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PSA: Xbox Live Gold now comes with two new Xbox One games every month

Xbox One owners will soon get a bit more value out of their optional $60 ( or less ) annual membership. Starting in July, Microsoft will begin offering two free Xbox One games to Gold members as part of its existing Games With Gold program every month. Xbox One owners will be able to download Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag starting on July 1 and indie puzzle-platformer So Many Me on July 16. A similar twice-monthly release schedule for free Xbox One games will continue into the future, Microsoft said. Gold members will also be able to download two Xbox 360 games each month, as they have since the program began in June of 2013. Until now, though, Microsoft has generally made only one Xbox One title available through Games for Gold each month. As usual, Xbox One Games for Gold titles claimed and downloaded during their monthly availability window will be playable as long as the Gold membership is maintained (Xbox 360 games can be kept permanently, regardless of future membership). Sony has made 46 PlayStation 4 games available through the similar PlayStation Plus program in the 20 months the system has been available in North America, increasing from a general rate of one per month in the early days to an average of three or four titles every month in 2015. Both Sony and Microsoft’s free game programs are dominated by smaller indie titles, with the occasional AAA release thrown in months after its initial release. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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PSA: Xbox Live Gold now comes with two new Xbox One games every month

Samsung silently disabling Windows Update on some computers

Microsoft MVP Patrick Barker, who spends a large portion of his life analysing, debugging, and helping other people troubleshoot Windows, has discovered that Samsung is actively disabling Windows Update on some of its PCs. Barker stumbled across the issue while trying to assist a user who found that Windows Update “kept getting disabled randomly.” By using Auditpol and registry security auditing, Barker discovered that a program called Disable_Windowsupdate.exe was being run every time the PC booted up—and that EXE file, unfortunately, belonged to Samsung’s SW Update suite. SW Update is exactly what it sounds like: it’s one of those bundled OEM tools that ostensibly keeps all of your PC’s software and drivers up-to-date. In this case, though, SW Update also installs a service that regularly downloads and executes a file called Disable_Windowsupdate.exe directly from Samsung’s servers. The file  is even digitally signed by Samsung (but don’t run it unless you want to disable Windows Update). Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung silently disabling Windows Update on some computers

European skeleton had Neanderthal ancestor less than 200 years earlier

By now, it’s pretty firmly established that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals when our ancestors reached Eurasia. What’s less clear is when (and how often) this happened. Estimates of the event have wide error ranges, covering the entire time from when modern humans left Africa to the disappearance of Neanderthals from the fossil record. Now, human remains have yielded DNA that may indicate at least two distinct Neanderthal interbreeding events, one of them only a few generations earlier. The only problem? There’s no indication that this skeleton’s population contributed to any current group of humans. The best evidence we have on the timing of interbreeding comes from a modern human skeleton from Siberia that dates from about 45,000 years ago. That suggests that interbreeding with Neanderthals took place about 60,000 years ago , which would place it at a time when modern humans were first reaching the Middle East. But there were some hints that additional Neanderthal DNA came into that lineage more recently. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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European skeleton had Neanderthal ancestor less than 200 years earlier

Airplanes grounded in Poland after hackers allegedly attack flight plan computer

Around 1400 passengers at Warsaw’s Chopin (Okecie) airport in Poland were grounded on Sunday after hackers allegedly attacked the computer system used to issue flight plans to the airplanes. The source of the attack isn’t yet known. The alleged hack targeted LOT, the state-owned flag-carrying Polish airline. Reuters is reporting that the attack took place on Sunday afternoon, and was fixed about five hours later. 10 LOT flights were cancelled and about a dozen more were delayed, according to a LOT spokesman. The spokesman didn’t provide any details of what had actually occurred, though he did give away this one tantalising morsel: “We’re using state-of-the-art computer systems, so this could potentially be a threat to others in the industry.” The spokesman said that flights that were already in the air were not affected by the hack and could land normally. Also, the hack didn’t affect the airport itself; it was just the LOT computers. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Airplanes grounded in Poland after hackers allegedly attack flight plan computer

Former red light camera CEO pleads guilty to bribery, fraud in Ohio

A former CEO of Redflex, the embattled red light camera vendor, has pleaded guilty to bribery and wire fraud in Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio. In December 2013, Ars reported on red light cameras nationwide, and in particular, Redflex’s four cameras in the central California town of Modesto. Karen Finley was indicted on related charges in August 2014 in Chicago. She pleaded not guilty, and had been set to go to trial in October 2015. But new court filings show she is now scheduled to change her plea in August 2015. As prosecutors wrote in a statement on Friday: Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Former red light camera CEO pleads guilty to bribery, fraud in Ohio

Sprint stops throttling heavy users to avoid net neutrality complaints

Sprint has stopped throttling its heaviest data users, even when its network is congested, to avoid potential violations of the Federal Communications Commission’s new net neutrality rules that ban throttling. Instead, Sprint will manage congestion with a policy aimed at giving all customers a solid connection to the network. “Sprint said it believes its policy would have been allowed under the rules, but dropped it just in case,”  The Wall Street Journal reported . “Sprint doesn’t expect users to notice any significant difference in their services now that we no longer engage in the process,” Sprint told the newspaper. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint stops throttling heavy users to avoid net neutrality complaints

Stuxnet spawn infected Kaspersky using stolen Foxconn digital certificates

Some of the malware that infected the corporate network of antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab concealed itself using digital certificates belonging to Foxconn, the electronics manufacturing giant and maker of the iPhone, Xbox, and other well-known products. Cryptographically generated credentials are required to install drivers on newer, 64-bit versions of Windows. Foxconn used one such certificate when installing several legitimate drivers on Dell laptop computers in 2013. Somehow, the attackers who infected the Kaspersky Lab network appropriated the digital seal and used it to sign their own malicious drivers. As Ars explained last week, the drivers were the sole part of the entire Duqu 2.0 malware platform that resided on local hard drives. These drivers were on Kaspersky firewalls, gateways, or other servers that had direct Internet access and were used to surreptitiously marshal sensitive information in and out of the Kaspersky network. Not the first time The Foxconn certificate is the third one used to sign malware that has been linked to the same advanced persistent threat (APT) attackers. The Stuxnet malware, which reportedly was developed by the US and Israel to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, used a digital certificate from Realtek, a hardware manufacturer in the Asia Pacific region. A second driver from Jmicron, another hardware maker in the Asia Pacific, was used several years ago to sign Stuxnet-related malware developed by some of the same engineers. Like the previous two certificates, the one belonging to Foxconn had never been found signing any other malicious software. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Stuxnet spawn infected Kaspersky using stolen Foxconn digital certificates

Xbox 360 backward compatibility coming to Xbox One

LOS ANGELES—While Microsoft’s pre-E3 press conference focused largely on newer video games, the event also filled in a pretty major gap for hardware-upgrading holdouts: backward compatibility. Starting later this year, the company’s newest console, the Xbox One, will support a limited number of older Xbox 360 games. Gamers will have two ways of playing old games that are part of the backward-compatible initiative. If users already purchased the games digitally through Xbox Live, they can simply log in and re-download the game on Xbox One without paying any additional cost. If they own the game as a disc, they’ll have to download the game to their Xbox One hard drive, and the system will then check for the disc before launching the game. Technical details on how this works are still unknown. The hardware of the Xbox 360 is very different from the hardware of the Xbox One, and pure emulation of the kind used in console emulators such as MESS and arcade emulators like MAME is technically improbable ; Xbox 360 is simply too fast and too new. The limited compatibility and need to download even those games that are owned on disc suggests to us that some mix of recompilation and emulation is in use. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Xbox 360 backward compatibility coming to Xbox One

Magic: The Gathering player helps cops recover his $8,000 collection

A 23-year-old Magic: The Gathering  player who had $8,000 worth of his cards stolen managed to help snare the perpetrator after working with the police to craft an elaborate sting operation. According to The Washington Post , Kemper Pogue of Woodbridge, Virginia said he was quite upset when he realized that his car had been burglarized and that he’d lost 300 cards. “I went in the house, cracked open a beer, had a few sips, and promptly started screaming expletives as I waited for the police to arrive,” he told the Post . “I’d been collecting these cards since I was a kid, and over the years they’ve only increased in value.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Magic: The Gathering player helps cops recover his $8,000 collection

Intercepted WhatsApp messages led to Belgian terror arrests

The FBI has been lobbying hard to get unfettered access to the messages passed by encrypted messaging services. But they apparently didn’t need that level of access to WhatsApp messages sent between members of an alleged Chechen jihadist group operating in Belgium. According to a report by Bloomberg , a pair of men were arrested and warrants were issued for three others for allegedly preparing for a terrorist attack in Belgium. The arrests followed raids in which 16 people were detained, which Belgian law enforcement officials said was the result of “working with U.S. authorities to monitor suspects’ communications on WhatsApp Inc.’s messaging service,” Bloomberg’s Gaspard Sebag reported. The police investigation began after they obtained information about a man who had returned to Belgium after fighting as a jihadi in Syria. Ars reached out to WhatsApp and to Facebook, which completed its acquisition of WhatsApp in October. A spokesperson from Facebook declined to comment on the matter. But WhatsApp began providing end-to-end (E2E) encryption of its messages last November with the incorporation of security researcher Moxie Marlinspike’s WhisperSystems encryption protocol  TextSecure. In theory, if TextSecure were in use by the alleged terrorists, the content of their messages would have been very difficult to read; the TextSecure protocol continuously changes pairs of encryption keys with each new message. But it’s uncertain that the messages were encrypted—particularly since E2E encryption is not supported by the Apple iOS version of WhatsApp, and group messages and images aren’t supported by TextSecure yet. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intercepted WhatsApp messages led to Belgian terror arrests