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DOJ and 4 states want $24 billion in fines from Dish Network for telemarketing

Four states and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) are seeking up to $24 billion in fines from Dish Network after a judge ruled that the company and its contractors made more than 55 million illegal telemarketing calls using recorded messages and phoning people on do-not-call lists. The trial to decide whether Dish was aware that it was breaking the law and whether the company is responsible for calls made by its subcontractors began yesterday. A spokesperson for Dish, which is based outside of Denver, Colorado, noted in an e-mail to Ars that “Most of the Dish calls complained about took place almost ten years ago and Dish has continued to improve its already compliant procedures.” The spokesperson added that in 2008, the satellite TV and Internet provider hired Possible Now, a company that specializes in marketing and regulatory compliance, to make sure that Dish’s marketing practices were legal. According to Dish, Possible Now gave the company a passing grade on compliance with federal regulatory rules. However, the DOJ as well as Ohio, Illinois, California, and North Carolina say that Dish disregarded federal laws on call etiquette. US lawyers are asking for $900 million in civil penalties, and the four states are asking for $23.5 billion in fines, according to the Denver Post . “Laws against phoning people on do-not-call lists and using recorded messages allow penalties of up to $16,000 per violation,” the Post added. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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DOJ and 4 states want $24 billion in fines from Dish Network for telemarketing

Department of Transportation going full speed ahead on self-driving cars

The world as seen by a self-driving car. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin) We’ve been hitting the tech of self-driving cars pretty heavily this week, taking a look at what companies like Audi , BMW , Ford , QNX , and Tesla are doing in the field. But it’s looking more and more likely that it’s not going to be the technology itself that determines when  we’ll be able to buy a self-driving car for that morning commute. Instead, all the other stuff— regulations, laws, insurance questions, and society’s comfort level —appear ready to own the issue of timing. At this week’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced that “i n 2016, we are going to do everything we can to promote safe, smart and sustainable, vehicles. We are bullish on automated vehicles.” Still, w orking out how to regulate self-driving cars is far from settled. Each state (well, OK maybe every state but Maryland) has a pretty good idea of how to test young drivers to determine whether they’re ready to mix it with the rest of us in traffic. Figuring out how to apply that to a car itself is proving to be more of a challenge. California, for instance, is about to hold a couple of public workshops to get input into its draft regulations on the the matter, and DMVs in other states are being told by their respective legislatures to start working on the problem. Today, there’s a real fear in the industry that we could end up with a patchwork of different state laws (something Cars Technica even talked about on the radio yesterday ). Then there’s the federal government, where crafting policies, regulations, and guidances can be slow work. Take recent advances in headlight technology for example. Over in Europe, you can now buy cars that use LED lasers to supplement their high-beams. Those lights are intelligent enough to avoid blinding other cars on the road, and they represent a significant safety advantage. But the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards for headlights in the US went into effect in 1968 and haven’t been updated since. And because they don’t make any allowances for anything other than a high beam and a low beam, such systems are illegal here in the US. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Department of Transportation going full speed ahead on self-driving cars

Autonomous car makers hand over data on glitches and failures to California DMV

Delphi’s autonomous vehicle. (credit: Delphi ) If you want to build a self-driving car and test it on public roads in California, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles says that every year you have to submit a disengagement report—basically a list of every time the human driver had to take over for the car. This year, Bosch, Delphi, Google, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, and Volkswagen Group were required to submit disengagement reports, and the results are largely what you’d expect from a novel and complicated technology. Google, as the company that’s driven the most miles on public roads in California, said it experienced 341 significant disengagement events over 424,000 miles of driving  (PDF). Similarly, Nissan reported that it drove 1,485 miles on public roads in California and it experienced 106 disengagements. Delphi’s two autonomous vehicles drove 16,662 miles and the company reported 405 disengagements. Tesla, for its part, reported no disengagements  (PDF) from fully-autonomous mode from the time it was issued a permit to test self-driving cars in California. While it’s tempting to use those numbers as a comparison point as to how good a company’s autonomous vehicles are, there are many variables that could obscure an otherwise accurate comparison. The numbers only reflect miles driven on California roads and disengagements that happen in that state. If a company primarily tests its public road driving in another state, those numbers won’t be reflected in these reports. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Autonomous car makers hand over data on glitches and failures to California DMV

Et tu, Fortinet? Hard-coded password raises new backdoor eavesdropping fears

(credit: Fortinet) Less than a month after Juniper Network officials disclosed an unauthorized backdoor in the company’s NetScreen line of firewalls , researchers have uncovered highly suspicious code in older software from Juniper competitor Fortinet. The suspicious code contains a challenge-and-response authentication routine for logging into servers with the secure shell (SSH) protocol . Researchers were able to unearth a hard-coded password of “FGTAbc11*xy+Qqz27” (not including the quotation marks) after reviewing this exploit code posted online on Saturday . On Tuesday, a researcher posted this screenshot purporting to show someone using the exploit to gain remote access to a server running Fortinet’s FortiOS software. This exploit code provides unauthorized SSH access to devices running older versions of FortiOS. (credit: Full Disclosure mailing list ) This partially redacted screenshot purports to show the exploit in action. (credit: @dailydavedavids ) Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, a security researcher who helped uncover the innerworkings of the Juniper backdoor , took to Twitter on Tuesday and repeatedly referred to the custom SSH authentication as a “backdoor.”  In one specific post , he confirmed he was able to make it work as reported on older versions of Fortinet’s FortiOS. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Et tu, Fortinet? Hard-coded password raises new backdoor eavesdropping fears

Scientists discover 2,100-year-old stash of “fine plucked” tea

Chunks of ancient tea are on the left, and the tomb where they were excavated near Xi’an is on the right. (credit: Houyuan Lu) Researchers in China have positively identified a block of ancient vegetable matter as tiny tea buds that were lovingly tucked away in Han Yangling Mausoleum, a sumptuous tomb north of Xi’an. The city Xi’an was once known as Chang’an, seat of power for the Han Dynasty, and stood as the easternmost stop on the vast trade routes known today as the Silk Road. Previously, the oldest physical evidence of tea came from roughly 1,000 years ago. Coupled with another ancient block of tea found in western Tibet’s Gurgyam Cemetery, this new discovery reveals that the Han Chinese were already trading with Tibetans in 200 BCE, trekking across the Tibetan Plateau to deliver the luxurious, tasty drink. Though the tea was excavated over a decade ago, it wasn’t until recently that researchers had access to tests that could determine whether the vegetable matter was in fact tea. By untangling the chemical components of the leaves, including their caffeine content, the researchers were able to verify that both blocks of leaves, from China and Tibet, were tea. In fact, they even figured out what kind of tea it probably was. In Nature Scientific Reports , they write: The sample contains a mixture of tea, barley ( Hordeum vulgare , Poaceae) and other plants. Therefore, it is likely that tea buds and/or leaves were consumed in a form similar to traditionally-prepared butter tea, in which tea is mixed with salt, tsampa (roasted barley flour) and/or ginger in the cold mountain areas of central Asia. Of course, methods of brewing and consuming tea varied from culture to culture along the Silk Road . We also know the tea was what people today would call “fine plucked” or “Emperor’s Tea,” because it consisted only of the plant’s buds with a few small leaves. These parts of the plant are considered the most valuable and are used to make especially high-grade tea. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Scientists discover 2,100-year-old stash of “fine plucked” tea

Oculus cofounder building a -43° propane phase-change-cooled PC

Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus VR and creator of the Oculus Rift, somewhat unsurprisingly, is a fully paid-up member of the PC Master Race . During a recent Reddit AMA , Luckey was asked about the hardware specs of his PC. The first part of his response was to be expected, and probably straight out of the company’s PR playbook: I have lived on the bleeding edge of PC hardware for as long as I could scrape the money together, but for VR, I am sticking to hardware that sticks to our recommended specs: https://www.oculus.com/en-us/oculus-ready-pcs/ That way, I get the same experience as most of my customers. I don’t want to become disconnected from the reality of how our hardware and software performs. On the side, though, Luckey is working on something just a little bit more exciting: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Oculus cofounder building a -43° propane phase-change-cooled PC

Big names gamble big bucks on blood tests for early cancer detection

Forget biopsies, ultrasounds, mammograms, pap smears, rectal exams, and other unpleasant cancer screenings—the race is now on for simple, affordable blood tests that can detect all sorts of cancers extremely early. On Sunday, genetic sequencing company  Illumina Inc. announced the start of a new company called Grail, which will join dozens of companies developing such blood tests. Toting big-name investors including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Illumina’s high-profile startup raised more than $100 million to get Grail going. The company hopes that Grail’s tests will be on the market by 2019 and cost around $500 a pop. Though researchers have recently questioned the benefits of early cancer screening—showing in some cases that early detection does not generally save lives —Illumina is confident that the science behind the blood-based screens is at least possible. Illumina Chief Executive Jay Flatley, who will be Grail’s chairman, said Illumina has been working on the tests for about a year and a half. “We’ve made tremendous progress, which gives us the confidence that we can get to the endpoint that we expect.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Big names gamble big bucks on blood tests for early cancer detection

iOS 9.3 brings multi-user mode to iPads, along with more features and fixes

(credit: Apple) Apple has just released the first beta of iOS 9.3 to its public beta testers and developers. The company regularly releases beta versions of its operating systems, but this update is unique because Apple has put together several pages extensively detailing its new features , something we normally don’t get until we see the release notes posted with the final version of the update. Collectively, this list of new features will make 9.3 the biggest release since iOS 9.0 . The first and most significant is a multi-user mode for iPads, aimed primarily at schools where buying a single iPad for each student is too expensive or otherwise undesirable. From Apple’s description, it sounds as though each student will have a roaming user profile that follows them from iPad to iPad so they can access the same apps and data no matter which iPad they use to login. User content can be cached so that students who regularly use the same iPad won’t have to wait for data to download each time they log in. These new user profiles are just one part of a larger group of features meant to make the iPad more appealing for schools. The “classroom” app gives teachers a bird’s-eye view of their students and what apps they’re using. The app can be used for screen sharing to help students out when they need it or to lock students out of specific apps when they’re not supposed to be using them. The Apple School Manager can be used by administrators to create Apple IDs, purchase apps, and manage devices. And a new type of Apple ID, the “Managed Apple ID,” can be created and assigned by schools independently of students’ normal Apple IDs. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iOS 9.3 brings multi-user mode to iPads, along with more features and fixes

Intel Skylake bug causes PCs to freeze during complex workloads

Intel has confirmed that its Skylake processors suffer from a bug that can cause a system to freeze when performing complex workloads. Discovered by mathematicians at the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), the bug occurs when using the GIMPS Prime95 application to find Mersenne primes. “Intel has identified an issue that potentially affects the 6th Gen Intel Core family of products. This issue only occurs under certain complex workload conditions, like those that may be encountered when running applications like Prime95. In those cases, the processor may hang or cause unpredictable system behaviour.” Intel has developed a fix, and is working with hardware partners to distribute it via a BIOS update. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel Skylake bug causes PCs to freeze during complex workloads

Two months after FBI debacle, Tor Project still can’t get an answer from CMU

Proof of connection: the site check.torproject.org will show you if you’re connected via Tor. (credit: Tor) Shari Steele, Executive Director of the Tor Project (credit: EFF ) It’s been quite a few months for the Tor Project. Last November, project co-founder and director Roger Dingledine  accused the FBI of paying Carnegie Mellon computer security researchers at least $1 million to de-anonymize Tor users and reveal their IP addresses as part of a large criminal investigation. The FBI dismissed things, but the investigation in question is a very high-profile matter focused on members of the  Silk Road  online-drug marketplace. One of the IP addresses revealed belonged to Brian Farrell, an alleged Silk Road 2 lieutenant. An early filing in Farrell’s case, first reported  by Vice Motherboard, said that a “university-based research institute” aided government efforts to unmask Farrell. That document fit with Ars reporting  from January 2015, when a Homeland Security search warrant affidavit stated  that from January to July 2014, a “source of information” provided law enforcement “with particular IP addresses” that accessed the vendor-side of Silk Road 2. By July 2015, the Tor Project managed to discover and shut down this sustained attack. But the Tor Project further concluded that the attack resembled a technique described by a team of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers who a few weeks earlier had canceled a security conference presentation on a low-cost way to deanonymize Tor users . The Tor officials went on to warn that an intelligence agency from a global adversary also might have been able to capitalize on the vulnerability. Read 59 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Two months after FBI debacle, Tor Project still can’t get an answer from CMU