January 5, 2018 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

As of today, no US airlines operate the mighty Boeing 747

Mike Kane/Bloomberg/Getty Images On Wednesday, Delta Airlines flight 9771 flew from Atlanta to Pinal Airpark in Arizona. It wasn’t a full flight—just 48 people on board. But it was a milestone—and not just for the two people who got married mid-flight—for it marked the very last flight of a Boeing 747 being operated by a US airline. Delta’s last scheduled passenger service with the jumbo was actually late in December, at which point it conducted a farewell tour and then some charter flights. But as of today, after 51 long years in service, if you want to ride a 747 you’ll need to be traveling abroad. Way back in the 1960s, when the white heat of technological progress was burning bright, it looked for a while as if supersonic air travel was going to be the next big thing. France and Britain were collaborating on a new kind of airliner that would fly at twice the speed of sound and shrink the globe. But there was just one thing they hadn’t counted on: Boeing and its gargantuan 747 jumbo jet. The double-decker airliner wouldn’t break the sound barrier, but its vast size compared to anything else in the skies helped drop the cost of long-haul air travel, opening it up to the people in a way Concorde could never hope to do. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

New measurement confirms: The ozone is coming back

Enlarge / Each year’s ozone hole is a little bit different. (credit: NASA ) The Montreal Protocol, which went into effect in 1989, is a rare instance of a global agreement to solve a global problem: the release of vast quantities of ozone-destroying chemicals into the atmosphere. In the decades since, however, changes in ozone have been small and variable, making it hard to tell whether the protocol is making any difference. But evidence has been building that the ozone layer is recovering, and a new paper claims to have directly measured the ozone hole gradually filling back in. CFCs and ozone During the 1970s and ’80s, evidence had been building that a class of industrial chemicals, the chloro-flurocarbons (CFCs), were damaging the ozone layer, a region of the stratosphere rich in this reactive form of oxygen. Ozone is able to absorb UV light that would otherwise reach the Earth’s surface, where it’s capable of damaging DNA. But the levels of ozone had been dropping, and this ultimately resulted in a nearly ozone-free “hole” above the Antarctic. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

11,000-year-old child’s skeleton tells tale of Native American origins

Enlarge / Excavations at the Upward Sun River site. (credit: Ben Potter) Where did Native Americans come from? Over the years, lots of ideas have been considered, but genetic data eventually came down decisively in favor of one of them. Native Americans are most closely related to East Asians and must have come across a land bridge that was present between Siberia and Alaska during the last glacial period. But that big-picture answer has raised all sorts of additional questions about the details. There has been a long-running argument over their mode of travel, which only recently seems to have been decided in favor of boats . There are still arguments over how many waves of migration took place. And a weak genetic affinity for Eurasian populations, strengthened by an ancient Siberian genome , raises questions about how that DNA ended up in Native American genomes. Now, a large team of researchers is saying they have data that clarifies a lot of these questions. It comes in the form of a genome obtained from a child’s skeleton found in Alaska. The skeleton has been dated to 11,500 years ago, and the genome now suggests it represents a member of a now-lost population that occupied the Beringian land bridge at the peak of the last glacial period—and gave rise to Native Americans. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws threaten PCs, phones and servers

By now you’ve probably heard about a bug Intel is dealing with that affects processors built since 1995. But according to the people who found “Meltdown” and “Spectre, ” the errors behind these exploits can let someone swipe data running in other apps on devices using hardware from Intel, ARM and AMD. While server operators ( like Amazon ) apply Linux patches to keep people from accessing someone else’s information that’s being executed on the same system, what does this mean for your home computer or phone? Google’s Project Zero researchers identified the problems last year, and according to its blog post, execution is “difficult and limited” on the majority of Android devices. A list of potentially impacted services and hardware is available here , while additional protection has been added in the latest Android security update . In a statement, Microsoft said: “We are in the process of deploying mitigations to cloud services and have also released security updates to protect Windows customers against vulnerabilities affecting supported hardware chips from Intel, ARM, and AMD.” In a blog post directed towards customers on its Azure server platform, the company said its infrastructure has already been updated, and that a “majority” of customers should not see a performance impact. Apple has not publicly commented on the issue, however security researcher Alex Ionescu points out that macOS 10.13.2 addresses the issue and said that the 10.13.3 update will include “surprises.” According to AMD, “Due to differences in AMD’s architecture, we believe there is a near zero risk to AMD processors at this time, ” however it has promised further updates as the information comes out. As for ARM, it says most processors are unaffected but it has specific information on the types that are available here . So what does this mean for you? On your devices the prescription is the same as always — make sure you have the latest security updates installed and try to avoid malware-laden downloads from suspicious or unknown sources. Source: MeltdownAttack.com

Intel says it will patch 90 percent of recent chips by next week (updated)

A little more than a day since Google Project Zero went public with its findings regarding a major security flaw in Intel ( and others ) chip designs, the company announced that it is already is pushing out patches to eliminate the vulnerability. Intel has “already issued updates for the majority of processor products introduced within the past five years, ” per the company press release, and expects to have 90 percent of affected chips produced within the past five years patched by the end of the week. The flaw, which afflicts chips made over the past decade, enables ordinary processes to determine the layout of protected kernel memory. This “software analysis method”, as Intel describes the flaw, allows a pair of exploits, dubbed “Meltdown” and “Spectre, ” to swipe data from other apps on vulnerable devices — be they PCs, servers or mobile phones — running Intel, ARM or AMD chips. The solution cooked up by Intel and its partners so far entails severing the link between the kernel and these processes, though that could have a dramatic impact on a patched chip’s operating speed. The company asserts that the impacts will be “highly workload-dependent” and not particularly noticeable by the average consumer. Update: Microsoft says it will release an update for Surface devices to protect them against the chip vulnerability. The company also explains that it “has not received any information to indicate that these vulnerabilities have been used to attack customers at this time.” You can check the list of Surface gear that will receive the patch at the link above, but Microsoft says the updates will be available devices running Windows 10 with Windows Update or through the Microsoft Download Center. Source: Intel

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Intel says it will patch 90 percent of recent chips by next week (updated)