It must be one of these... Joseph No

Whitehat hackers have struck back at the operators of the pernicious CryptoLocker ransom trojan that has held hundreds of thousands of hard drives hostage.

Through a partnership that included researchers from FOX-IT and FireEye, researchers managed to recover the private encryption keys that CryptoLocker uses to lock victims' personal computer files until they pay a $300 ransom. They also reverse engineered the binary code at the heart of the malicious program. The result: a website that allows victims to recover the key for their individual content.

To use the free service, victims must upload one of the files encrypted by CryptoLocker along with the e-mail address where they want the secret key delivered. Both FOX-IT and FireEye are reputable security companies, but readers are nonetheless advised to upload only non-sensitive files that contain no personal information.

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It hardly seems like it’s been a year since the iPhone 5S was released, but word on the street is that Apple is planning to reveal its next-generation iPhone on September 9. That’s just over a month from now, and the rumor mill has been in full swing all summer, churning out speculation about what Apple will introduce. Since 2008’s iPhone 3G, iPhones released in even-numbered years get a new design while phones in odd-numbered years are just and sped up and tweaked. Since this is a redesign year, people are especially interested in seeing how Apple moves the platform forward.

This close to a new iPhone’s launch, rumors firm up a bit and begin to agree on specific aspects of the new hardware. Apple has a big supply chain and sells tens of millions of phones a quarter—given the sheer scale of the operation, it’s inevitable that details will leak. We knew most of the particulars about the iPhone 5S and 5C well before they were officially announced, and there’s no reason to believe that this year will be any different.

Now that we have a probable date for the announcement, we’ve rounded up the most credible and plausible rumors (combined with a few educated guesses) to make a rough sketch of what the next-generation iPhone will probably look like. We tried to stick to sources that have been relatively reliable in the past. Some of the better reporting from rumor sites and prominent Apple watchers, assertions from major publications like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, and clear, not-obviously-faked pictures of individual components form the basis of our information here. In aggregate, everything we’ve heard so far gives us a pretty good idea of what we can expect next month.

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Because we’re big fans of the LED-powered Philips Hue lights at Ars, Philips recently sent over a review sample of their new Hue Tap, a four-function clickable remote control that can be used to send commands to the wirelessly controlled lights. Manually changing the lights’ colors or turning them on or off generally requires either fumbling out your smartphone and starting the app or taking advantage of the Hue API (personally, I use my Leap Motion and BetterTouchTool to fire scripts based on gestures, but I’m… kind of a nerdy outlier).

That's no longer the case. Armed with the Hue Tap, you get one-click access to up to four different functions. You can turn some or all of the lights on or off, change their brightness, change colors, or set the lights to a Hue "scene" (Hue app shorthand for a preset configuration of light colors and brightness levels). The Tap has an adhesive backing, or you can mount it to a wall or other surface, or you can simply set it down somewhere.

The interesting bit is the wireless, battery-less design. On disassembly, we found that the core component of the Tap is an EnOcean PTM 215Z rolling-code switch module, which uses an energy converter to turn the mechanical action of the user’s clicks into a small amount of current (between 120-210 microjoules at 2V) to power the device’s electronics. The link above actually points to the PTM 215, which operates at 868MHz; the "Z" version in the Hue Tap uses the same 2.5GHz Zigbee 802.15.4 bands as the rest of the Philips Hue systems.

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You get the feeling there's some vital organ damage in a torso of that shape. Randy Queen

Update: Randy Queen has apologized and says he will no longer attack critics of his work. You can read about it here.

Original Story: Comic book artist Randy Queen has reportedly sent Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests to Tumblr, asking that posts that reproduce his illustrations and comment on them in a negative light be taken down. Queen's requests were directed at the blog Escher Girls, which lobs criticism at illustrators who draw female characters in contorted, overly stylized, and anatomically impossible ways.

The drawings Queen wanted taken off Escher Girls' Tumblr were taken from his Darkchylde series of comics, which saw success in the late '90s after the first issue was released in 1996. On Escher Girls, Queen's drawings are occasionally posted with a “redraw,” where the submitter redraws the scene in their own style, generally to reflect a more realistic human anatomy. When Queen first submitted the takedown requests, Tumblr complied and even removed some of the user-drawn art, it seems.

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Apple and Samsung have agreed to drop their patent lawsuits against each other in every jurisdiction but one: the US. The two companies have sued each other in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Netherlands, the UK, France, and Italy; and all these cases are being dropped without being settled and without any cross-licensing agreements being negotiated. The companies disclosed the change in legal strategy in a joint e-mail.

This leaves the US as the sole battleground between the smartphone giants. Juries in the US awarded Apple $120 million in May this year and $900 million in 2013 (reducing a $1.05 billion award from the previous year).

This move is the latest de-escalation in the smartphone patent wars. Apple and Google settled in May this year, ending all smartphone patent litigation between those companies. Apple and Samsung also dropped their appeals of an International Trade Commission case in June.

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Waterfalls: picturesque in nature, less so in development. Flickr user: Dina Eric CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});

SEATTLE—For the longest time, Microsoft had something of a poor reputation as a software developer. The issue wasn't so much the quality of the company's software but the way it was developed and delivered. The company's traditional model involved cranking out a new major version of Office, Windows, SQL Server, Exchange, and so on every three or so years.

The releases may have been infrequent, but delays, or at least perceived delays, were not. Microsoft's reputation in this regard never quite matched the reality—the company tended to shy away from making any official announcements of when something would ship until such a point as the company knew it would hit the date—but leaks, assumptions, and speculation were routine. Windows 95 was late. Windows 2000 was late. Windows Vista was very late and only came out after the original software was scrapped.

In spite of this, Microsoft became tremendously successful. After all, many of its competitors worked in more or less the same way, releasing paid software upgrades every few years. Microsoft didn't do anything particularly different. Even the delays weren't that unusual, with both Microsoft's competitors and all manner of custom software development projects suffering the same.

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Sprint owner SoftBank has been talking about buying T-Mobile US for months, but is reportedly abandoning the plan because US regulators would likely object.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that SoftBank is giving up after "decid[ing] it simply would be too difficult to win approval from regulators." The report quoted the usual "people familiar with the matter." Sprint CEO Dan Hesse is also expected to be replaced tomorrow. The new CEO will be Marcelo Claure of Brightstar, according to Re/code.

We asked Sprint if it is ending its pursuit of T-Mobile, but a spokesperson declined to comment.

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Delight your houseguests by replacing all the sponges in your home with a compact PC heat sink.

A fact check on a PC workstation concept from Hack A Day suggests that consumers might want to be wary about investing in the concept device. Silent Power's pitch is for a compact tower that, among other unusual features, stays cool through the use of "copper foam," which Hack A Day calls "quite literally, one of the worst possible heat sinks imaginable."

Silent Power first surfaced as a crowdfunded project on IndieGogo, seeking money to produce the PC. The project was taken down "without warning," according to the team, but the company is now looking for funding via PayPal. If they can crack 45,000 ($60,424), they will start making the product.

Unfortunately, Hack A Day warns that the design's key feature, its sponge-like copper heat sink, is actually worse than the usual bladed anodized aluminum design. For one, the layer where heat retained by the copper mesh would transfer into the air wouldn't operate effectively; for another, heat sinks are often colored black to help them emit thermal radiation, but copper cannot be anodized to get this benefit.

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Groupon

There was a reason that we wondered in early 2013 if Groupon would make it to 2014—the company is hemorrhaging cash, and the situation has just gotten a lot worse.

According to the company’s latest earnings report published on Tuesday, the online deals site sustained a net loss of $22.8 million in the second quarter of 2014—approximately triple the level of losses the company had during the same period a year ago. During the first half of 2014, Groupon lost over $60.6 million, or over five times what it lost during the first half of 2013. From 2009 through 2013, Groupon has incurred total net losses of over $820 million.

Unsurprisingly, the stock price took a hit today—as of this writing, Groupon has plummeted over 15 percent in after-hours trading, hovering just under $6 per share. By comparison, Groupon closed at just over $26 per share after its first day as a publicly traded company back in November 2011.

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Dan Goodin

A Wisconsin security firm claims that a Russian criminal group has accumulated the largest known collection of stolen online usernames and passwords via SQL injections, according to a new report in The New York Times on Tuesday.

Hold Security, which did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, apparently has 1.2 billion usernames and passwords across 420,000 sites. It declined to tell The Times which companies were affected, nor name the group specifically.

In February 2014, Hold Security also discovered 360 million compromised login credentials for sale in underground crime forums. The haul, which included an additional 1.25 billion records containing only e-mail addresses, came from multiple breaches. In October 2013, the same firm discovered the circulation of 153 million user names and passwords stolen during a massive breach of Adobe's corporate network. A month later, the security firm uncovered 42 million plaintext passwords taken during a hack on niche dating service Cupid Media.

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Summer continues to be the season that separates the gaming projects that will actually see a holiday 2014 release and those that will inevitably be pushed into the next year for slightly more development time. Cooperative shooter Evolve joined the latter group today when publisher 2K announced in an earnings call that the anticipated shooter is being pushed back from a planned October 21, 2014 release to February 2015. No specific reason was given for the delay.

Developed by Left 4 Dead studio Turtle Rock, Evolve sees four players with unique capabilities teaming up to take on a single, human-controlled beast, who evolves new abilities by eating local flora and fauna. The unique take on the usual team-based shooter dynamics impressed our previewer earlier this year, and the game has continued to shine at trade show demos since then. Just this weekend, 2K conducted a closed alpha test of the game on PC, and the title will also be available on PS4 and Xbox One.

This news follows a recently announced delay for Battlefield: Hardline, which publisher EA pushed back from October 21 to "early 2015." If the persistent delays of holiday games in the past two years is any indication, they might not be alone by the time October finally comes around.

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NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

Chaos theory is sometimes described with an exaggerated story about the flapping of a butterfly’s wings affecting the formation of a hurricane thousands of miles away. Some “butterflies” flap harder than others, of course—a volcanic eruption can be one hell of a butterfly. According to a new study, the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, which made a dent in the average global temperature for a couple of years, may also have a lot to do with the slower surface warming more than a decade after its eruption.

Research has made it clear that a string of La Niñas—where cold water rises to the surface in the eastern tropical Pacific—has pulled down average global temperatures in recent years. The oscillation between La Niña and El Niño conditions is a major factor in the year-to-year variability of average global surface temperatures.

So why has the coin flip come up “La Niña” so frequently lately? It appears that stronger trade winds over the Pacific—which blow westward, pushing warm surface water in the tropical Pacific as they go and bringing up the cold waters of the La Niña—are responsible. And so, you should be asking, why have the trades strengthened?

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Ron Amadeo

The 2015 Cadillac ATS coupe. It's basically a big red smartphone.

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NEW YORK CITY—The world's fastest mobile hotspots? General Motors is bringing mobile connectivity to most of its 2015 car lineup with a service called "OnStar 4G LTE." As the name would imply, GM is integrating an LTE modem into its vehicles as a standard feature, giving owners a mobile data connection wherever they are. GM invited us down to SoHo's Classic Car Club to demo the feature on a 2015 Cadillac ATS.

Why would you want to get LTE through your car instead of through a portable hotspot or your smartphone? The simple answer is that a hotspot in a car can get much better reception. On the roof of the ATS is a "shark fin" antenna, similar to what has been used in the past for satellite radio. The antenna picks up LTE, carries it to the car infotainment system, and beams it via Wi-Fi to up to seven devices in your car.

The roof-mounted antenna benefits from being not just higher up than a smartphone, but it's outside of the potential signal killer that is a car. The antenna can also be better at picking up a signal than a smartphone. Smartphone antennas need to fit into a pocket-sized device and can only sip power from the tiny battery. A car antenna only needs to fit into several thousand pounds of vehicle and is eventually powered by gasoline, so there is much more room for a performance improvement. If you're in an area with a weak signal, the car has a much better chance of getting a signal than your phone.

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It's been about 20 years since Mark Hamill first graced PC screens as Colonel Christopher Blair in Origin System's Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger. If you've somehow gone this whole time without experiencing his performance, now's your chance to rectify that. EA is currently offering the game completely free on its Origin digital distribution service.

WC3 is part of EA's ongoing "On the House" promotion, which started off with Battlefield 3 in June and The Sims 2: Ultimate in July, with the promise of new free titles to come regularly in the future. Though the price is time-limited, those who download the game during the sale will have access to it through Origin indefinitely.

Wing Commander III usually sells for just $5 on Origin and is currently available for $6 DRM-free from GOG, so this isn't exactly the world's biggest video game sale. Still, there can be a big difference between "free" and "a few bucks," especially when it comes to a retro PC classic that every sci-fi fan should experience.

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No one suffering from an emergency expects to be greeted by a recording when they dial 911.

Yet 911 callers in Caddo County, Oklahoma were unable to reach a human operator for months in 2013. Instead, they were routed to an automated message that "instructed callers to 'hang up and dial 911' if their call is an emergency," the Federal Communications Commission said yesterday.

The FCC issued a proposed fine of $100,000 to the Hinton Telephone Company, saying the telco "betrayed its customers."

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This iPhone 5S is likely to be superseded in September. Andrew Cunningham

After a summer full of rumors and part leaks, Re/code reports that Apple is planning to hold its next iPhone event on Tuesday, September 9. Re/code co-founder Walt Mossberg has a long history with Apple, and his prior publication AllThingsD correctly predicted the dates of Apple's iPhone and iPad events last year, so there's a good chance this is the real thing.

This year Apple is widely expected to release a redesigned "iPhone 6" with a larger screen. Reports have varied, but anonymous sources have told multiple publications that the company is planning a 4.7-inch phone to rival "normal" handsets from competitors, as well as a 5.5-inch version intended to compete with so-called "phablet" phones like Samsung's Galaxy Note series. Last year's top-end iPhone 5S and midrange iPhone 5C were both refinements of the iPhone 5 design introduced in 2012.

Apple also uses its iPhone events to announce final release dates for new iOS versions, which for the past two years have come out on the second Wednesday after the iPhone unveiling. This means a final release of iOS 8 is likely on or near September 17, assuming Apple doesn't change its plans. iOS 8 will refine the new design introduced in iOS 7, allow iOS devices to work more closely with Macs running OS X Yosemite, and introduce a number of under-the-hood improvements, including Extensions. Third-generation Apple TVs will receive an updated UI, as well.

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Kenzie

A set of newly published documents shows that under half of the people on the United States Terrorist Screening Database have “no recognized terrorist group affiliation” and that nearly 1,000 new names are added daily.

An August 2013 chart, published Tuesday for the first time by The Intercept, shows that there are one million names on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE). Of those, 680,000 were on the aforementioned watchlist, and of those, 280,000 had “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.”

The Intercept

The Intercept did not reveal how it got the documents, only saying that they were obtained “from a source in the intelligence community.” In the past, The Intercept has published documents obtained as part of the Edward Snowden cache, but it has specifically mentioned his name when it does so.

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On Tuesday, Justin.tv, the video streaming service that created the popular gaming video site Twitch, announced its closure effective immediately.

Visitors to either the main Justin.tv site or any of its subchannels are now redirected to a goodbye message announcing that "the Justin.tv website, mobile apps, and APIs are no longer in service." Following that announcement is a Q&A about the closure, and the first question—"Why?"—dances around the answer. The FAQ indirectly blames the popularity of Twitch: "Unfortunately that means we need to shut down Justin.tv."

Such an answer only fuels recent rumors and reports that have all but confirmed that YouTube will soon acquire Twitch for $2 billion. Should that happen, today's news hints at Twitch's services remaining largely unchanged, as Justin.tv users are advised to transfer their account to Twitch by September 5, 2014. (Paid Justin.tv users have already had their accounts converted to similar services on Twitch.)

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64-bit Chrome running on the OS X Yosemite public beta. It's beta software all the way down! Andrew Cunningham

About two months after issuing the first 64-bit Chrome beta builds to Windows users, Google has introduced 64-bit support to the OS X version of the Chrome beta as well. The change was first spotted by iClarified, and we downloaded the Canary version of Chrome to confirm for ourselves. Chrome's Canary channel is the least stable of all the release channels, and it's often where new or experimental features make their first appearance. The Dev channel, also early and unstable but updated less frequently and therefore less tumultuous, has been updated with 64-bit support as well.

64-bit Chrome builds for Windows were accompanied by an announcement on the Chromium blog, but no such release accompanied the OS X release. One assumes that the advantages for Mac users are similar to those for Windows users. Google claims that compiler optimizations and newer instruction sets inherent to 64-bit CPUs should improve speed, improved ASLR support and better heap partitioning should improve security, and (when the build goes stable) the browser should suffer from fewer crashes than 32-bit Chrome.

The current stable build of Chrome is version 36, which was released in mid-July. The 64-bit Windows build of Chrome, recently bumped from the Canary channel to the Beta channel, is version 37, while the 64-bit OS X build is version 38. Chrome's six-week release cycle means that, barring some kind of show-stopping bug, 64-bit Chrome should come to the stable Chrome channel for Windows users in early September and to OS X users in mid-October. In the meantime, the work-in-progress Canary Chrome betas are available here. Install them at your own risk.

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@congressedits

The new bot @Congressedits, which tweets anonymous Wikipedia edits made from Capitol Hill, discovered one of its most substantial revisions on Tuesday. The program listens for Wikipedia changes stemming from Congressional IP address ranges, and it auto-tweeted about an alteration to the page for Navi Pillay, the United Nation's High Commissioner on Human Rights.

The 33-word revision to the page for Pillay added that the commissioner has received "criticism for reffering (sic) to Edward Snowden, the American traitor who defected to Russia, as a 'Human Rights Defender' and saying that he should not face trial for his crimes." The month before, Pillay made headlines when she said Snowden "should be seen as a human rights defender," and "We owe a great deal to him for revealing this kind of information."

The edit comes after Wikipedia recently handed out both 10-day and single-day bans on edits from Capitol Hill. The move hoped to deter edits like the one above for Pillay or for a recent edit on the entry for Web outlet Mediaite. Not long after Mediaite wrote a story about @congressedits, Mediaite's Wikipedia entry was changed by someone in the House, calling the site a "sexist transphobic news and opinion blog" that "automatically assumes that someone is male without any evidence." (That change was cited by the Wikipedia admin who imposed the ban, according to The Hill.)

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