Month: November 2017

Ford will build EVs with Chinese automaker in $765 million deal

Over the last few months, China has been making plans and deals to wean its country’s cars off fossil fuels. In July, Daimler agreed to pair up with Chinese automaker BAIC to invest $735 million in EV infrastructure. Ford just entered its own venture, a 50-50 partnership with manufacturer Zotye Auto for a combined investment of $756 million to produce electric cars. Once the Chinese government approves the deal, the enterprise will build a manufacturing facility in the Zhejiang province to produce EVs under its new brand, Zotye Ford. As CNET points out, both parent companies signed an agreement back in August that paved the way for this partnership. “Zotye Ford will introduce a new brand family of small all-electric vehicles, ” Ford group VP Peter Fleet said in the statement . “We will be exploring innovative vehicle connectivity and mobility service solutions for a new generation of young city-dwelling Chinese customers.” While China hasn’t set a specific deadline to ban fossil fueled cars, as France and UK expect to phase out by 2040, the clock is ticking. Foreign automakers have two choices: Pay a hefty 25 percent import tax on vehicles or partner with a local company to produce cars in the country. This gives manufacturers like Zotye experience (though that company in particular already produces electric and battery-powered vehicles) while granting outside conglomerates access to Chinese markets. Companies are making deals to get a slice of the country’s EV pie ahead of time because, while its ratio of car owners is low (one in five people), China’s 1.4 billion-person population means nearly 300 million vehicles currently on its roads. Source: CNET

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Ford will build EVs with Chinese automaker in $765 million deal

Cryptojacking craze that drains your CPU now done by 2,500 sites

Enlarge / A music streaming site that participated in Coinhive crypto mining maxes out the visitor’s CPU. (credit: Malwarebytes ) A researcher has documented almost 2,500 sites that are actively running cryptocurrency mining code in the browsers of unsuspecting visitors, a finding that suggests the unethical and possibly illegal practice has only picked up steam since it came to light a few weeks ago. Willem de Groot, an independent security researcher who reported the findings Tuesday, told Ars that he believes all of the 2,496 sites he tracked are running out-of-date software with known security vulnerabilities that have been exploited to give attackers control. Attackers, he said, then used their access to add code that surreptitiously harnesses the CPUs and electricity of visitors to generate the digital currency known as Monero. About 80 percent of those sites, he added, also contain other types of malware that can steal visitors’ payment card details. “Apparently, cyberthieves are squeezing every penny out of their confiscated assets,” he said. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cryptojacking craze that drains your CPU now done by 2,500 sites

Code mistake freezes up to $280 million in digital currency

Imagine if one person’s code error deprived you of a pile of money, and there was no guarantee you’d get your funds back. Wouldn’t you be hopping mad? That’s how many cryptocurrency owners are feeling right now. The digital wallet company Parity is warning users that a large volume of Ethereum funds have effectively been frozen after code contributor devops199 claims to have accidentally deleted the library needed to use multi-signature wallets (those that require more than one signature to move funds) created after July 20th. Devops triggered a long-unpatched bug that turned Parity’s wallet contract into a standard multi-signature wallet, making every wallet “suicide” and erase the guiding library code. Whether or not you believe that it was a mistake, it could have very serious consequences. Observers estimate that there could be more than 1 million in ether locked away, which would amount to roughly $280 million. A lower estimate still pegs the damage at over $150 million. Parity describes these figures as “speculative” and suggests you should take them with a grain of salt, but there’s no question that some Ethereum holders are suddenly without a lot of cash. This doesn’t mean that the currency is permanently off-limits, but unfreezing it and compensating users could involve a bailout. And whatever happens, the incident highlights a simple problem: digital wallets and cryptocurrency in general are only as reliable as the code that guides them. The software needs to be airtight if you’re going to tie your livelihood to non-traditional income. Via: Comae (Medium) , Business Insider Source: Parity , Twitter , GitHub

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Code mistake freezes up to $280 million in digital currency

What’s under the yellowed crust of varnish on renaissance paintings

https://twitter.com/philipmould/status/927542755500359680 Art dealer and BBC presenter Philip Mould posted this video showing restoration work on a centuries-old painting . It’s more vigorous than you might expect: a solvent tailored to the varnish but safe for the paint, and the resulting slimy mix simply wiped off to reveal surprisingly clear, vibrant color. Mould hasn’t shared the secrets of what method is being used. Turpentine is sometimes used with another solvent, but that doesn’t appear to be what’s happening here. No matter what method is employed, it takes a good deal of skill to remove the varnish and not have any impact on the actual painting underneath. Details about the featured painting aren’t abundant. Mould later clarified that the “woman in red” is 36 years-old and was painted in 1618, according to an inscription. Below is a digital restoration of the Mona Lisa . The varnish and paint are reportedly too chemically similar to attempt the job with current techniques.

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What’s under the yellowed crust of varnish on renaissance paintings

MINIX: Intel’s Hidden In-chip Operating System

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ZDNet: Matthew Garrett, the well-known Linux and security developer who works for Google, explained recently that, “Intel chipsets for some years have included a Management Engine [ME], a small microprocessor that runs independently of the main CPU and operating system. Various pieces of software run on the ME, ranging from code to handle media DRM to an implementation of a TPM. AMT [Active Management Technology] is another piece of software running on the ME.” At a presentation at Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Ronald Minnich, a Google software engineer reported that systems using Intel chips that have AMT, are running MINIX. So, what’s it doing in Intel chips? A lot. These processors are running a closed-source variation of the open-source MINIX 3. We don’t know exactly what version or how it’s been modified since we don’t have the source code. In addition, thanks to Minnich and his fellow researchers’ work, MINIX is running on three separate x86 cores on modern chips. There, it’s running: TCP/IP networking stacks (4 and 6), file systems, drivers (disk, net, USB, mouse), web servers. MINIX also has access to your passwords. It can also reimage your computer’s firmware even if it’s powered off. Let me repeat that. If your computer is “off” but still plugged in, MINIX can still potentially change your computer’s fundamental settings. And, for even more fun, it “can implement self-modifying code that can persist across power cycles.” So, if an exploit happens here, even if you unplug your server in one last desperate attempt to save it, the attack will still be there waiting for you when you plug it back in. How? MINIX can do all this because it runs at a fundamentally lower level. According to Minnich, “there are big giant holes that people can drive exploits through.” He continued, “Are you scared yet? If you’re not scared yet, maybe I didn’t explain it very well, because I sure am scared.” Also read: Andrew S. Tanenbaum’s (a professor of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit) open letter to Intel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MINIX: Intel’s Hidden In-chip Operating System

New high-resolution scan of medieval Aberdeen Bestiary

The 12th-century Aberdeen Bestiary has just been digitally scanned and made available online. One of the most famous extant bestiaries, the new version includes newly-discovered details on the book’s production. (more…)

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New high-resolution scan of medieval Aberdeen Bestiary

Comcast’s nationwide outage was caused by a configuration error

Yesterday, folks across the country reported that Comcast internet was down — an unusually large outage that lasted around 90 minutes. It turns out that the problem was caused by Level 3, an enterprise ISP that provides the backbone for other internet providers like Verizon, Comcast and RCN. “Our network experienced a service disruption affecting some of our customers, ” the firm said in a statement. “The disruption was caused by a configuration error.” The outage shows yet again just how vulnerable the internet is in the US. Last year around this time, a DDoS attack shut down Spotify, Twitter, the New York Times and other sites, prompting some soul-searching from ISPs and internet security experts. This time it was a case of simple human error, but the results were similar: The internet, which many individuals and businesses now depend on for their livelihoods, went down. Level 3 internet backbone currently has disruptions affecting U.S. RCN immediately rerouted to alternate backbone. RCN service normal. — RCN (@RCNconnects) November 6, 2017 The problem, according to an expert contact by Wired , was a “route leak.” ISPs use something called the Border Gateway Protocol to find networks they can route data packets through. To figure out which routes are the most efficient, so-called Autonomous Systems (ASes) track data packets that are moving through various networks. A route leak is caused when these ASes relay bad information about their IP addresses. That can cause internet providers to make bad or inefficient routing decisions, causing packets to be delayed or stopped altogether. A good example of this is an error Level 3 made back in 2015 . In that case, a telecom in Malaysia accidentally told Level 3 that it could relay internet data from anywhere around the world. Level 3 accepted the routes, even thought it shouldn’t have, causing worldwide data to be shunted through the Malaysian telecom, which had no way of handling all the traffic. Something similar could have happened yesterday if Level 3 was, say, tweaking its routing settings and made a mistake. ISPs use filters to guard against such errors, but the scale of the internet makes it difficult to catch them all. After last year’s large DDoS attack, security experts pointed out that internet infrastructure providers like Dyn and Level 3 are particularly vulnerable to attacks. Yesterday’s outage shows how vulnerable they are to human error, too. Via: Wired Source: Comcast

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Comcast’s nationwide outage was caused by a configuration error

Quark fusion makes ten times as much energy as nuclear fusion

Scientists have overcome huge barriers in the past year to get us even closer to nuclear fusion, and with it a near-limitless supply of clean energy. But, what if there’s something far more powerful out there? According to researchers at Tel Aviv University and the University of Chicago, there is, and it involves the fusion of elementary particles known as quarks — the resulting energy from which would be ten times that of nuclear fusion. Quarks (not to be confused with the alien from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) are tiny particles that make up the neutrons and protons inside atoms. They come in six different types, with scientists referring to them in terms of three pairs: up, down; charm, strange; and top, bottom. To find out more, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been smashing atoms together at high speeds. Doing so, causes these component parts to split from their parent atoms, and fuse with other particles, creating baryons. Prior research has indicated that energy is produced when quarks bind together. By looking into one-such occurrence (a doubly-charmed baryon), the physicists found that it would take 130 megaelectronvolts (MeV) of energy to force two charm quarks together. On top of that, the fusion ends up releasing even more power, around 12 MeV. Motivated by their findings, they then focussed on the much-heavier bottom quarks. The same binding process, they claim, would theoretically release approximately 138 MeV, which is almost eight times as much as hydrogen fusion (which also powers hydrogen bombs). Naturally, this set off alarm bells, with the researchers hesitating to go public with their findings. “If I thought for a microsecond that this had any military applications, I would not have published it, ” professor Marek Karliner told Live Science . But, further calculations suggested that causing a chain reaction with quarks would be impossible — mainly because they don’t exist long enough to set each other off. Plus, there’s the fact that this type of bottom quark fusion is completely theoretical. Whereas, the researchers didn’t fuse bottom quarks themselves, they claim it is technically achievable at the LHC. Source: Nature

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Quark fusion makes ten times as much energy as nuclear fusion