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“Most serious” Linux privilege-escalation bug ever is under active exploit (updated)

(credit: michael ) A serious vulnerability that has been present for nine years in virtually all versions of the Linux operating system is under active exploit, according to researchers who are advising users to install a patch as soon as possible. While CVE-2016-5195, as the bug is cataloged, amounts to a mere privilege-escalation vulnerability rather than a more serious code-execution vulnerability, there are several reasons many researchers are taking it extremely seriously. For one thing, it’s not hard to develop exploits that work reliably. For another, the flaw is located in a section of the Linux kernel that’s a part of virtually every distribution of the open-source OS released for almost a decade. What’s more, researchers have discovered attack code that indicates the vulnerability is being actively and maliciously exploited in the wild. “It’s probably the most serious Linux local privilege escalation ever,” Dan Rosenberg, a senior researcher at Azimuth Security, told Ars. “The nature of the vulnerability lends itself to extremely reliable exploitation. This vulnerability has been present for nine years, which is an extremely long period of time.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Most serious” Linux privilege-escalation bug ever is under active exploit (updated)

Teslas will now be sold with enhanced hardware suite for full autonomy

Enlarge (credit: Tesla) Late Wednesday, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk announced that the company would be adding its own hardware to new all new Tesla cars to allow up to Level 5 autonomy. In the automotive industry, Level 5 denotes a fully self-driving vehicle. Musk said that it would be some time before Tesla’s software would advance to meet capabilities of the new hardware available, which the company is calling “Hardware II.” Still, the CEO stressed that all new cars would come with the new hardware suite, even if the software isn’t activated. The hardware includes eight cameras for a 360-degree view, twelve ultrasonic sensors, “forward-facing radar with advanced processing,” and an Nvidia Titan GPU that’s capable of 12 trillion operations per second. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Teslas will now be sold with enhanced hardware suite for full autonomy

T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Enlarge T-Mobile USA failed to adequately disclose speed and data restrictions on its “unlimited data” plans and has agreed to pay a fine and provide some benefits to customers, the Federal Communications Commission said today. Like other carriers, T-Mobile slows the speeds of its unlimited data customers after they’ve used a certain amount of data each month; when these customers connect to congested cell towers, they receive lower speeds than customers without unlimited data plans. The throttling is applied after customers use 26GB in a month. “Under its ‘Top 3 Percent Policy,’ T-Mobile ‘de-prioritizes’ its ‘heavy’ data users during times of network contention or congestion,” the FCC said in an announcement today. “This potentially deprived these users of the advertised speeds of their data plan. According to consumers, this policy rendered data services ‘unusable’ for many hours each day and substantially limited their access to data.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

XG.fast DSL does 10Gbps over telephone lines

(credit: Bob Dormon / Ars Technica UK) Nokia has achieved a connection speed of 5Gbps—about 625MB/sec—over 70 metres of conventional twisted-pair copper telephone wire, and 8Gbps over 30 metres. The trial used a relatively new digital subscriber line (DSL) protocol called XG.fast (aka G.fast2). XG.fast is the probable successor of G.fast , which was successfully trialled in a few countries over the past couple of years and will soon begin to commercially roll out. (In an unusual turn of events,  the UK will probably be the first country with G.fast .) Fundamentally, both G.fast and XG.fast are best described as “VDSL on steroids.” Basically, while a VDSL2 signal frequency maxes out around 17MHz, G.fast starts at 106MHz (it can be doubled to 212MHz) and XG.fast uses between 350MHz and 500MHz. This means that there’s a lot more bandwidth (the original meaning of the word), which in turn can be used for transferring data at higher speeds. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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XG.fast DSL does 10Gbps over telephone lines

Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

(credit: Qualcomm) Qualcomm is promising to launch its first 5G modem in 2018, even though basic standards for 5G have yet to be established , nor even which part of the radio spectrum it will use. Dubbed the Snapdragon X50, the San Diego chipmaker says its new modem will be able to deliver blindingly fast peak download speeds of around 5Gbps. The X50 5G will at first operate with a bandwidth of about 800MHz on the 28GHz millimetre wave (mmWave in Qualcomm jargon) spectrum, a frequency that’s also being investigated by Samsung, Nokia, and Verizon. However, the powers that be have far from settled on this area of the spectrum, with 73GHz also being mooted. In the UK, Ofcom is investigating several bands in a range between 6GHz and 100GHz. As the industry as a whole is a long way from consensus, this could be Qualcomm’s bid to get the final frequency locked down well before 2020—the year that 5G is expected to reach any kind of consumer penetration. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

Samsung’s new 10nm process promises big power efficiency improvements

Enlarge (credit: Samsung) The news hasn’t been great for Samsung’s smartphone division lately, but there is good news for the chipmaking arm of the company: Samsung announced today that it has started to mass-produce chips on its new 10nm LPE manufacturing process, a major improvement over its current 14nm process. According to Samsung, 10nm chips can fit 30 percent more transistors within the same physical area as a 14nm chip. Chip designers will be able to create chips that are up to 27 percent faster or chips that use up to 40 percent less power, though most chips will probably do a little of both instead of maximizing one or the other. A second-generation, 10nm LPP process will begin mass production in the second half of 2017, roughly one year from today. Other than the timing, we only know that this revision is intended to boost performance. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung’s new 10nm process promises big power efficiency improvements

DEA reverses decision on kratom; drug stays legal for now

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle ) The Drug Enforcement Administration is withdrawing its plan to ban the opioid-like herbal drug kratom—at least for now— according to a preliminary withdrawal notice posted today . The notice, which will appear in the Federal Registry Thursday, nixes the agency’s emergency decision in late August to list kratom as a Schedule I Controlled Substance, the most restrictive category that also includes heroin and LSD. The DEA deemed the plant’s use an urgent threat to public health—based on concern that it could be abused and addictive—and set the date for a ban as early as September 30. But the abrupt plan drew intense backlash from public health experts, lawmakers, and thousands of devoted users , who argue that the currently unregulated herbal supplement treats chronic pain and prevents deadly opioid addictions . After the initial notice, kratom advocates swiftly organized protests, collected more than 140,000 petition signatures, and convinced more than 50 Congress members to sign letters urging the DEA to reverse course. One of the letters highlighted the ongoing, federally funded research looking at using kratom for opioid withdrawal. That research would likely be shut down by a Schedule I listing. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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DEA reverses decision on kratom; drug stays legal for now

Breach exposes at least 58 million accounts, includes names, jobs, and more

(credit: Hefin Richards ) There has been yet another major data breach, this time exposing names, IP addresses, birth dates, e-mail addresses, vehicle data, and occupations of at least 58 million subscribers, researchers said. The trove was mined from a poorly secured database and then published and later removed at least three times over the past week, according to this analysis from security firm Risk Based Security. Based on conversations with a Twitter user who first published links to the leaked data , the researchers believe the data was stored on servers belonging to Modern Business Solutions , a company that provides data storage and database hosting services. Shortly after researchers contacted Modern Business Solutions, the leaky database was secured, but the researchers said they never received a response from anyone at the firm, which claims to be located in Austin, Texas. Officials with Modern Business Solutions didn’t respond to several messages Ars left seeking comment and additional details. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Breach exposes at least 58 million accounts, includes names, jobs, and more

Comcast fined $2.3 million by FCC for “negative option billing” practices

The FCC announced a $2.3 million fine against Comcast on Tuesday after confirming that the company had been billing customers for products and services they had never ordered. After calling the fine “the largest civil penalty  assessed from a cable operator by the FCC,” the federal agency’s announcement detailed exactly how Comcast bilked customers—and new company practices that must be put into place as a result. According to the FCC’s Office of Media Relations, the agency had received “numerous complaints from consumers” about the issue of “negative option billing”—meaning, receiving charges for items that the customers had never affirmatively requested. (The FCC reminds readers that in the telecom world, this practice is known as “cramming.”) The listed complaints revolve specifically around items related to cable TV service, including “premium channels, set-top boxes, and DVRs.” “Despite specifically declining service or equipment upgrades” Though the FCC’s statement didn’t quote particular complaints or state how many the agency received, it described a range of unsavory reports from customers, including “being billed despite specifically declining service or equipment upgrades offered by Comcast,” “having no knowledge of unauthorized charges until they received unordered equipment in the mail,” and “expending significant time and energy to attempt to remove unauthorized charges from their bills and obtain refunds.” (Ars has reached out to the FCC with questions about specific complaints and the number received; we will update this report if we receive a response.) Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast fined $2.3 million by FCC for “negative option billing” practices

Leaker fined $1.2 million for uploading screener of The Revenant

Enlarge / Leonardo DiCaprio signs autographs for fans during the Tokyo premiere for “The Revenant” in March. (credit: Yuriko Nakao via Getty Images) The pirate who in December leaked The Revenant and The Peanuts Movie  days ahead of their US releases has been ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution to 20th Century Fox and was also handed eight months of home confinement, federal prosecutors said . The defendant, William Morarity of the Los Angeles suburb of Lancaster, was working for an undisclosed studio lot when he unlawfully accessed watermarked, screener versions of the films and uploaded them to a private BitTorrent site ” Pass the Popcorn ,” according to his guilty plea  (PDF).  The Revenant was downloaded more than 1 million times and The Peanuts Movie more than 220,000 times, according to court documents . (PDF) Deirdre Fike, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said the defendant’s behavior is a killer of creativity and jobs. “Mr. Morarity used his position of trust to gain access to sensitive intellectual property, then shared that content online and incurred large-scale losses to the owner of that property,” Fike said. “The theft of intellectual property—in this case, major motion pictures—discourages creative incentive and affects the average American making ends meet in the entertainment industry.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Leaker fined $1.2 million for uploading screener of The Revenant