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HP’s Spectre x360 13 Promises Up To 16 Hours of Battery Life in a Faster, Cooler Design

From a report: The HP Spectre x360 13 is already one of the most popular 360-degree convertible laptops, and it’s about to get faster and cooler, thanks in part to Intel’s latest 8th-generation Core CPUs. Announced Wednesday, the refreshed Spectre x360 13 also offers greatly improved thermals and other nice tweaks. The Spectre x360 13 will ship on October 29 with a starting price of $1, 150, including a color-matched pen. Best Buy will begin taking pre-orders October 4. Multiple configurations will be available, but we’re listing below the specs we were given for the higher-end model ae013dx: CPU: Intel 8th-generation Core i7-8550U, a quad-core CPU with a 1.8GHz base clock and turbo boost up to 4GHz. Core i5 CPUs will also be available. RAM: 16GB LPDDR3 SDRAM. Storage: 512GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HP’s Spectre x360 13 Promises Up To 16 Hours of Battery Life in a Faster, Cooler Design

We’re Not Living in a Computer Simulation, New Research Shows

A reader shares a report: A team of theoretical physicists from Oxford University in the UK has shown that life and reality cannot be merely simulations generated by a massive extraterrestrial computer. The finding — an unexpectedly definite one — arose from the discovery of a novel link between gravitational anomalies and computational complexity. In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhi show that constructing a computer simulation of a particular quantum phenomenon that occurs in metals is impossible — not just practically, but in principle. The pair initially set out to see whether it was possible to use a technique known as quantum Monte Carlo to study the quantum Hall effect — a phenomenon in physical systems that exhibit strong magnetic fields and very low temperatures, and manifests as an energy current that runs across the temperature gradient. The phenomenon indicates an anomaly in the underlying space-time geometry. They discovered that the complexity of the simulation increased exponentially with the number of particles being simulated. If the complexity grew linearly with the number of particles being simulated, then doubling the number of partices would mean doubling the computing power required. If, however, the complexity grows on an exponential scale — where the amount of computing power has to double every time a single particle is added — then the task quickly becomes impossible. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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We’re Not Living in a Computer Simulation, New Research Shows

Tesla Is Shipping Hundreds of Powerwall Batteries To Puerto Rico

schwit1 quotes a report from Futurism: In a continued streak of goodwill during this year’s devastating hurricane season, Tesla has been shipping hundreds of its Powerwall batteries to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Since the hurricane hit on 20 September, much of the U.S. territory has been left without power — about 97 percent, as of 27 September — hampering residents’ access to drinkable water, perishable food, and air conditioning. The island’s hospitals are struggling to keep generators running as diesel fuel dwindles. Installed by employees in Puerto Rico, Tesla’s batteries could be paired with solar panels in order to store electricity for the territory, whose energy grid may need up to six months to be fully repaired. Several power banks have already arrived to the island, and more are en route. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia Suspected In GPS-Spoofing Attacks On Ships

How did a 37-ton tanker suddenly vanish from GPS off the coast of Russia? AmiMoJo shares a report from Wired: The ship’s systems located it 25 to 30 miles away — at Gelendzhik airport… The Atria wasn’t the only ship affected by the problem… At the time, Atria’s AIS system showed around 20 to 25 large boats were also marooned at Gelendzhik airport. Worried about the situation, captain Le Meur radioed the ships. The responses all confirmed the same thing: something, or someone, was meddling with the their GPS… After trawling through AIS data from recent years, evidence of spoofing becomes clear. GPS data has placed ships at three different airports and there have been other interesting anomalies. “We would find very large oil tankers who could travel at the maximum speed at 15 knots, ” said a former director for Marine Transportation Systems at the U.S. Coast Guard. “Their AIS, which is powered by GPS, would be saying they had sped up to 60 to 65 knots for an hour and then suddenly stopped. They had done that several times”… “It looks like a sophisticated attack, by somebody who knew what they were doing and were just testing the system…” says Lukasz Bonenberg from the University of Nottingham’s Geospatial Institute. “You basically need to have atomic level clocks.” The U.S. Maritime Administration confirms 20 ships have been affected — all traveling in the Black Sea — though a U.S. Coast Guard representative “refused to comment on the incident, saying any GPS disruption that warranted further investigation would be passed onto the Department of Defence.” But the captain of the 37-ton tanker already has his own suspicions. “It looks like the Russians define an area where they don’t want the GPS to apply.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Russia Suspected In GPS-Spoofing Attacks On Ships

Critical EFI Code in Millions of Macs Isn’t Getting Apple’s Updates

Andy Greenberg, writing for Wired:At today’s Ekoparty security conference, security firm Duo plans to present research on how it delved into the guts of tens of thousands of computers to measure the real-world state of Apple’s so-called extensible firmware interface, or EFI. This is the firmware that runs before your PC’s operating system boots and has the potential to corrupt practically everything else that happens on your machine. Duo found that even Macs with perfectly updated operating systems often have much older EFI code, due to either Apple’s neglecting to push out EFI updates to those machines or failing to warn users when their firmware update hits a technical glitch and silently fails. For certain models of Apple laptops and desktop computers, close to a third or half of machines have EFI versions that haven’t kept pace with their operating system system updates. And for many models, Apple hasn’t released new firmware updates at all, leaving a subset of Apple machines vulnerable to known years-old EFI attacks that could gain deep and persistent control of a victim’s machine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Critical EFI Code in Millions of Macs Isn’t Getting Apple’s Updates

Nestle Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For

Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company, has been bottling water since 1843 and has grown into the largest seller of bottled water. But a detailed report on Bloomberg uncovers the company’s operation in Michigan, revealing that Nestle has come to dominate in the industry in part by going into economically depressed areas with lax water laws. It makes billions selling a product for which it pays close to nothing. Find the Bloomberg Businessweek article here (it might be paywalled, here’s an alternative source). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nestle Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For

Ransomware Hack Targeting 2 Million an Hour

New submitter Zorro writes: A ransomware attack sweeping the globe right now is launching about 8, 000 different versions of the virus script at Barracuda’s customers, Eugene Weiss, lead platform architect at Barracuda, told Axios, and it’s hitting at a steady rate of about 2 million attacks per hour. What to watch out for: An incoming email spoofing the destination host, with a subject about “Herbalife” or a “copier” file delivery. Two of the latest variants Barracuda has detected include a paragraph about legalese to make it seem official, or a line about how a “payment is attached, ” which tricks you to click since, as Weiss puts it, “everyone wants a payment.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ransomware Hack Targeting 2 Million an Hour

Chinese Scientists Are Developing A Vaccine Against Cavities

A vaccine against tooth decay “is urgently needed” writes Nature — and a team of Chinese scientists is getting close. hackingbear writes: Scientists at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences developed low side effects and high protective efficiency using flagellin-rPAc fusion protein KFD2-rPAc, a promising vaccine candidate. In rat challenge models, KFD2-rPAc induces a robust rPAc-specific IgA response, and confers efficient prophylactic and therapeutic efficiency as does KF-rPAc, while the flagellin-specific inflammatory antibody responses are highly reduced. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chinese Scientists Are Developing A Vaccine Against Cavities

Python’s Official Repository Included 10 ‘Malicious’ Typo-Squatting Modules

An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer: The Slovak National Security Office (NBU) has identified ten malicious Python libraries uploaded on PyPI — Python Package Index — the official third-party software repository for the Python programming language. NBU experts say attackers used a technique known as typosquatting to upload Python libraries with names similar to legitimate packages — e.g.: “urlib” instead of “urllib.” The PyPI repository does not perform any types of security checks or audits when developers upload new libraries to its index, so attackers had no difficulty in uploading the modules online. Developers who mistyped the package name loaded the malicious libraries in their software’s setup scripts. “These packages contain the exact same code as their upstream package thus their functionality is the same, but the installation script, setup.py, is modified to include a malicious (but relatively benign) code, ” NBU explained. Experts say the malicious code only collected information on infected hosts, such as name and version of the fake package, the username of the user who installed the package, and the user’s computer hostname. Collected data, which looked like “Y:urllib-1.21.1 admin testmachine”, was uploaded to a Chinese IP address. NBU officials contacted PyPI administrators last week who removed the packages before officials published a security advisory on Saturday.” The advisory lays some of the blame on Python’s ‘pip’ tool, which executes arbitrary code during installations without requiring a cryptographic signature. Ars Technica also reports that another team of researchers “was able to seed PyPI with more than 20 libraries that are part of the Python standard library, ” and that group now reports they’ve already received more than 7, 400 pingbacks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mind-Altering Cat Parasite Linked To a Whole Lot of Neurological Disorders

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: The brain-dwelling parasite Toxoplasma gondii is estimated to be hosted by at least 2 billion people around the world, and new evidence suggests the lodger could be more dangerous than we think. While the protozoan invader poses the greatest risk to developing fetuses infected in the womb, new research suggests the parasite could alter and amplify a range of neurological disorders, including epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, and also cancer. “This study is a paradigm shifter, ” says one of the team, neuroscientist Dennis Steindler from Tufts University. “We now have to insert infectious disease into the equation of neurodegenerative diseases, epilepsy, and neural cancers.” The findings are part of an emerging field of research looking into how T. gondii, which is usually transmitted to humans via contact with cat faeces (or by eating uncooked meat), produces proteins that alter and manipulate the brain chemistry of their infected hosts. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mind-Altering Cat Parasite Linked To a Whole Lot of Neurological Disorders