Month: January 2016

A conceptualization of the electric BUDD-e. (credit: Volkswagen)

As Volkswagen began its European recall of hundreds of thousands of diesel vehicles with defeat devices, it's also pushing forward with publicity for its forthcoming electric vehicles. A company official recently made a comment to a reporter at Car Magazine to indicate that Volkswagen would be moving forward with a concept design for an electric van that was on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month.

According to Car Magazine, Volkswagen’s head of electronic development, Dr. Volkmar Tanneberger, said that by 2020, Volkswagen would start serial production of an electric van using Volkswagen’s “Modular Electric Toolkit” (abbreviated MEB from the German) called the BUDD-e. "You will see a car that looks a lot like this,” Tanneberger said, referring to the car’s “microbus” design.

In a press release at the beginning of January, Volkswagen said that its BUDD-e concept car had a range of 233 miles, based on a drive-cycle estimate using the Environmental Protection Agency’s guidelines, and incorporated a flat battery with a motor at the front and rear axles. The concept car envisioned a high level of Internet connectivity, with touch panels instead of buttons and digital screens instead of analog mirrors. At the time, Volkswagen said its MEB platform would be the basis for its electric vehicles by 2019, but the BUDD-e vehicle was merely referred to as a concept.

(credit: Ben Hudson)

Maintainers of the OpenSSL cryptographic code library have fixed a high-severity vulnerability that made it possible for attackers to obtain the key that decrypts communications secured in HTTPS and other transport layer security channels.

While the potential impact is high, the vulnerability can be exploited only when a variety of conditions are met. First, it's present only in OpenSSL version 1.0.2. Applications that rely on it must use groups based on the digital signature algorithm to generate ephemeral keys based on the Diffie Hellman key exchange. By default, servers that do this will reuse the same private Diffie-Hellman exponent for the life of the server process, and that makes them vulnerable to the key-recovery attack. DSA-based Diffie-Hellman configurations that rely on a static Diffie-Hellman ciphersuite are also susceptible.

Fortunately, the requirements don't appear to be met by many mainstream applications that rely on OpenSSL and use DSA-based Diffie-Hellman. The Apache Web server, for instance, turns on the SSL_OP_SINGLE_DH_USE option, which causes different private exponents to be used. The OpenSSL-derived BoringSSL code library, meanwhile, got rid of SSL_OP_SINGLE_DH_USE support a few months ago, and LibreSSL deprecated it earlier this week. The applications and libraries may still be vulnerable when using a static ciphersuite, however.

A tiger doing some problem-solving. (credit: Greg Stricker/Sarah Benson-Amram)

Animal intelligence varies widely. Some have cognitive abilities that were once thought to be limited to humans, while others seem to act purely on instinct. It's not simply a matter of having large brains; birds don't have especially large ones, but they can master complicated problems or learn the solution from others in their social network.

So what can explain animal intelligence? One general trend that has been noted is that the size of the brain relative to the rest of the body seems to matter. Birds may not have big brains on an absolute scale, but their brains are relatively large compared to their body mass. Others have also noted that lots of the animals we consider smart seem to operate in social groups. These include birds, primates, elephants, and dolphins.

A new study looks at problem-solving across a wide range of carnivores and finds mixed support for these ideas. Belonging to a social group didn't seem to make a difference, but having a large brain to body ratio did. The surprising (or perhaps worrying) thing is that the brain to body ratio was high in some of the biggest carnivores tested: bears.

(credit: NASA)

Every year, the Dutch physics community gets together to celebrate the year in physics. These are some highlights from the meeting. Since it is a meeting, it is not possible to link to published work (a talk could cover multiple papers or just parts of papers). Where possible, we've linked to the research group that presented the work.

It seems that this is the year that black hole physics is making a splash—in addition to dark matter, black hole talks seemed to be everywhere at the FOM conference. Appropriately enough, I was sucked right in to these talks. It seems that since Erik Verlinde confused us all five years ago, a lot of progress has been made. In particular, it feels as if the presenters are far more confident about what they can do with the tricks they've been developing.

One sign of the progress is that the session titled "The quantum information nature of spacetime" gave me a feeling other than overwhelming confusion. The entire session was focused on the quantum nature of black holes and how the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics was highlighted by black holes. This is not because of the singularity at the center of the black hole but because of what happens at the event horizon.

(credit: Flickr / stan)

Video game mega-retailer GameStop is continuing to branch out from running 6,900 worldwide stores and into directly publishing games itself. The company revealed today that it will serve as the publisher for Song of the Deep, a new 2D underwater action-adventure game from Ratchet & Clank and Resistance developer Insomniac.

While GameStop and Insomniac both say this isn't a "traditional" publishing relationship, the deal does mean that GameStop will be the only place to buy disc-based copies of the game (which will also be available for direct download on PC, PS4, and Xbox One when it launches this spring). And while Insomniac says it will have full creative control over the title, GameStop will own the intellectual property, presumably maintaining control of the series if it becomes a franchise. GamesStop will also presumably retain most of the profits from the game's merchandising plans, which already include a children's book and a Funko vinyl doll.

"We've all noticed a resurgence of indie titles over the years, and what's awesome about that is that the smaller titles tend to take more creative risks and deliver something that's very different than, say, the AAA, more realistic titles," Insomniac Games President Ted Price said at an event announcing the game (as reported by IGN). "When [GameStop executive] Mark [Stanley] and I were talking about how the market's evolving and looking ahead and bringing more to players, we started connecting on that particular topic, and we were serendipitously working on a pitch for Song of the Deep, and sparks ignited."

Now available on Github, the guts of Walmart's cloud application OneOps. (credit: @Walmartlabs)

If you want evidence of just how different Internet retail and brick-and-mortar retail are, you just have to look at what's going on with the world's largest retailer. In the same week that Walmart announced the closing of over 100 physical stores, the company's e-commerce unit announced that it is releasing a piece of its cloud-management infrastructure as open source—publishing the OneOps platform on Github. The company's internal e-commerce development unit, @Walmartlabs, has released OneOps under the Apache 2.0 license.

OneOps is a tool built around the philosophy of DevOps—a "cloud management and application lifecycle management platform," as Walmart Chief Technology Officer Jeremy King described it in a blog post. That places it in the same space as tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Amazon Web Services' Elastic Beanstalk but with some specific differences that have driven its development and adoption at Walmart.

OneOps works with any public, private, or hybrid cloud that uses the OpenStack cloud environment (including CenturyLink and Rackspace), as well as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. It can automatically configure, repair, and scale up applications across multiple cloud providers. Like other tools, it also automates the creation of virtual machine instances for developers, handling security settings and other image configuration tasks. But it can also move applications from one cloud to another on a user's command as lower costs, better availability, available bandwidth, security, capacity, or other technological advantages dictate.

The Dell XPS 15.

Laptop size is a personal preference. Having owned numerous 15- and 13-inch laptops and used various 11-inch ones, 13 inches is very much my sweet spot: a big-enough screen that I can have a bunch of open windows and a small-enough package that it's not too burdensome to carry around or use on the plane. Indeed, if you were to judge the market by what technology sites most commonly talk about and prefer (and by what most technology writers seem to use for their own personal machines) you'd probably think that 13-inch laptops, or perhaps smaller, were the standard mainstream option.

But they're not. Depending on which part of the world you're in, the typical screen size is 14 or 15 inches. Increasing the size of the screen lifts a lot of the constraints found in smaller devices. The Ultrabook class systems all use processors with a 15W thermal and power envelope, which limits them to a maximum of two cores and four threads. The power and cooling constraints similarly tend to preclude the use of discrete GPUs, forcing them to stick with the integrated parts built in to the processor. They also tend to offer only limited options for external connectivity due to an emphasis on being thin and light, and this same focus also tends to make them relatively expensive.

Since its release last year, Dell's XPS 13 system has won widespread plaudits, with many regarding it as the 13-inch PC laptop to beat. I recently reviewed the new Skylake version and found it to be a compelling mix of design and technology. And now, for the many people who want something bigger than a 13-inch screen, Dell has the XPS 15.