Eleven people have been arrested in Iceland as a result of what local media are calling the “Big Bitcoin Heist”—600 mining computers were recently stolen from Icelandic data centers in four separate burglaries between December 2017 and January 2018.
According to the Associated Press, which cited Icelandic authorities, the heist is “the biggest series of thefts ever” in the island nation.
So far, a Reykjanes District Court judge ordered two of the 11 arrested individuals to remain in custody. Apparently, the specialized machines have not yet been located and are worth approximately $2 million.
]]>Slack, Stride, HipChat—workplace chat apps that integrate with various project management and collaboration services are all the rage. It's surprising, then, that Google hasn't jumped on board yet. Workers are using Google Hangouts in offices all over the world, but the company doesn't offer the kinds of features that Slack does. Now, Google has launched Hangouts Chat, its Slack competitor—sorry, "messaging platform built for teams." It's part of the G Suite at every pricing tier, though the features vary by plan.
Announced last year, Hangouts Chat looks and behaves just like regular Hangouts, but it has several enterprise features. It integrates more deeply with various other productivity products in the G Suite-like Google Drive, but it also offers some features and integrations for popular third-party services like Salesforce and Trello, just like Slack does. Google says you can "schedule meetings, create tasks, or get updates from your team right within Chat."
Google also promises that the service works without any plugins, and that includes the expanded Hangouts feature, Hangouts Meet, which went live a while ago. Hangouts Meet has a leg up over regular Hangouts in the form of tighter integration with Google Calendar and automatic inclusion of old-fashioned conference line call-in numbers. Below are images from the initial announcement of the service.
]]>As anyone wanting to put together a high performance PC has likely discovered, the self-build PC market is in a terrible state right now. DDR4 RAM prices are more than double what they were 18 months ago, as demand from smartphones has pressured supply. As for GPUs... well, they're a mess. High-end video cards are being bought in their dozens by cryptocurrency miners, leaving those who want a video card to actually do graphical things high and dry. It's enough to make you want to shout with rage.
This situation has made pre-built PCs unusually competitive—components bought at scale, as part of long-term supply agreements, likely have more price stability than those sold directly to end users—but that's small consolation to those who truly want to build their own machine.
But all hope is not lost; Tom's Hardware Guide has found another source of, if not exactly cheap, at least cheaper video cards: external GPU graphics docks with preinstalled video cards.
]]>By now, there's very little disagreement that the Russian government has been pursuing an organized social media campaign within the US. But there are still significant arguments regarding the goals and impacts of that campaign. Most of these center around the presidential election, but the Republicans on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology are doing their best to get people to consider an additional topic they argue has been specifically targeted by the Russians: the US energy economy.
According to a report released Thursday by Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the Russian efforts were part of a specific campaign to suppress US development of fossil fuels. But the evidence presented in the report is pretty weak, and it seems to indicate the Russian troll farms were simply trying to get Americans to argue with each other.
The report released by the committee is a majority staff report, which means it was prepared without the Democratic members of the committee. And it's an odd mixture of reasoned argument and selective interpretation of evidence.
]]>When gun enthusiasts gather for the National Rifle Association’s annual conventions, rates of gun-related injuries and deaths drop by 20 percent nationwide—and a whopping 63 percent in the hosting state—according to an analysis published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The finding was based on an analysis of insurance data on gun injury rates during NRA conventions from 2007 through 2015, as well as rates three weeks before and three weeks after each of the conventions. The researchers behind the work—health policy expert Anupam Jena, MD, PhD of Harvard Medical School and economist Andrew Olenski of Columbia University—also looked at crime rates during those times.
They found no significant change in crime rates despite the dip in injuries. They also noted that the largest drops in firearm-related injuries during NRA conventions were in men, the southern and western areas of the country, and in states with the highest levels of gun ownership.
]]>Charter Communications is appealing a court ruling that said the ISP must face a lawsuit alleging the company falsely promised fast Internet speeds that Charter knew it could not deliver.
Charter claims that federal regulations, including the recent repeal of net neutrality rules, preempts the lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman against Charter and its Time Warner Cable (TWC) subsidiary in February 2017.
The New York Supreme Court rejected Charter's motion to dismiss the case on February 16, but Charter is appealing the decision in a state appellate court. (Despite its name, the New York Supreme Court is not the state's highest court.)
]]>The winds were howling so much in Washington DC on Friday that flight controllers at Dulles International Airport had to temporarily evacuate their tower, which suspended flight operations. Conditions weren't much better on board the airplanes themselves. A Canadair Regional Jet reported, after it landed at the same airport with about 50 passengers, that "pretty much everyone on the plane threw up."
Up the coast, conditions were even more severe, as New England residents had to deal not only with severe winds, but major coastal flooding as well. Boston is no stranger to a good nor'easter, of course, but the storm now bearing down on the Eastern United States is especially brutal by historical standards in terms of winds and coastal flooding. It also happens to be the second such powerful nor'easter that has wracked the US East Coast in just two months.
For much of the 20th century, the Northeastern Blizzard of 1978 set the benchmark for extreme snowfall and flooding. During this storm, the tidal gauge in Boston Harbor measured a record 15.1 feet. The extreme "bomb cyclone" storm that afflicted the Eastern United States in January of this year recorded a mark of 15.16 feet in Boston, eclipsing the record.
]]>Starting this year, buyers of new Lego playsets will begin to see a new type of block in their boxes—ones made of plant-based plastic.
The Danish company announced the initiative on Thursday, confirming that roughly "1-2 percent" of all Lego bricks are now being made of sugarcane-sourced polyethylene. For this material-switch rollout, Lego has made the admittedly cute decision of using it to produce playsets' tiny Lego plants—as in, trees, shrubs, vines, and patches of grass.
]]>
Imagine a mammoth, grazing 20,000 years ago in the steppe-tundra—a vast and frigid grassland where plants grew slowly under a frigid, low-carbon atmosphere. The mammoth tramples saplings, reducing forest cover and allowing grass to flourish. It devours the grass, leaving room for fresh, new plant life to grow. The mammoth and the grass belong to an ecosystem of dazzling complexity, where every tiny factor plays a role in the exact balance of nutrients, the release of carbon, and the life cycle of every species that lived there.
Dan Zhu is a scientist who studies how land, plants, and animals all feed into the climate. She led a team of researchers that built the closest thing we have to a time-machine terrarium that lets us study the ecosystem the mammoth inhabited: a computational simulation of the tundra they occupied. The results, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution this week, help to explain one of the big mysteries about mammoths: how did such an enormous animal survive in an environment where everything struggled to grow?
We can't build our own tundra, and the mammoths are long gone. So how do we study this? Imagine you could shrink that tundra and keep it in a terrarium, studying the complexity and understanding the interplay. Make it a time machine too: pause it, reboot it, and fast-forward it through hundreds of years at a time. This magical terrarium would let you play out hundreds of different scenarios, tweaking conditions slightly to see how they influence the ecosystem that develops.
]]>United Launch Alliance
America has a new weather satellite—the second of a new generation of high-definition weather observation spacecraft. The GOES-S spacecraft lifted off from Florida on Thursday evening, launched aboard an Atlas V rocket. It will reach its target geostationary orbit in two weeks, about 36,000km above the Earth's surface.
From this point, the satellite will undergo several months of testing to determine the health of the spacecraft and its six primary instruments. Officials with NOAA and NASA expect the instrument to become fully operational this fall.
]]>Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will not take possession of the Kentucky handmade long gun that the National Rifle Association (NRA) tried to give him when he won the group's Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire award.
The NRA and American Conservative Union (ACU) announced the award when Pai appeared last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Pai thanked NRA board member Carolyn Meadows for the award during the ceremony and did not decline the honor at the time, but the gun that comes with the award wasn't presented on stage.
"As you know, once my staff became aware of what was happening, they asked backstage that the musket not be presented to me to ensure that this could be first discussed with and vetted by career ethics attorneys in the FCC's Office of General Counsel," Pai wrote in letters sent to the NRA and ACU yesterday, according to a Politico report.
]]>Instagram may soon add a new feature that keeps users in the app longer (if that's even possible). According to a TechCrunch report, icons for "call" and "video call" lie buried in the Instagram and Instagram Direct APKs. This may signal that Instagram is close to debuting voice and video chatting options in its apps, features that have been rumored for the past couple of months. Instagram would not comment on the unearthed icons or its future plans.
In January, the WhatsApp blog WABetaInfo spotted a video chat feature in a non-public version of Instagram, and that discovery sparked rumors of a forthcoming calling feature. This new discovery in the app's APK could mean that Instagram plans to push out voice and video chatting in its app soon.
Such features would heighten the competition between Instagram and Snapchat, a battle that has been raging for a few years. Snapchat introduced text and video chatting in 2014, and those have been some of the few features Instagram hasn't yet implemented in its main app. The closest that Instagram has come is Instagram Direct, a standalone app it began testing late last year that lets users send photos and videos to individuals, rather than posting them to a profile as they would in the main Instagram app.
]]>Marlowe Bangeman
“Huh, a $60,000 Buick.”
That was my first thought after scanning the Monroney sticker for the 2018 Buick Enclave Avenir after it arrived in my inbox along with electronic copies of the usual fleet loan documents. A price tag of $60,000 is close to European luxury territory, as well, so Buick is really trying to make a statement with its fully redesigned, three-row crossover.
]]>Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey posted a series of tweets on Thursday to concur with growing resentment about his platform—and to admit that Twitter is somehow not in a position to fix the problems he listed.
Dorsey's tweet thread began with an all-too-familiar promise of "public accountability" (which is a clever thesaurus-twist of his usual "more transparent" promises), before then delivering what might be his most frank admission of Twitter's woes:
We love instant, public, global messaging and conversation. It's what Twitter is, and it's why we're here. But we didn't fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences. We acknowledge that now and are determined to find holistic and fair solutions. We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers. We aren't proud of how people have taken advantage of our service or our inability to address it fast enough.
That last part, about Twitter's apparent inabilities, resonates through the rest of the Thursday posts. Dorsey claimed that Twitter has been "accused of... optimizing for our business and share price instead of the concerns of society" and that the company has fallen behind in part by focusing on the removal of TOS-violating posts instead of "building a systemic framework to help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking."
]]>Attackers have generated $3,900 so far in an ongoing campaign that's exploiting the popular rTorrent application to install currency-mining software on computers running Unix-like operating systems, researchers said Thursday.
The misconfiguration vulnerabilities are similar in some respects to ones Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy reported recently in the uTorrent and Transmission BitTorrent apps. Proof-of-concept attacks Ormandy developed exploited weaknesses in the programs' JSON-RPC interface, which allows websites a user is visiting to initiate downloads and control other key functions. Ormandy's exploits demonstrated how malicious sites could abuse the interface to run malicious code on vulnerable computers.
The in-the-wild attacks targeting rTorrent are exploiting XML-RPC, an rTorrent interface that uses HTTP and the more-powerful XML to receive input from remote computers. rTorrent doesn't require any authentication for XML-RPC to work. Even worse, the interface can execute shell commands directly on the OS rTorrent runs on.
]]>A former YouTube employee has sued Google—the video site’s parent company—alleging that he was wrongfully terminated from his position after he complained against hiring practices that he claimed were discriminatory against white and Asian men.
The lawsuit, which was filed in late January in San Mateo Superior Court but wasn’t reported in the media until Thursday, comes at a time when many Silicon Valley companies (including Google) are becoming increasingly cognizant of a largely male, white and Asian workforce. Some companies have publicly said that they are trying to rectify this situation by working harder to find candidates who can do the job and who are also traditionally underrepresented minorities.
The civil complaint explains that Arne Wilberg, who is described as a 40-year-old white man by The Wall Street Journal, worked as a recruiter for YouTube for seven years. In his job, Wilberg was tasked with helping to select engineering and tech talent for YouTube and Google.
]]>Samsung’s next big phone is nearly upon us. At first blush, the Galaxy S9 looks to be a decent, if unremarkable, update. The fingerprint scanner isn’t as awkward to reach as it was on the Galaxy S8, the speakers should be louder, and the adjustable aperture of the new camera could allow for better photos in low light. The Galaxy S9 won’t be a revelation when it arrives on March 16, but then again the Galaxy S8 wasn’t exactly a bad phone to begin with.
One thing that’s all but guaranteed, though, is that the Galaxy S9 will be very popular. The reach of Samsung’s advertising and sales channel in America remains unmatched by any smartphone maker that isn’t named Apple. Given the modest sales of Google’s Pixel phones, there’s little reason to think the Galaxy S9 won’t be far and away the highest-selling Android flagship of 2018, just as the last several Galaxy S phones have been.
That means plenty of people will be looking to get the new phone when pre-orders go live at 12am EST on Friday, March 2. The good news is that many of those Samsung fans will be able to save a little bit of cash by ordering early. The bad news is that, per usual, the mobile carriers of America haven’t made buying the phone an entirely uniform process. Shocking, I know.
]]>In his State of the Nation speech today, Russian President Vladimir Putin showed computer animations and videos demonstrating three new classes of strategic weapons under development that are specifically intended to defeat the United States' ballistic missile defenses. Among them were two weapons powered by miniaturized nuclear reactors: a drone submarine "torpedo" previously revealed in a Russian news leak and a cruise "missile" drone with what Putin described as a virtually unlimited range. The third was a new non-ballistic, hypersonic ICBM capable of evading US missile interceptors.
The weapons, Putin said, were a direct response to the US' withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and its continued development of ballistic missile defenses—which the Russian government has argued undermine the strategic deterrent value of Russia's existing nuclear force. "No one has listened to us," said Putin. "Listen to us now."
Putin claimed that the cruise missile's miniaturized nuclear power plant had been successfully tested last fall and that, when built, the weapon would have a "practically unlimited" range. An animation showed a computer-generated image of the weapon flying close to the ground, following terrain contours, flying over mountains, and out to sea, avoiding seaborne air defense radars on its way to a virtual target. A similar animation showed nuclear-powered torpedoes launched from a submarine, traveling "intercontinental" distances, and striking a US aircraft carrier and exploding near a shore facility. This was the first official public announcement of both weapons.
]]>Presidential Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced at a briefing Thursday that President Trump plans to meet with members of the video game industry next week "to see what they can do" on the issue of gun violence.
Details on specific timing and attendance for the meeting weren't immediately available, but Sanders cast the meeting as of a piece with multiple others that have already taken place between the president and "a number of stakeholders" in the gun violence debate. "This is going to be an ongoing process and something that we don't expect to happen overnight, but something we're going to continue to be engaged in and continue to look for the best ways possible to protect schools across the country," Sanders said.
The announcement comes after multiple statements in recent days in which the president called out the "incredible" level of violence in video games and other media while publicly mulling changes to the existing voluntary rating systems that help guide parental media purchases.
]]>After a night of drinking, Kenny Bachman called an Uber to take him to his home in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia. There was just one problem: he wasn't in the Philadelphia area. He was in Morgantown, West Virginia, more than 300 miles away from home.
The cost of the ride: $1,635.93.
"I just woke up," Bachman told NJ.com. "And I'm thinking, 'Why the f--- am I in the car next to some random-ass dude I don't even know?"
]]>Swedish prosecutors just announced that they are dropping the rape investigation against Julian Assange, the cofounder of Wikileaks. But it’s not yet clear if Assange will leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London anytime soon.
Swedish prosecutors just announced that they are dropping the rape investigation against Julian Assange, the cofounder of Wikileaks. But it’s not yet clear if Assange will leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London anytime soon.
I/O, Google’s huge developer conference/outdoor coding festival will be wrapping up in Mountain View tomorrow. Thousands of developers have been soaking in the sun and knowledge while Google woos them with free Google Homes, raw vegan salads, and a live performance by LCD Soundsystem. Usually the can’t miss moment of…
]]>I/O, Google’s huge developer conference/outdoor coding festival will be wrapping up in Mountain View tomorrow. Thousands of developers have been soaking in the sun and knowledge while Google woos them with free Google Homes, raw vegan salads, and a live performance by LCD Soundsystem. Usually the can’t miss moment of…
]]>It’s not every day one stumbles upon a 400 pound whale heart, but when you do, you put that shit in a museum. Thankfully, that’s exactly what the folks at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) did when they uncovered a dead blue whale in Newfoundland back in 2014. Since then, biologist Jacqueline Miller and her team at ROM…
]]>It’s not every day one stumbles upon a 400 pound whale heart, but when you do, you put that shit in a museum. Thankfully, that’s exactly what the folks at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) did when they uncovered a dead blue whale in Newfoundland back in 2014. Since then, biologist Jacqueline Miller and her team at ROM…
]]>The ever-expanding operations of Uber are defined by two interlocking and zealously guarded sets of information: the things the world-dominating ride-hailing company knows about you, and the things it doesn’t want you to know about it. Both kinds of secrets have been in play in the Superior Court of California in San…
]]>The ever-expanding operations of Uber are defined by two interlocking and zealously guarded sets of information: the things the world-dominating ride-hailing company knows about you, and the things it doesn’t want you to know about it. Both kinds of secrets have been in play in the Superior Court of California in San…
]]>