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California governor mandates 25 percent water use reduction

Today, California Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order that is intended to spur water savings. The order comes as the state enters another year of extreme drought caused by lack of winter rain and snowfall. The state receives almost all of its precipitation in the winter and relies on that to fill reservoirs and deposit snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. But this year, there was no precipitation for the entire month of January, leaving snowpack at many locations well below average —and completely absent in many areas. The new order focuses on conservation, with mandatory water reductions in cities and towns that will cut use by 25 percent. Many of the additional steps are obvious and probably should have been done before a crisis hit: remove 50 million square feet of lawns, have places like school campuses, golf courses, and cemeteries limit water use, and ban any installation of new irrigation systems that don’t use efficient drip irrigation. Standards for toilet and faucet water use will also be updated. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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California governor mandates 25 percent water use reduction

New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

The number of things getting plugged into the “Internet of Things” has already reached the point of satire . But there’s a new, extremely low power technology that’s being prepared for market that could put computing power and network access into a whole new class of sensors, wearables, and practically disposable devices. That’s because it can run off a battery charge for over over 10 years. Atmel, the San Jose-based microcontroller maker, today released samples of a new type of ultra-low power, ARM based microcontroller that could radically extend the battery life of small low-power intelligent devices. The new SAM L21 32-bit ARM family of microcontroller (MCUs) consume less than 35 milliamps of power per megahertz of processing speed while active, and less than 200 nanoamps of power overall when in deep sleep mode—with varying states in between. The chip is so low power that it can be powered off energy capture from the body, as Andreas Eieland, Atmel’s Director of Product Marketing for low-power products, demonstrated at CES earlier this year. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New ARM-powered chip aims for battery life measured in decades

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

New WoW item will allow players to trade gold for game time

Blizzard will soon allow World of Warcraft players to trade purchased game time for in-game gold, and vice versa, effectively putting an official, floating real-world value on the in-game currency. With yesterday’s rollout of WoW patch 6.12, Blizzard says it’s ready to introduce the ” WoW token,” a new in-game item that can be traded for 30 days of play time in the subscription-based MMO. Blizzard says the new feature will be launched in the Americas “once Patch 6.1.2 has been live for a while [to] help us ensure the foundation for the feature is solid.” Other regions will get tokens further down the line. WoW tokens will be available for purchase from the in-game shop for $20 or “the rough equivalent” in other regions. That’s somewhat more than the $14.99 maximum usually charged for a single month’s subscription fee, but the tokens differ from regular subscription game time because they can be exchanged for in-game gold through an in-game auction house. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New WoW item will allow players to trade gold for game time

Big solar plants produced 5% of California’s electricity last year

Today, the US Energy Information Agency announced that California had passed a key milestone, becoming the first state to produce five percent of its annual electricity using utility-scale solar power. This represents more than a doubling from the 2013 level, when 1.9 percent of the state’s power came from utility-scale solar, and means that California produces more electricity from this approach than all of the remaining states combined. The growth in California was largely fueled by the opening of two 550MW capacity photovoltaic plants, along with two large solar-thermal plants. In total, the state added nearly two GigaWatts of capacity last year alone. The growth is driven in part by a renewable energy standard that will see the state generate 33 percent of its electricity from non-hydro renewables by 2020; it was at 22 percent in 2014. Other states with renewable standards—Nevada, Arizona, New Jersey, and North Carolina—rounded out the top five. Both Nevada and Arizona obtained 2.8 percent of their electricity from solar; all other states were at one percent or less. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Big solar plants produced 5% of California’s electricity last year

We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans from the cops

OAKLAND, Calif.—If you have driven in Oakland any time in the last few years, chances are good that the cops know where you’ve been, thanks to their 33 automated license plate readers (LPRs). Now Ars knows too. In response to a public records request, we obtained the entire LPR dataset of the Oakland Police Department (OPD), including more than 4.6 million reads of over 1.1 million unique plates between December 23, 2010 and May 31, 2014. The dataset is likely the largest ever publicly released in the United States—perhaps in the world. Read 59 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans from the cops

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

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