Month: February 2016

Researchers have uncovered what appears to be newly developed Mac malware from HackingTeam, a discovery that's prompting speculation that the disgraced malware-as-a-service provider has reemerged since last July's hack that spilled gigabytes worth of the group's private e-mail and source code.

The sample was uploaded on February 4 to the Google-owned VirusTotal scanning service, which at the time showed it wasn't detected by any of the major antivirus programs. (Ahead of this report on Monday, it was detected by 10 of 56 AV services.) A technical analysis published Monday morning by SentinelOne security researcher Pedro Vilaça showed that the installer was last updated in October or November, and an embedded encryption key is dated October 16, three months after the HackingTeam compromise.

The sample installs a copy of HackingTeam's signature Remote Code Systems compromise platform, leading Vilaça to conclude that the outfit's comeback mostly relies on old, largely unexceptional source code, despite the group vowing in July that it would return with new code.

Two British brothers convicted of selling marijuana are being sent to prison for two years after they mocked the judge on Facebook immediately after their court appearance. The judge had handed them two-year suspend sentences. The brothers, from Accrington, showed remorse when they appeared for sentencing earlier this month, but they sang a different tune on Facebook.

About an hour after a Burnley Crown Court judge issued the suspended sentences, one of the brothers, Daniel Sledden, 27, took to Facebook telling judge Beverley Lunt to suck his you-know-what. Younger brother Samuel, 22, wrote Lunt on Facebook "up ur ass aha nice 2year suspended," according to Sky News.

The elder brother apologized on Facebook, to no avail. "I want to say how sorry I am for what I wrote about Judge Lunt and my sentence," he wrote.

As we reported late last year, the scandal plaguing Volkswagen over its emissions-cheating hasn't had negative consequences for the group's halo brand Bugatti. It was widely expected that the scandal and its possible $40 billion impact on VW Group would result in the cancellation of the replacement for the Bugatti Veyron. Thankfully, its replacement, the Chiron, was unveiled formally to the world Monday in Geneva.

Named after a prewar Monegasque racing driver, Louis Chiron (pronounced shi'ron), the new car will cost about $2.6 million (£1.9 million) before tax. Behind the cockpit is a reworked version of the 8L turbocharged W16 engine (four banks of four cylinders with two common crankshafts), which will propel the all-wheel drive monster to 261mph (420km/h).

But it's no stripped-out racer—as you might expect for a marque renowned for building the ultimate in four-wheel excess, the interior is a riot of leather and machined aluminum. Expect it to be as easy to drive at regular speeds as the old car, too—it's said the Veyron was an easy drive even for one's grandmother as long as she didn't floor it.

The particles known as quarks were suggested as a way of making sense of a large collection of particles that kept popping out of our atom smashers. While some particles, like electrons and neutrinos, are fundamental, others are composed of two or three quarks and a few gluons to hold them together. The familiar proton and neutron, for example, are composed of collections of three quarks.

But as far as we knew, three has been the upper limit for quarks in a single particle, so that's all our theories bothered to deal with. Over the past several years, however, evidence has been piling up that four- and even five-quark particles can be produced in particle accelerators. That data has led to a little theoretical confusion, as it wasn't clear whether these were single particles with all those quarks or a composite object composed of a combination of two familiar particles.

Now, researchers who worked on Fermilab's Tevatron have gone through old data and discovered that it too had produced evidence of a four-quark particle. This is the first four-quark particle to have each of its component quarks come in different flavors. And the particle's mass suggests that it's likely to be a single unit rather than a composite particle.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a number of deals to share with you to close out February. One of the best ones is on a premium Dell notebook—now you can get a Dell XPS 13, featuring an Intel Core i5 processor, 1080p InfinityEdge display, and 128GB SSD for just $764.99. This MacBook Air-like laptop regularly starts at $999, so now's the time to grab it while a few hundred bucks are shaved off the price tag.

Be sure to check out the rest of the deals below as well.

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