Google’s Project Zero security team disclosed two previously unknown TrueCrypt vulnerabilities . The most serious one allows an application running as a normal user or within a low-integrity security sandbox to elevate privileges to SYSTEM or even the kernel. The Fraunhofer researchers said they also uncovered several additional previously unknown TrueCrypt security bugs. Despite the vulnerabilities, the analysis concluded that TrueCrypt remains safe when used as a tool for encrypting data at rest as opposed to data stored in computer memory or on a mounted drive. The researchers said the vulnerabilities uncovered by Project Zero and in the Fraunhofer analysis should be fixed but that there’s no indication that they can be exploited to provide attackers access to encrypted data stored on an unmounted hard drive or thumb drive. According to a summary by Eric Bodden , the Technische Universität Darmstadt professor who led the Fraunhofer audit team: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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TrueCrypt is safer than previously reported, detailed analysis concludes