Month: February 2016

Martin Winterkorn (credit: GovernmentZA)

The New York Times has obtained internal e-mails and memos from Volkswagen Group that may suggest that top executives within the company were aware as early as 2014 that many of their diesel vehicles had illegal emissions control-cheating software.

Volkswagen has maintained that only a small number of engineers knew about the emissions-cheating software that has been found on Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche diesel vehicles. The company has said that Martin Winterkorn, the CEO of Volkswagen Group when then scandal broke, did not know that any illegal software existed on US cars. Winterkorn stepped down from his position shortly after the news of the company’s wrongdoing broke.

If executives were aware that their cars had emissions system cheating software on them before the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notified the company that it was in violation of federal rules, Volkswagen Group could face harsher fines and penalties for failing to disclose to shareholders issues that could materially affect the company’s stock price.

Politicians are often criticized for living up to their promises. For the Idaho Republican Party, however, doing so may end up leaving schools open to constitutional battles.

Last year, the state Republican party's central committee officially endorsed using the Bible in the state's public schools. Although the Bible has valid educational uses in a number of classes, the resolution included a huge laundry list of possible topics where it could apply, and those included a number of sciences, specifically astronomy, biology, and geology.

At the time, it wasn't at all clear how an ancient religious text would inform modern scientific understanding. But that hasn't stopped the Idaho Senate's Education Committee, which has proposed a bill with language that precisely mimics the central committee's document. The only significant additional text in the bill involves repealing existing Idaho education law in order to make room for the Bible.

Enlarge (credit: SimpliSafe.com)

A security system used in more than 200,000 homes has an unfixable flaw that allows tech-savvy burglars to disarm the alarm from as far away as a few hundred feet.

The wireless home security system from SimpliSafe is marketed as costing less than competing ones and being easier to install, since it doesn't use wires for one component to communicate with another. But according to Andrew Zonenberg, a researcher with security firm IOActive, the system's keypad uses the same personal identification number with no encryption each time it sends a message to the main base station. That opens the system to what's known as a replay attack, in which an attacker records the authentication code sent by the valid keypad and then recycles it when sending rogue commands transmitted over the same radio frequency.

"Unfortunately, there is no easy workaround for the issue since the keypad happily sends unencrypted PINs out to anyone listening," Zonenberg wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. "Normally, the vendor would fix the vulnerability in a new firmware version by adding cryptography to the protocol. However, this is not an option for the affected SimpliSafe products because the microcontrollers in currently shipped hardware are one-time programmable. This means that field upgrades of existing systems are not possible; all existing keypads and base stations will need to be replaced."

The recent detection of gravitational waves did more than just confirm Einstein's theory of relativity; it provided our first direct observational evidence of the existence of black holes. That finding highlights LIGO's new job as an astronomical observatory, able to track some of the most energetic events in the Universe—and possibly discover entirely new classes of events.

But with only two detectors, it's hard to pinpoint where an event is happening. That also makes it hard to direct other instruments to the site, meaning we can't observe the event in visible light or other wavelengths. Which would be rather disappointing if the event's gravitational signal suggests it's something new. Things will get somewhat better when the European VIRGO instrument and Japan's KAGRA detector are integrated with LIGO.

But things are likely to get even better with LIGO-India, which would place a LIGO-style interferometer at a site to be determined in India. While approval only came this week, the project has been under consideration for a while. The site-selection process has already started, and a facility is being built that would receive and validate the LIGO hardware before its installation.