It’s only fitting that Sabine is paid tribute at the track itself, after her much-too-young death back in March, following a fight with cancer. Turn 1 of the Nordschleife has been renamed, becoming Sabine Schmitz Kurve, to honor her at the start of every lap taken at a circuit that is, without doubt, hers.
Porsche
There had already been a commemorative lap led by the 1996 BMW M3 “Eifelblitz” car Sabine won the Nürburgring 24 Hour race with back in 1996 and 1997, driven by her longtime co-driver Johannes Scheid. It was a fitting tribute, as part of the 2021 version of the race, where 11 women racers were among the drivers trying to follow in Sabine’s tire tracks.
Renaming the first corner of the Nordschleife is even better though. Now, whenever you cross the start/finish line at track, Sabine Schmitz will be ahead, and every lap will start with her sending you on your way.
Stanford researchers have developed a new technique that produces “atomically-thin” transistors under 100 nanometers long. That’s “several times” shorter than the previous best, according to the university.
The team accomplished the feat by overcoming a longstanding hurdle in flexible tech. While ‘2D’ semiconductors are the ideal, they require so much heat to make that they’d melt the flexible plastic. The new approach covers glass-coated silicon with a super-thin semiconductor film (molybdenum disulfide) overlayed with nano-patterened gold electrodes. This produces a film just three atoms thick using a temperature nearing 1,500F — the conventional plastic substrate would have deformed around 680F.
Once the components have cooled, the team can apply the film to the substrate and take a few “additional fabrication steps” to create a whole structure about five microns thick, or a tenth the thickness of human hair. It’s even ideal for low-power use, as it can handle high currents at low voltage.
Hypercars with $3 million price tags aren’t usually synonymous with environmental sustainability. Christian von Koenigsegg, founder and chief executive of Koenigsegg Automotive, wants to change that. The Ängelholm, Sweden-based company is experimenting with ultra-high-voltage battery packs and biofuels using emissions from volcanoes to build environmentally “benign” and potentially even carbon-neutral cars, without sacrificing performance.
[…]
If we take a pure electric sports car, they tend to be quite heavy because you need a quite large battery to have enough range and performance. That goes against the sporty nature of the car.
We electrify in a different way with more extreme cell technology for power output. And then we have extreme combustion-engine technology running on renewable fuels, but very good aftertreatment systems, and our free-valve technology where we can really make sure we combust extremely efficiently with very small engines to make the car lighter, more exciting, have better performance, but still being environmentally benign.
What we mean by agnostic is that we mix and match whatever makes the most sense at each given time and for each model. We’re not stuck in traditional combustion technology. The technology we develop there is really next-generation beyond anything else I’ve seen out in the marketplace, and also next-generation electrification, and combining these technologies in an interesting way to make our product stand out and be as competitive as we can with as little environmental footprint as possible.
You don’t have to pollute the planet just because you want to have a fast, interesting sports car.
[…]
there is this technology from Iceland, it was invented there, where they cap the CO2 emittance from semi-active volcanoes and convert that into methanol. And if you take that methanol and you power the plants that do the conversion of other fuels and then power the ship that transports the those fuels to Europe or the U.S. or Asia, wherever it goes, you put the fuel completely CO2-neutral into the vehicle.
And of course with the correct aftertreatment systems, depending on the environment you’re in, you can kind of clean up the particles in the atmosphere while you’re using the engine. So you can be very much environmentally conscious doing that. It’s just a fun aspect of renewable fuels that are not talked so much about, but there are many, many other technologies that are coming up.
Southern California–based Hyperion Companies, Inc., and its Hyperion Motors division, is banking on cutting-edge, space-grade hydrogen fuel-cell technology to help consumers embrace the electric car market with much more vigor. Hyperion’s first salvo in the battle against combustion is the XP-1 prototype—a futuristic supercar with a claimed 1,016-mile range and the ability to haul to 60 mph in 2.2 seconds. Oh, and the recharge time is less than five minutes.
The Hyperion XP-1 prototype. Photo: Courtesy of Hyperion Companies, Inc.
Skeptics of the XP-1’s performance promises should consider three crucial factors: Hyperion was founded nearly a decade ago by a team of PhDs exclusively focused on hydrogen-based power and delivery, and Hyperion works in conjunction with NASA to utilize technologies developed for space travel in commercial applications. Lastly, the organizers of the 24 Hours of Le Mans are planning to add a hydrogen-powered class by 2024, signaling that the element may play a vital part in the future of motorsports.
“Our vehicle represents the answer to ‘why hydrogen?’” says Angelo Kafantaris, Hyperion’s CEO. “It’s a no-compromise car that represents the best that hydrogen fuel-cell technology can be. Hydrogen is the cleanest, most sustainable energy source that’s not been properly utilized.”
On Friday, Volkswagen disclosed a data breach that it said affected 3.3 million customers and interested buyers. On Monday, hackers put the data stolen from the car maker on sale on a notorious hacking forum.
In the sales listing reviewed by Motherboard, a hacker that goes by 000 wrote that the data included email addresses and Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN). The hacker also posted two samples of the data, which included full names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and phone numbers.
[…]
Volkswagen said that “the majority” of affected data included: “first and last name, personal or business mailing address, email address, or phone number. In some instances, the data also included information about a vehicle purchased, leased, or inquired about, such as the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN), make, model, year, color and trim packages.” But for 90,000 victims, the data also included “more sensitive information relating to eligibility for a purchase, loan, or lease.
Nearly all of the more sensitive data (over 95%) consists of driver’s license numbers,” according to the company, which added that the majority of data pertains to Audi customers and interested buyers in the US and Canada only. The company also said it believes the data was left unsecured by a vendor. (Audi is owned by the Volkswagen Group.)
“There were also a very small number of dates of birth, Social Security or social insurance numbers, account or loan numbers, and tax identification numbers,” the website read.
[…]
The hacker said she is asking between $4,000 and $5,000 for the whole database.
[…]
The company added that it believes “the data was obtained when the vendor left electronic data unsecured at some point between August 2019 and May 2021, when the source of the incident was identified.” The company did not identify the vendor responsible for the breach, saying only that it is used by Audi, Volkswagen, and some authorized dealers.
The company added that the stolen data ranged from 2014 until 2019, and that it is notifying all victims.
It was a closed source backdoored system. This goes to show that weakening encryption for political reasons and trusting software that can’t be audited independently is a Bad Idea ™
A weakness in the algorithm used to encrypt cellphone data in the 1990s and 2000s allowed hackers to spy on some internet traffic, according to a new research paper.
The paper has sent shockwaves through the encryption community because of what it implies: The researchers believe that the mathematical probability of the weakness being introduced on accident is extremely low. Thus, they speculate that a weakness was intentionally put into the algorithm. After the paper was published, the group that designed the algorithm confirmed this was the case.
Researchers from several universities in Europe found that the encryption algorithm GEA-1, which was used in cellphones when the industry adopted GPRS standards in 2G networks, was intentionally designed to include a weakness that at least one cryptography expert sees as a backdoor. The researchers said they obtained two encryption algorithms, GEA-1 and GEA-2, which are proprietary and thus not public, “from a source.” They then analyzed them and realized they were vulnerable to attacks that allowed for decryption of all traffic.
When trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm, the researchers wrote that (to simplify), they tried to design a similar encryption algorithm using a random number generator often used in cryptography and never came close to creating an encryption scheme as weak as the one actually used: “In a million tries we never even got close to such a weak instance,” they wrote. “This implies that the weakness in GEA-1 is unlikely to occur by chance, indicating that the security level of 40 bits is due to export regulations.”
Researchers dubbed the attack “divide-and-conquer,” and said it was “rather straightforward.” In short, the attack allows someone who can intercept cellphone data traffic to recover the key used to encrypt the data and then decrypt all traffic. The weakness in GEA-1, the oldest algorithm developed in 1998, is that it provides only 40-bit security. That’s what allows an attacker to get the key and decrypt all traffic, according to the researchers.
“To meet political requirements, millions of users were apparently poorly protected while surfing for years.”
A spokesperson for the organization that designed the GEA-1 algorithm, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), admitted that the algorithm contained a weakness, but said it was introduced because the export regulations at the time did not allow for stronger encryption.
[…]
Raddum and his colleagues found that GEA-1’s successor, GEA-2 did not contain the same weakness. In fact, the ETSI spokesperson said that when they introduced GEA-2 the export controls had been eased. Still, the researchers were able to decrypt traffic protected by GEA-2 as well with a more technical attack, and concluded that GEA-2 “does not offer a high enough security level for today’s standards,” as they wrote in their paper.
With streaming games and “let’s plays” becoming a dominant force of influence in the gaming world, one of the sillier trends we’ve seen is video games coming out with “stream safe” settings that strip out audio content for which there is no broadcast license. We’ve talked already about how this sort of thing is not a solution to the actual problem — the complicated licenses surrounding copyrighted works and the permission culture that birthed them — but is rather a ploy to simply ignore that problem entirely. That hasn’t stopped this from becoming a more regular thing in the gaming world, even as we’ve seen examples of “stream safe” settings fail to keep streams from getting DMCA notices.
Well, if there were a perfect example of a video game that highlights the absurdity of all of this, it may well be the forthcoming Guardians of the Galaxy title. If you’re not familiar with the GotG movies, you should know that retro music plays a major role in the films. The game promises that retro music will be just as important as in the films. And that’s what immediately set off concern for game streamers.
One group that is wary of this heavy emphasis on pop music is the livestreaming crowd, who are concerned that it could make the game near-impossible to broadcast. This is because Twitch and YouTube creators are regularly hit with what are known as Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices.
[…]
The game publisher of course secured the rights to the songs to be included in the game, but did not license the songs for rebroadcast. Because the world is an extremely stupid place, streaming a game equates to a rebroadcast of any music within it. And, also because the world is an extremely stupid place, Eidos-Montreal’s solution to this is once again to mute licensed music.
Newsweek contacted Eidos-Montréal to ask if they had made any considerations for Twitch streamers in respect to Guardians of the Galaxy’s music. Over email, a spokesperson confirmed that there will actually be an option to mute licensed tracks, if players want to be absolutely safe from potential DMCA takedowns.
And so a major thematic element for the franchise will be nixed in any live-streams of the game.
The U.S. is dominated by anticompetitive giants in banking, telecom, insurance, health care, air travel, and countless other sectors. And generally, we’ve historically encouraged them by underfunding our regulators, steadily weakening antitrust enforcement, rubber stamping merger after terrible merger, and replacing competent Judges with bobble head dolls. All under the pretense that doing anything else would be disastrous, while clinging tightly to a consumer welfare standard that sometimes seemed incapable of addressing modern market, labor, and consumer harms.
[…]
The movement to rein in big tech and shore up antitrust enforcement certainly has valid components, based on justified anger at years of dodgy business practices. But this anger has been proven to be exploitable by folks like News Corporation and AT&T. Both companies are looking to saddle their Silicon Valley competitors in online advertising with rules that don’t apply to their own businesses, while simultaneously demolishing constraints and oversight of their own sectors (see: net neutrality, the dismantling of FCC authority, or the steady erosion of media consolidation rules protecting small businesses).
[…]
Meanwhile, many of the bills are oddly selective in what they deem to be a “dominant platform.” The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act (pdf), for example, greatly restricts what constitutes a monopolistic offender, making sure to carve out exceptions for telecom giants, Mastercard, VISA, and Walmart. The bill bans companies from owning or operating a business that “presents a clear conflict of interest,” but only if the company in question has 50 million monthly active U.S. users and a market cap of over $600 billion:
“…is owned or controlled by a person with net annual sales, or a market capitalization greater than $600,000,000,000, adjusted for inflation on the basis of the Consumer Price Index, at the time of the Commission’s or the Department of Justice’s designation under sec13 tion 4(a) or any of the two years preceding that time, or at any time in the 2 years preceding the filing of a complaint for an alleged violation of this Act.”
Again, this very specific restriction omits a lot of companies that are engaging in the same kind of anticompetitive behavior, including many that see overlap in markets dominated by technology giants (telecom). It’s also just kind of an arbitrary restriction given that what others value you at isn’t necessarily what determines whether or not you’re engaging in anticompetitive behavior. The actual, anticompetitive behavior does.
But just looking at the $600 billion valuation threshold gives a sense of just how this line-drawing happened. Under this definition (including the number of US users), it looks like the law only applies to Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google (Alphabet) and Facebook. That’s it. It seems notable that companies which are also kinda powerful and dominant, but happen to fall just somewhat beneath the threshold, include Visa, Mastercard, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Walmart, Disney… and Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.
[…]
Telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast have spent the last three or four years successfully convincing many DC policymakers that Silicon Valley giants are the only dominant giants worth worrying about. Rupert Murdoch has been playing similar reindeer games. Pretending “big tech” monopolies are the only monopolies that need immediate fixing benefits both, and exploiting legitimate public anger at big tech isn’t particularly hard right now on either side of the aisle.
An incredibly light new material that can reduce aircraft engine noise and improve passenger comfort has been developed at the University of Bath.
The graphene oxide-polyvinyl alcohol aerogel weighs just 2.1kg per cubic metre, making it the lightest sound insulation ever manufactured. It could be used as insulation within aircraft engines to reduce noise by up to 16 decibels—reducing the 105-decibel roar of a jet engine taking off to a sound closer to that of a hair-dryer.
The aerogel’s meringue-like structure makes it extremely light, meaning it could act as an insulator within aircraft engine nacelles, with almost no increase in overall weight. The material is currently being further optimised by the research team to offer improved heat dissipation, offering benefits to fuel efficiency and safety.
[…]
“We managed to produce such an extremely low density by using a liquid combination of graphene oxide and a polymer, which are formed with whipped air bubbles and freeze-casted. On a very basic level, the technique can be compared with whipping egg whites to create meringues—it’s solid but contains a lot of air, so there is no weight or efficiency penalty to achieve big improvements in comfort and noise.”
São Paulo pickpockets are increasingly stealing people’s smartphones not to pawn off the device, but rather to gain access to their bank account.
That’s according to a report from Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo this week. As first spotted by 9to5 Mac, the report claims this kind of theft has been going on since the early days of the pandemic, but now specialized gangs have adopted the tactic to empty users’ bank accounts, and it’s put local authorities on high alert.
It remains unclear exactly how these criminals are bypassing security measures for the phones and banks involved. According to São Paulo police chief Roberto Monteiro, they appear to target devices that have already been unlocked by the owner.
“Usually Waze users in the car with an Android smartphone are their main focus. Although breaking an iOS system is more difficult, they have also specialized in it,” he said, 9to5 Mac reports.
Transfers are carried out overnight to avoid arousing the victims’ attention, he continued. In at least one case, criminals appear to have impersonated a victim after breaking into their email account and convinced their bank to transfer thousands of dollars to outside accounts.
While no official statistics have been released at this time, the problem is severe enough that the region’s consumer protection regulator Procon-SP has called on smartphone manufacturers and banks to improve their security measures.
“Procon has already learned about a gang of cell phone receivers whose main illegal business is not the resale of cell phones, but the defrauding of passwords for bank fraud. This is being done through an army of hackers,” said Procon-SP executive director Fernando Capez according to a Google translation.
In some cases, banks have refused to refund the stolen money to victims, arguing that their security systems didn’t fail but rather the clients were negligent by not regularly updating their passwords, Folha de S.Paulo reports. However, clients have fiercely pushed back in these cases. One victim currently involved in a legal battle with the São Paulo-based bank Bradesco said she hadn’t slacked on updating her passwords and her phone was closed when thieves took it. Another victim claimed he had enabled facial recognition and token-based authentication on his phone when it was stolen.
China has launched three astronauts into orbit to begin occupation of the country’s new space station.
The three men – Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo – are to spend three months aboard the Tianhe module some 380km (236 miles) above the Earth.
It will be China’s longest crewed space mission to date and the first in nearly five years.
The crew successfully docked with the space station just over seven hours after the launch.
The moment of contact was met with applause from mission control in China.
Their Shenzhou-12 capsule took off atop its Long March 2F rocket on Thursday.
Lift-off from the Jiuquan satellite launch centre in the Gobi desert was at 09:22 Beijing time (01:22 GMT).
The launch and subsequent mission are another demonstration of China’s growing confidence and capability in the space domain.
In the past six months, the country has returned rock and soil samples to Earth from the surface of the Moon, and landed a six-wheeled robot on Mars – both highly complex and challenging endeavours.
[…]
This 16.6m-long, 4.2m-wide Tianhe cylinder was launched in April.
It is the first and core component in what will eventually be a near 70-tonne orbiting outpost, comprising living quarters, science labs and even a Hubble-class telescope to view the cosmos.
[…]
It has poured significant funding into its space efforts, and in 2019 became the first country to send an un-crewed rover to the far side of the Moon.
But it’s had to go at it alone in developing a space station, in part because it has been excluded from the International Space Station project.
The US, which leads that partnership (with Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan) will not co-operate with the Asian nation in orbit.
For its part, China says it is open to foreign involvement on its station. In the first instance, this means hosted scientific experiments. For example, the Shenzhou-12 crew will conduct cancer investigations that are led from Norway. And on the outside of the station, there is an Indian-developed telescopic spectrograph to study ultraviolet emissions coming from deep space, from the likes of exploded stars.
But, long term, there probably also will be visits to the station by non-Chinese nationals.
It’s almost the end of the line for those who’ve been causing havoc in Los Santos with their friends on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Rockstar Games says it will shut down the Grand Theft Auto Online servers for those consoles on December 16th, bringing an end to the multiplayer mode as well as website stat tracking via the Rockstar Games Social Club. The move doesn’t affect the single-player side of Grand Theft Auto V.
You’ll still be able to buy PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Shark Cards for GTA Online until September 15th. However, you won’t be able to get a refund or transfer your digital currency or virtual items to another platform.
PS3 and Xbox 360 GTA Online players can no longer transfer their character data or progress to another platform either. When the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Grand Theft Auto V arrived, players were initially able to port their GTA Online progress to the newer consoles. Rockstar ended support for those transfers in 2017.
The publisher says it will “continue to move forward with updates and support” for the PS4, Xbox One and PC versions of GTA Online. In November, it’ll release versions of GTA V and GTA Onlineoptimized for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. PS5 owners will get free access to GTA Online for three months. It’s not yet clear whether PS4 and Xbox One owners will be able to transfer GTA Online data to the upcoming versions.
Rockstar will also shut down online features for other PS3 and Xbox 360 games on September 16th. Multiplayer, leaderboards and website stat tracking will no longer be available in those versions of Max Payne 3 after that date. PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of L.A. Noirewill also lose website stat tracking. The single-player aspects of both games are otherwise unaffected.
This is a real problem, also for the history of gaming. Regulators should force an open source variant of the server to be released to the public so that these games are not at the mercy of the publisher to kill as and when they please.
On Wednesday, Facebook and Michigan State University debuted a novel method of not just detecting deep fakes but discovering which generative model produced it by reverse engineering the image itself.
Beyond telling you if an image is a deep fake or not, many current detection systems can tell whether the image was generated in a model that the system saw during its training — known as a “close-set” classification. Problem is, if the image was created by a generative model that the detector system wasn’t trained on then the system won’t have the previous experience to be able to spot the fake.
[…]
“By generalizing image attribution to open-set recognition, we can infer more information about the generative model used to create a deepfake that goes beyond recognizing that it has not been seen before.”
What’s more, this system can compare and trace similarities across a series of deep fakes, enabling researchers to trace groups of falsified images back to a single generative source, which should help social media moderators better track coordinated misinformation campaigns.
[…]
A generative model’s hyperparameters are the variables it uses to guide its self-learning process. So if you can figure out what the various hyperparameters are, you can figure out what model used them to create that image.
Google and Apple Inc. face a sweeping probe into the “duopoly” power of their mobile ecosystems, in the U.K. antitrust watchdog’s latest attack on Silicon Valley.
The increasingly tech-focused Competition and Markets Authority opened a 12-month market study into broad aspects of the iOS and Android systems, saying it feared the companies’ dominance is stifling competition. The investigation adds to the regulator’s separate investigations into both tech giants.
“Our ongoing work into big tech has already uncovered some worrying trends and we know consumers and businesses could be harmed if they go unchecked,” CMA Chief Executive Officer Andrea Coscelli said in a statement.
[…]
The CMA said it will consider whether Apple and Google use their position as the owners of the main app stores to exploit consumers and developers as well as their supply of mobile browsers.
Big Tech is the focus of a vast array of European probes looking at how the firms increasingly govern the terms of what people do online, often gaining insights into user behavior that smaller rivals can’t match.
The market study will inform the CMA’s move to boost oversight over the largest tech companies while it develops a new code of conduct for companies that have “strategic market status.” But the regulator also warned that the study could lead to more stringent interventions, noting that even operational splits of company units were a possible outcome.
The CMA is separately scrutinizing Apple’s app payment rules and Google’s planned changes to ad tracking.
Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) said on Tuesday it canceled about 500 flights and delayed hundreds of others after it was forced to temporarily halt operations over a computer issue — the second time in 24 hours it had been forced to stop flights.
The Federal Aviation Administration said it had issued a temporary nationwide groundstop at the request of Southwest Airlines to resolve a computer reservation issue. The groundstop lasted about 45 minutes, and ended at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT), it said.
Southwest said its operations were returning to normal. The issue was the result of “intermittent performance issues with our network connectivity.”
Southwest delayed nearly 1,300 flights on Tuesday, or 37% of its flights, according to flight tracker FlightAware.
Southwest Airlines earlier reported a separate issue that required a groundstop Monday evening after its “third-party weather data provider experienced intermittent performance issues … preventing transmission of weather information that is required to safely operate our aircraft.”
Most of Amazon’s properties including Amazon.com, WholeFoods.com and Zappos.com are preventing Google’s tracking system FLoC — or Federated Learning of Cohorts — from gathering valuable data reflecting the products people research in Amazon’s vast e-commerce universe, according to website code analyzed by Digiday and three technology experts who helped Digiday review the code.
Amazon declined to comment on this story.
As Google’s system gathers data about people’s web travels to inform how it categorizes them, Amazon’s under-the-radar move could not only be a significant blow to Google’s mission to guide the future of digital ad tracking after cookies die — it could give Amazon a leg up in its own efforts to sell advertising across what’s left of the open web.
[…]
Digiday watched last week as Amazon added code to its digital properties to block FLoC from tracking visitors using Google’s Chrome browser. For example, while earlier in the week WholeFoods.com and Woot.com did not include code to block FLoC, by Thursday Digiday saw that those sites did feature code telling Google’s system not to include activities of their visitors to inform cohorts or assign IDs. But Amazon’s blocking appears scattered.
The GNU C Library (glibc) and GNU Portability Library (gnulib) are laying the groundwork to divorce themselves from the troubled Free Software Foundation by removing the requirement for copyright assignment.
This move follows in the footsteps of the same shift by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on 2 June.
Like many projects under the GNU umbrella, glibc and gnulib – the GNU Project’s C standard library and a collection of subroutines designed to ease cross-platform porting respectively – allow anyone to contribute code. Those doing so are asked to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation – for now, at least.
[…]
“The changes to accept patches with or without FSF copyright assignment would be effective on August 2nd, and would apply to all open branches.”
[…]
Andrew Katz, managing partner and head of tech and IP at Moorcrofts Corporate Law, said of the move: “My view is that the GPL is sufficient in itself. For GPL, licence in = licence out seems to be the fairest approach from both the developers’ and the project’s perspective, and it means that, ultimately, the developers remain in control of their code.
“Recent questions about governance of the FSF (specifically, concerning RMS’s departure and reinstatement) may cause people to be concerned about the quality of that governance as regards licensing decisions. Assigning copyright to an organisation requires a significant amount of trust, and developers may understandably be concerned that trusting a third party (whether a business or a not-for-profit) presents a greater risk than retaining their own rights in the code.”
Ukrainian police have arrested six people, alleged to be members of the notorious Clop* ransomware gang, seizing cash, cars – and a number of Apple Mac laptops and desktops.
“It was established that six defendants carried out attacks of malicious software such as ‘ransomware’ on the servers of American and [South] Korean companies,” alleged Ukraine’s national police force in a statement published at lunchtime today.
Ukrainian Police’s stash of seized cash from Clop ransomware gang Pic via: Ukraine police
While the gang is notorious in the West for indiscriminately targeting well-off companies and extorting ransoms in exchange for decryption keys, its most shocking moment was when a poorly secured Accellion file transfer appliance gave the criminals access to defence contractor Bombardier. There the criminals were able to copy blueprints for an airborne early warning radar fitted to the company’s flagship AWACS-style military jet.
The six suspects were arrested in joint raids carried out with South Korean law enforcement authorities earlier today, cops in Ukraine said.
Back in December, Clop had targeted a South Korean retailer, E-Land, reportedly stealing two million credit card details over a 12-month period. Cops in South Korea apparently identified the Clop suspects soon after.
Alibaba’s Chinese shopping operation Taobao has suffered a data breach of over a billion data points including usernames and mobile phone numbers. The info was lifted from the site by a crawler developed by an affiliate marketer.
Chinese outlet 163.comreported the case last week and today it was picked up by the Wall Street Journal.
Both reports state that a developer created a crawler that was able to reach beneath information available to the human eye on Taobao, and that the crawler operated for several months before Alibaba noticed the effort.
163.com suggests the source of the crawler was a company that makes money from affiliate referrals to Taobao, and that the site was scraped from November 2019 until Alibaba noticed the activity in July 2020. Alibaba notified authorities, an investigation commenced, and the matter landed in the People’s Court of Suiyang District — which in May convicted a developer and his employer of lifting the data.
Both were sentenced to three years inside.
Thankfully, the perps appear not to have shared the data, instead hoarding it for their own purposes.
When does the Alpha challenge drop begin and how much funding is available?
The Alpha challenge drop is now open and closes for proposals on 4 August 2021. The value of individual contracts offered throughout the entire Space to Innovate Campaign will be from £125k to £400k, with durations of the contracts expected to be from 6 months to 18 months. The amount of funding available for the entire Space to Innovate Campaign is expected to be £2m, with the campaign ending on 31 March 2023.
The second Bravo challenge drop will address challenges focusing on ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) and SSA (Space Situational Awareness).
[…]
Alpha drop challenges
Challenge 1: Visualisation tools to enable space operators to exploit information gathered from multiple data sources
For challenge 1, DASA is looking for novel solutions that could help to address issues such as:
enhancing the situational awareness around an object
understanding and monitoring manoeuvres and changes of objects in orbit
streamlining ingestion issues with multiple data sources and different naming conventions
using machine learning to enhance our understanding and interrogation of the data presented & make sense of results
visualising uncertainty in data
Challenge 2: Novel methods for characterising objects in space and their intent
For challenge 2, DASA is looking for novel solutions that could help to address issues such as:
detecting changes of state and predicting future changes
exploiting non-traditional sensor configurations including bi- or multi-static configurations and the repurposing of existing facilities
technologies that allow resolution of individual features on an observed satellite, inferring information regarding payloads
observing the interaction and cooperation between satellites in formation in low Earth orbit (LEO) or geostationary Earth orbit (GEO)
satellite overflight warning of Earth observation missions primarily in LEO
asset protection for high value satellites operating in GEO
China’s heavy investment in airpower-related facilities in the region is already being leveraged by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), as evidenced by an unprecedented level of activity along the Sino-Indian border as of late. This is in addition to massive growth in ground-based air defenses, as well as the construction of new fortifications, heliports, and rail lines into the area. As such, there is more going on here than just some defensive upgrades and the strategic implications are potentially severe.
With that in mind, The War Zone brought in some of the best satellite image analysts we know, virtually a who’s-who of the strongest voices in Twitter’s open-source intelligence community who also specialize in develpments in Asia. We want to actually show you via satellite imagery exactly what we mean when we say China is massively expanding its air combat capability footprint in the far western areas of the country, as well as what it all means.
According to the study, 56% of foundations and eye products, 48% of lip products and 47% of mascaras tested were found to contain high levels of fluorine, which is an indicator of PFAS use in the product. . Credit: University of Notre Dame
Many cosmetics sold in the United States and Canada likely contain high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a potentially toxic class of chemicals linked to a number of serious health conditions, according to new research from the University of Notre Dame.
Scientists tested more than 200 cosmetics including concealers, foundations, eye and eyebrow products and various lip products. According to the study, 56 percent of foundations and eye products, 48 percent of lip products and 47 percent of mascaras tested were found to contain high levels of fluorine, which is an indicator of PFAS use in the product. The study was recently published in the journal of Environmental Science and Technology Letters.
“These results are particularly concerning when you consider the risk of exposure to the consumer combined with the size and scale of a multibillion-dollar industry that provides these products to millions of consumers daily,” Graham Peaslee, professor of physics at Notre Dame and principal investigator of the study, said. “There’s the individual risk—these are products that are applied around the eyes and mouth with the potential for absorption through the skin or at the tear duct, as well as possible inhalation or ingestion. PFAS is a persistent chemical—when it gets into the bloodstream, it stays there and accumulates. There’s also the additional risk of environmental contamination associated with the manufacture and disposal of these products, which could affect many more people.”
Previously found in nonstick cookware, treated fabrics, fast food wrappers and, most recently, the personal protective equipment used by firefighters across the country, PFAS are known as “forever chemicals,” because the chemical compounds don’t naturally degrade—which means they end up contaminating groundwater for decades after their release into the environment. Use of PFAS in foam fire suppressants has been linked to contaminated drinking water systems, prompting the Department of Defense to switch to environmentally safer alternatives, for example.
Studies have linked certain PFAS to kidney cancer, testicular cancer, hypertension, thyroid disease, low birth weight and immunotoxicity in children.
Peaslee and the research team tested products purchased at retail locations in the United States as well as products purchased online in Canada. The study found high levels of fluorine in liquid lipsticks, waterproof mascaras and foundations often advertised as “long-lasting” and “wear-resistant.” Peaslee said this not entirely surprising, given PFAS are often used for their water resistance and film-forming properties.
What is more concerning is that 29 products with high fluorine concentrations were tested further and found to contain between four and 13 specific PFAS, only one of these items tested listed PFAS as an ingredient on the product label.
“This is a red flag,” Peaslee said. “Our measurements indicate widespread use of PFAS in these products—but it’s important to note that the full extent of use of fluorinated chemicals in cosmetics is hard to estimate due to lack of strict labeling requirements in both countries.”
Peaslee’s novel method of detecting PFAS in a wide variety of materials has helped reduce the use of “forever chemicals” in consumer and industrial products.
Following a study from his lab in 2017, fast food chains that discovered their wrappers contained PFAS switched to alternative options. Peaslee continues to receive samples of firefighter turnout gear from fire departments around the world to test for PFAS, and his research has spurred conversations within the firefighter community to eliminate use of “forever chemicals” in various articles of personal protective equipment.
The enzyme cocktail includes PETase and MHETase. These are produced by a type of bacteria that feeds on PET plastic (often found in plastic bottles) dubbed Ideonella Sakaiensis.
Professor John McGeehan from the University of Portsmouth, said in a statement to news agency PA, “Currently, we get those building blocks from fossil resources such as oil and gas, which is really unsustainable. But if we can add enzymes to the waste plastic, we can start to break it down in a matter of days.”
Reuters
In 2018, McGeehan was the one who accidentally developed the first enzyme that feasted on plastic. However, the original enzyme was still slower in its process.Researchers from the team were working on different ways they could speed up the process and one such method was fusing a combination of enzymes, making a cocktail of sorts.
McGeehan explains, “PETase attacks the surface of the plastics and MHETase chops things up further, so it seemed natural to see if we could use them together, mimicking what happens in nature. Our first experiments showed that they did indeed work better together, so we decided to try to physically link them.”
He added, “It took a great deal of work on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was worth the effort – we were delighted to see that our new chimeric enzyme is up to three times faster than the naturally evolved separate enzymes, opening new avenues for further improvements.”
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Apart from PET, the enzyme can also help in degrading PEF or polyethene furoate that are found in beer bottles. Sadly these are the only two kinds of plastic it can degrade. However, McGeehan claims that they’re working on trying combinations with other enzymes to bridge this gap.
Lawmakers in the House have introduced five new bills that would place significant limits on major tech companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.The proposed legislation is part of a broader effort to step up antitrust enforcement against tech giants.The bills would place new limits on the companies’ ability to acquire new business and change how they treat their own services compared with competitors.
“From Amazon and Facebook to Google and Apple, it is clear that these unregulated tech giants have become too big to care and too powerful to ever put people over profit,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal said in a statement. “By reasserting the power of Congress, our landmark bipartisan bills rein in anti-competitive behavior, prevent monopolistic practices, and restore fairness and competition while finally leveling the playing field and allowing innovation to thrive.”
The bills include:
The American Choice and Innovation Online Act: A measure that would prevent tech platforms from advantaging their own business over a competitor. Rep. David Cicilline, chair of the House Antitrust subcommittee, said the bill would prevent Amazon “from manipulating their marketplaces to promote their own products.” It could also address concerns that Apple preferences its own services in the App Store.
The Ending Platform Monopolies Act: Co-authored by Rep. Jayapal, whose district includes Amazon, the bill targets the online retail giant. It would prevent big tech companies from “selling products in marketplaces they control.”
The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act: The bill would prevent “dominant platforms” from acquiring companies that represent “competitive threats.” Members of Congress have previously questioned Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook’s aggressive pursuit of competitors.
The ‘Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act of 2021: The bill would help the FTC and Department of Justice raise more money for antitrust enforcement by increasing the fees companies pay when requesting government approval for acquisitions.
Notably, the bills have bipartisan support, as limiting the power of big tech platforms has been a rare source of bipartisan agreement in Congress. Though the bills don’t name individual companies, the legislation could have a significant impact on Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, which have faced increasing scrutiny from Congress over their business practices and market dominance.
A team of researchers in Germany and Australia recently used a new microscopy technique to image nano-scale biological structures at a previously unmanageable resolution, without destroying the living cell. The technique, which employs laser light many millions of times brighter than the Sun, has implications for biomedical and navigation technologies.
The quantum optical microscope is an example of how the strange principle of quantum entanglement can feature in real-world applications. Two particles are entangled when their properties are interdependent—by measuring one of them, you can also know the properties of the other.
The sensor in the team’s microscope, described in a paper published today in Science, hinges on quantum light—entangled pairs of photons—to see better-resolved structures without damaging them.
“The key question we answer is whether quantum lightcan allow performance in microscopes that goes beyond the limits of what is possible using conventional techniques,” said Warwick Bowen, a quantum physicist at the University of Queensland in Australia and co-author of the new study, in an email. Bowen’s team found that, in fact, it can. “We demonstrate [that] for the first time, showing that quantum correlations can allow performance (improved contrast/clarity) beyond the limit due to photodamage in regular microscopes.” By photodamage, Bowen is referring to the way a laser bombardment of photons can degrade or destroy a microscope’s target, similar to the way ants will get crispy under a magnifying glass.
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“Technical hurdles … will need to be overcome before the technology becomes commercial, but this experiment is a proof-of-principle that quantum techniques developed decades ago can and will be deployed to great advantage in the life sciences.”
While other microscopes operating with such intense light end up sizzling holes in what they’re trying to study, the team’s method didn’t. The researchers chemically fingerprinted a yeast cell using Raman scattering, which observes how some photons scatter off a given molecule to understand that molecule’s vibrational signature. Raman microscopes are often used for this sort of fingerprinting, but the whole destroying-the-thing-we’re-trying-to-observe has long vexed researchers trying to see in higher resolutions. In this case, the team could see the cell’s lipid concentrations by using correlated photon pairs to get a great view of the cell without increasing the intensity of the microscope’s laser beam.
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