Rain soaked southern France swept with more torrents

A Palestinian driver has rammed a car into several pedestrians in Jerusalem, killing one person, hours after clashes erupted at the city's holiest site.

Home automation is emerging as one of the primary drivers in the rising popularity of the IoT (Internet of Things) concept. Popular home automation / smart home technologies include programmable thermostats (such as Nest and Honeywell Lyric) and remote controlled lights (such as the Philips Hue). IP cameras have been around as a security solution for quite some time, but they have not traditionally been included in the IoT discussions. As the smart home concept gains popularity, these three product categories are set to experience rapid growth.

Netgear is building upon their VueZone purchase by introducing the next generation wire-free cameras under the Arlo brand name. Simplicity and ease of use are primary drivers for the adoption of the VueZone family of cameras. Important updates (compared to the previous generation VueZone cameras) include high definition (720p) video clips and better configurability (such as schedules for turning off the camera completely).

Unlike the traditional IP cameras which stream video continuously, we are now seeing a sub-category where video is recorded and sent out only when there is movement. The Arlo IP cameras belong to this category. Since the units are battery powered, it does make sense to ensure that they don't run out of juice in a short time. The new design is also weather-proof, making it suitable for outdoor use. There are two models being introduced, one with IR LEDs for night vision, and the other suitable for day use or in illuminated locations.

As part of the smart home push, Netgear is introducing a hub to which up to four Arlo IP cameras can connect. Rules can be created for management of smart devices. Currently, the VueZone cameras (like Dropcam) allow for remote viewing, but recording to the cloud requires monthly plans. The new Arlo IP cameras will follow the same route. Fortunately, Netgear does realize that users would like to record to a local NAS. Since they also have the ReadyNAS product line, the Arlo team is definitely thinking about ensuring some sort of interoperability. However, cloud-free operation is not going to be a feature when the units ship to retail in January. Pricing for an Arlo-based security system (two IP cameras and a hub) is expected to be around $350. A standalone Arlo camera will retail for $170. However, it will not function without the hub.

In order to target the overall smart home ecosystem, Netgear is also announcing that they have joined the AllSeen Alliance and established a partnership with LIFX (a vendor of connected light bulbs).

 

Google's Nest Learning Thermostat is one of the better smart home gadgets out there, but at $250 for something that is normally under 50 bucks, it's an expensive upgrade. According to CNET, Nest is going to remove this barrier to entry by taking a page out of the smartphone playbook: it's offering the thermostat for free with a two-year contract.

For now the program is only in Ireland, where a deal with Electric Ireland subsidizes the Nest device with an electricity contract. Ireland seems like an odd place to start, but Nest Chief Executive Tony Fadell says the company will "bring it out to hopefully many more countries."

Back in February of this year, Google bought Nest for 3.2 billion. Nest is run as a separate subsidiary, and so far we haven't heard much from the combined-but-not-combined group—it's been business as usual.

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CCTV footage of Shrien Dewani meeting Zola Tongo, the man convicted of arranging the murder of Anni Dewani, has been shown in court.

Thousands of people have replied to a free round-the-world ticket offer for woman named 'Elizabeth Gallagher'.

Senator Udall visiting a wind power plant in Boulder in 2013. Mark Udall

Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) was one of just a few US Senators decrying widespread surveillance even before the Snowden leaks. Udall has been a sharp critic of intelligence agencies since then as well, asking for CIA Director John Brennan to resign after allegations emerged that the intelligence agency gained access to Senate files.

He won't be in office much longer. Udall lost his election last night against Republican challenger Rep. Cory Gardner. By 1:00am Eastern time, Gardner was ahead by six percentage points, with 87 percent of precincts reporting. At that point, several news agencies called the election for Gardner. The Senate seat was one of several that flipped from Democratic to Republican control last night, causing Republicans to take control of the upper house.

Udall's positioning as a tough critic of the NSA wasn't a big issue on the campaign trail, although in the final days of the election he did release an ad saying he “won’t tolerate” overbroad government surveillance. But much of Udall's campaigning came across as out of touch, running an old playbook. Udall hammered his opponent on womens' issues in socially liberal Colorado, noting that Gardner supported a "personhood amendment" to limit abortion and suggesting he wanted to ban some types of birth control.

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Underscoring just how broken the widely used MD5 hashing algorithm is, a software engineer racked up just 65 cents in computing fees to replicate the type of attack a powerful nation-state used in 2012 to hijack Microsoft's Windows Update mechanism.

Nathaniel McHugh ran open source software known as HashClash to modify two separate images—one of them depicting funk legend James Brown and the other R&B singer/songwriter Barry White—that generate precisely the same MD5 hash, e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338. The exercise—known in cryptographic circles as a hash collision—took just 10 hours and cost only 65 cents plus tax to complete using a GPU instance on Amazon Web Service. In 2007, cryptography expert and HashClash creator Marc Stevens estimated it would require about one day to complete an MD5 collision using a cluster of PlayStation 3 consoles.

The MD5 hash for this picture—e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338—is precisely the same for the one below. Such "collisions" are a fatal flaw for hashing algorithms and can lead to disastrous attacks.

The practical ability to create two separate inputs that generate the same hash is a fundamental flaw that makes MD5 unsuitable for most purposes. (The exception is password hashing. Single iteration MD5 hashing is horrible for passwords but for an entirely different reason that is outside the scope of this post.) The susceptibility to collisions can have disastrous consequences, potentially for huge swaths of the Internet.

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There is a growing fear that the conflict in neighbouring Syria will spill over into Lebanon, and that has left some communities taking up arms themselves.

The Spanish nurse who contracted Ebola outside of West Africa was cheered into a press conference after being discharged from hospital.

The mayor of the Colombian port city of Cartagena has said he will ask for a controversial plaque unveiled last week by Prince Charles to be removed.

Volunteers and residents in New Zealand manage to help free some pilot whales which had become beached in Ohiwa Harbour.

Image courtesy of Google

NFC-based mobile payments have had a boost in recent months, possibly thanks to the launch of Apple Pay, which was announced in September. Now, a person with knowledge of the matter tells Ars that Google Wallet, which launched back in 2011 and saw tepid success in the ensuing three years, has had considerable growth in the last couple of months. According to our source, weekly transactions have increased by 50 percent, and in the recent couple of months, new users have nearly doubled compared to the previous month.

Although it's still unclear whether Apple Pay will gain the critical mass of users necessary to become a true checkout stand alternative, Tim Cook recently said that one million cards were activated on Apple Pay in the first 72 hours of the platform's launch (although ReadWrite notes that one million cards is hardly a revolution). It seems that interest in the platform is buoying Apple's predecessor among Android users as well. Although there are some key differences in the way the two platforms work behind the scenes, the experience from the average user's perspective is close to identical.

Retailers want in on the game

The reinvigorated interest in using a phone to pay at a merchant's terminal has also fueled a bit of outrage toward retailers’ consortium Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) and its competing payments platform called CurrentC.

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Rajesh Mirchandani explains the results of the US mid-term elections in what was a "very good night for Republicans".

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Clive Myrie looks around a new, British army-built centre for treating people with Ebola in Kerry Town, Sierra Leone.

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Last year, the US Supreme Court finally banned patents on human genes after they were handed out by the US Patent and Trademark Office for decades.

The effort was powered by the ACLU and Public Patent Foundation, which gathered a group of plaintiffs who were paying high prices for the patented gene tests on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.

Now Canada is about to see a similar suit. The Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) has filed suit (PDF) in Canadian federal court seeking to invalidate patents related to "Long QT syndrome," an inherited heart disorder that affects somewhere between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 5,000 people. The patents were created at the University of Utah. That's the same US university that was connected to the landmark Myriad case. University of Utah got patents on the BRCA genes and then licensed them exclusively to Myriad Genetics.

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Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko orders army reinforcements to key southern and eastern cities in case of a new rebel offensive, following disputed polls in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Following a string of catastrophic vulnerabilities recently discovered in HTTPS encryption protections, Google engineers have released an app that allows developers to detect bugs and glitches that may leave passwords and other sensitive information open to snooping.

The open source tool is dubbed nogotofail, a reference to the so-called goto fail flaw that gave attackers an easy way to surreptitiously circumvent HTTPS-protected connections of Apple iOS and OS X devices. Since its discovery in February, various implementations of the underlying secure sockets layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) protocols have suffered several other devastating vulnerabilities, including a flaw in the GnuTLS library, the catastrophic Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL, and the more recently disclosed in version 3 of SSL.

"The Android Security Team has built a tool, called nogotofail, that provides an easy way to confirm that the devices or applications you are using are safe against known TLS/SSL vulnerabilities and misconfigurations," Google engineers wrote in a blog post published Tuesday morning. "Nogotofail works for Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, Chrome OS, OSX, in fact any device you use to connect to the Internet. There’s an easy-to-use client to configure the settings and get notifications on Android and Linux, as well as the attack engine itself which can be deployed as a router, VPN server, or proxy."

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