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Why T-Mobile needs Wi-Fi calling: its network can’t match AT&T and Verizon

T-Mobile’s “data strong network.” T-Mobile T-Mobile US’ latest “Un-carrier” move is just about the most amazing thing ever, CEO John Legere said last week. “This is like adding millions of towers to our network in a single day,” Legere boasted in a press release . “The difference between us and the traditional carriers is that they’ll do everything they can to make more money off you. We’ll do everything we can to solve your problems.” The innovation is actually something that T-Mobile has had since 2007: Wi-Fi calling. It makes sense for T-Mobile to promote Wi-Fi calling now, given that Apple is adding the capability to iPhones in iOS 8. The initiative has some nice benefits for customers—T-Mobile offered to upgrade all customers to phones that can make Wi-Fi calls and is giving out a free “Personal CellSpot,” a Wi-Fi router that prioritizes voice calls. Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why T-Mobile needs Wi-Fi calling: its network can’t match AT&T and Verizon

Android Browser flaw a “privacy disaster” for half of Android users

Thanks to a bug in the Android Browser, your cookies aren’t safe. Surian Soosay A bug quietly reported on September 1 appears to have grave implications for Android users. Android Browser, the open source, WebKit-based browser that used to be part of the Android Open Source Platform (AOSP), has a flaw that enables malicious sites to inject JavaScript into other sites. Those malicious JavaScripts can in turn read cookies and password fields, submit forms, grab keyboard input, or do practically anything else. Browsers are generally designed to prevent a script from one site from being able to access content from another site. They do this by enforcing what is called the Same Origin Policy (SOP): scripts can only read or modify resources (such as the elements of a webpage) that come from the same origin as the script, where the origin is determined by the combination of scheme (which is to say, protocol, typically HTTP or HTTPS), domain, and port number. The SOP should then prevent a script loaded from http://malware.bad/ from being able to access content at https://paypal.com/. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Android Browser flaw a “privacy disaster” for half of Android users

Boeing and SpaceX getting NASA money for manned space launches [Updated]

SpaceX’s Dragon V2. Megan Geuss Today, NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced that there were two winners in the campaign to become the first company to launch astronauts to low-Earth orbit: Boeing and SpaceX. The two will receive contracts that total $6.8 billion dollars to have hardware ready for a 2017 certification—a process that will include one crewed flight to the International Space Station (ISS). In announcing the plan, Bolden quoted President Obama in saying, “The greatest nation on earth should not be dependent on any other nation to get to space.” And he promoted the commercial crew program as a clear way of ending a reliance on Russian launch vehicles to get to the ISS. But Bolden and others at the press conference were also looking beyond that; several speakers, including Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana and astronaut Mike Fincke, mentioned that the ultimate goal is Mars. To that end, Bolden emphasized that NASA is still doing its own vehicle and rocket development. The Orion crew capsule, intended to be suitable for missions deeper into the Solar System, recently underwent a splashdown test in the Pacific. Its first test flight aboard a Delta IV rocket is scheduled for this December. Work on the Space Launch System, a heavy lift vehicle that can transport the additional hardware needed for deep space missions, was also mentioned. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Boeing and SpaceX getting NASA money for manned space launches [Updated]

Watch out, California’s self-driving car permits take effect today

Audi On Tuesday, permits for self-driving cars issued by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) took effect for the first time. Applications for the permits began in May 2014. Only the Volkswagen Group (which includes Volkswagen and Audi cars among others), Mercedes Benz, and Google have been issued permits for their 29 total vehicles. Overall, that represents a miniscule fraction of all 32 million registered cars in the Golden State. Bernard Soriano, a DMV spokesman, told Ars that Tuesday also marked the first time those numbers had been disclosed outside of the agency. “There are a handful of different companies that are completing their application,” he added, noting that the DMV expected to issue more permits soon. “They’re all large automakers.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Watch out, California’s self-driving car permits take effect today

iPhone 6 and 6 Plus pre-orders break record, top 4 million in one day

The iPhone 5S (left) next to the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. Which size is the one for you? Megan Geuss On Monday, Apple confirmed that its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus pre-order numbers broke records for the smartphone line, as they combined to rack up over four million purchases in the first 24 hours they were on sale. As we reported —and Apple’s announcement confirmed—many of those pre-orders won’t ship to customers until October. The pre-orders, which started early Friday morning in nine nations , handily surpassed the first-day numbers of the iPhone 5; that model received over two million pre-orders in 2012 , though its actual first-weekend sales upon retail launch reached five million . That doesn’t mean Apple’s first-week in-store supply will be able to feed the sort of demand that the iPhone 6 is generating. Anybody curled up in a sleeping bag in front of an Apple Store right now, however, can take comfort in the fact that Apple will make “additional supply” of both models available to purchase at 8am local time this coming Friday. All four major American carriers’ stores will also have phones available on Friday, as well as “additional carriers and select Apple Authorized Resellers.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iPhone 6 and 6 Plus pre-orders break record, top 4 million in one day

Hacker exploits printer Web interface to install, run Doom

Doom on a printer’s menu screen! Personally, we can’t wait until someone makes Descent playable on a toaster. Context Internet Security On Friday, a hacker presenting at the 44CON Information Security Conference in London picked at the vulnerability of Web-accessible devices and demonstrated how to run unsigned code on a Canon printer via its default Web interface. After describing the device’s encryption as “doomed,” Context Information Security consultant Michael Jordon made his point by installing and running the first-person shooting classic Doom on a stock Canon Pixma MG6450. Sure enough, the printer’s tiny menu screen can render a choppy and discolored but playable version of id Software’s 1993 hit, the result of Jordon discovering that Pixma printers’ Web interfaces didn’t require any authentication to access. “You could print out hundreds of test pages and use up all the ink and paper, so what?” Jordon wrote at Context’s blog report about the discovery , but after a little more sniffing, he found that the devices could also easily be redirected to accept any code as legitimate firmware. A vulnerable Pixma printer’s Web interface allows users to change the Web proxy settings and the DNS server. From there, an enterprising hacker can crack the device’s encryption in eight steps, the final of which includes unsigned, plain-text firmware files. The hacking possibilities go far beyond enabling choppy, early ’90s gaming: “We can therefore create our own custom firmware and update anyone’s printer with a Trojan image which spies on the documents being printed or is used as a gateway into their network,” Jordon wrote. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

OneDrive finally gets file sharing as easy as Dropbox

We reported last week that Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud service was finally syncing files larger than 2GB. The company today confirmed the change, and disclosed what the new size limit is: 10GB. Not quite enough for a Blu-Ray, but it should solve the file size problem for most users. That’s not the only improvement that Microsoft has made. The desktop client will, at long last, make it easy to share files in OneDrive with other people; right clicking the file in Explorer will have a straightforward “Share a OneDrive link” menu item to create a link that can be e-mailed, tweeted, or otherwise passed around. The lack of such a feature has long made using OneDrive much more annoying than using the competing Dropbox service. The new menu item is rolling out to OneDrive users on Windows 7 and Windows 8 over the next few weeks. The client for Windows 8.1 and OS X will be updated at some time after that. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OneDrive finally gets file sharing as easy as Dropbox

A big chunk of the Sierra Nevada caught fracturing on video

If you like geology, you’re used to relying on an active imagination. Most geologic processes occur too slowly to see them play out for yourself. Many of the exceptions are dangerous enough that you might not want a front row seat or rare enough that the odds of being there to witness it are disheartening. Sometimes, though, the Earth throws us a bone—or in this case, a gigantic slab of granite. One interesting way that rocks weather and crumble apart is called “exfoliation.” Like the skin-scrubbing technique, this involves the outermost layers of exposed igneous or metamorphic bedrock sloughing off in a sheet. Over time, this tends to smooth and round the outcrop—Yosemite’s Half Dome providing a spectacular example. We’re not entirely sure just what drives the peeling of an outcrop’s skin like this, but the classic explanation is that it’s the result of bringing rocks that formed at great pressure up to the surface. Once there, the outer layers can expand slightly, creating a physical mismatch with the layers below them. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Tasmanian depths may have been hiding unknown animal phylum

D. enigmata ron the right, with the three larger samples on the left representing D. discoides . PLoS one Over the past few years, studies of genomes have confused what we thought we knew about the origin of animal life. Instead of the simple sponges being the earliest branch off the animal tree, a group of relatively complex organisms, the ctenophores, seem to be the earliest branch . That finding has some serious implications as it suggests that a nervous system evolved twice . Now, some more traditional biology may upset the family tree even further. Old samples taken from the seabed near Tasmania contain examples of two different species that may belong to a phylum entirely unknown to us—one that split off near the base of the animal tree. The strange creatures also have features that suggest they may be related to remains from the Ediacaran, a period in which the first animal life appears in the fossil record. The samples actually date from a research cruise taken nearly 30 years ago, where a “sled” was dragged along the ocean floor and samples returned to the surface. The new species weren’t recognized as interesting when they were first found, so they were left mixed in with the rest of the collection, which was fixed with formaldehyde and then dumped in 80 percent ethanol. The samples suffered a bit of further abuse when one of the authors wanted to refresh the alcohol and was given 100 percent ethanol instead. (The paper actually notes, “Unfortunately absolute alcohol was provided without comment instead of the requested 80 percent ethanol.”) Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet the tech company performing ad injections for Big Cable

Front Porch ad. A Northern California company that bills itself as the “worldwide leader in Wi-Fi monetization” is the vendor behind Comcast’s and other US cable companies’ promotional advertising campaign performed through JavaScript injection, Comcast said Monday. Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed the vendor’s name, Front Porch of Sonora, hours after Ars reported that Comcast recently started serving Comcast ads to devices connected to one of its 3.5 million publicly accessible Wi-Fi hotspots across the US. We wrote that Comcast’s decision to inject data into the net raises security concerns and cuts to the heart of the ongoing net neutrality debate . As it turns out, Front Porch also does business with Cox, Time Warner, Bright House, and Cablevision in the US, Front Porch CTO Carlos Vazquez said in a telephone interview. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet the tech company performing ad injections for Big Cable

Ken May

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