Month: May 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

When you use your phone to unlock a Tesla, the device and the car use Bluetooth signals to measure their proximity to each other. Move close to the car with the phone in hand, and the door automatically unlocks. Move away, and it locks. This proximity authentication works on the assumption that the key stored on the phone can only be transmitted when the locked device is within Bluetooth range.

Now, a researcher has devised a hack that allows him to unlock millions of Teslas—and countless other devices—even when the authenticating phone or key fob is hundreds of yards or miles away. The hack, which exploits weaknesses in the Bluetooth Low Energy standard adhered to by thousands of device makers, can be used to unlock doors, open and operate vehicles, and gain unauthorized access to a host of laptops and other security-sensitive devices.

When convenience comes back to bite us

“Hacking into a car from hundreds of miles away tangibly demonstrates how our connected world opens us up to threats from the other side of the country—and sometimes even the other side of the world,” Sultan Qasim Khan, a principal security consultant and researcher at security firm NCC Group, told Ars. “This research circumvents typical countermeasures against remote adversarial vehicle unlocking and changes the way we need to think about the security of Bluetooth Low Energy communications.”

Enlarge / Apple’s Studio Display received a firmware update today to improve its webcam performance. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple released new software updates for all of its platforms on Tuesday. That includes the following:

• iOS 15.5 for iPhones and the iPod touch
• iPadOS 15.5 for iPads
• macOS 12.4 for Macs
• watchOS 8.6 for the Apple Watch
• tvOS 15.5 for the Apple TV
• HomePod Software 15.5 for HomePods
• Studio Display Firmware 15.5 for the Studio Display
• Swift Playgrounds 4.1 for iPad and Mac

These are almost certainly the last updates before the company’s annual developer conference, which is scheduled to kick off on June 6. Among other things, Apple will announce iOS and iPadOS 16, macOS 13, and watchOS 9 at the conference, but those updates won’t arrive until later this year.

iOS 15.5

Today’s iOS update offers just enough new user-facing features to earn that 15.x label instead of 15.x.x, which is usually reserved for bug fixes and the like.

Enlarge / An artist’s rendering of Google’s current reputation. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google finally launched a solution for people with “legacy” GSuite Google accounts. After initially threatening to shut down free GSuite accounts if users didn’t start paying for the service, Google has completely backed off. Once users jump through some sign-up hoops, Google will allow their ~16-year-old accounts to continue functioning. You’ll even get to keep your email address.

The saga so far, if you haven’t been following, is that Google has a custom-domain user account service, currently called “Google Workspace” and previously called “G Suite” and “Google Apps.” The service is mostly a normal Google account that lets you use an email that ends in your custom domain name rather than “@gmail.com.” Today this service is aimed at businesses and costs money each month, but that was not always the case. From 2006 to 2012, custom domain Google accounts were free and were even pitched at families as a geeky way to have an online Google identity.

In January, some bean counter at Google apparently noticed this tiny group of longtime users was technically getting a paid service for free and decided this was unacceptable. Google posted an announcement in January declaring these people “Legacy GSuite users” and basically told them, ‘Pay up or lose your account.’ These users signed up for a free Google service and stored data on it for as long as 16 years, and there were no indications it would ever be charged. Google held this decade-plus of user data hostage, telling users to start paying business rates for Workspace or face an account shutdown.

Enlarge / Just drive carefully, okay? (credit: Getty Images)

We had an inkling that the traffic statistics for 2021 would be bad. In November last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published data for the first half of that year, showing the greatest ever six-month rise in road fatalities since people kept records. On Tuesday, the other shoe dropped, with NHTSA’s estimate of the entire year’s toll: 42,915 people killed in crashes, an increase of 10.8 percent compared to 2020.

The rise in road deaths began with the pandemic in 2020. Despite a big reduction in the number of miles we drove, road deaths went up that year—8 percent year-over-year, after a period of gently declining traffic fatalities. Sadly things haven’t gotten better.

Most kinds of driving became more dangerous last year. Deaths on rural interstates and urban arterial roads increased by 15 percent. And local and urban collector road deaths went up by 20 percent, belying the idea of “Vision Zero”. Both daytime and nighttime deaths went up by 11 percent compared to 2020, with weekends seeing a slightly larger increase than weekdays (11 percent versus 10 percent).

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

The time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a handy deal for Apple’s newest iPad Air, which is down to $559 at Amazon and Walmart. Outside of a very brief drop to $549 last month, this is the lowest price we’ve seen for the 10.9-inch tablet, which only launched in March and goes for an MSRP of $600.

As we’ve noted before, the new Air is a good middle ground between the cheaper 10.2-inch iPad and the higher-end iPad Pro. It lacks the higher refresh rate, better speakers, and greater storage space (at 128GB) of the latter, but its M1 chip makes it virtually as fast, its USB-C port and front-facing camera are improved over the previous generation, and its ample display and accessory support keep it well-suited to both media consumption and casual work. The base iPad is still the best value for most, but if you’d prefer to avoid that tablet’s more dated design and lower performance ceiling, the M1-equipped Air should be a better buy than the Pro until the latter receives a refresh. You can read our review for a deeper dive.

Besides iPads, our deals roundup includes a strong discount on Terraforming Mars, a popular board game we’ve previously recommended in our ultimate board game gift guide. It’s available for $38 as of this writing, which is the lowest price we’ve tracked in well over a year. We included this one in the “heavier fare” section of our gift guide, so it’ll likely be a bit too complex, lengthy (at two-plus hours a game), and challenging for relative newbies. But for more involved players, it should provide an engaging and deeply replayable card-drafting game, one where players are tasked with turning the red planet green. Again, you can have a look at our review for more details.