Month: April 2016

Occator crater on Ceres keeps some shiny secrets. (credit: NASA)

NASA's Dawn spacecraft is a success from both a scientific and a technical standpoint. During the nearly nine years since its launch, the probe has orbited both Vesta and Ceres, two of the largest objects in the asteroid belt. For scientists, Dawn's most notable discovery is that it found spectacular craters on Ceres, the Texas-sized dwarf planet dotted with brilliant white specks.

Dawn has also demonstrated the viability of ion propulsion as a means of interplanetary travel. The spacecraft's thrusters ionize its xenon propellant, offering a considerable savings in terms of a propellant-to-thrust ratio. Ion engines get good gas mileage compared to traditional chemical rockets, although on this scale they travel more slowly. NASA may eventually use larger ion thrusters to ship large amounts of cargo to Mars in advance of human landings.

Now thanks to this efficiency, even after getting into orbits around both Vesta and Ceres, Dawn has a little bit of xenon gas left. Originally mission managers had planned to park it in a stable orbit around Ceres later this summer, creating a permanent artificial satellite. They could not crash the spacecraft into Ceres, as is customary with many similar missions, because Dawn has not been sterilized in accord with planetary protection procedures. But the extra xenon has created an additional opportunity.

Enlarge (credit: Blue Coat)

An ongoing drive-by attack is forcing ransomware onto Android smartphones by exploiting critical vulnerabilities in older versions of Google's mobile operating system still in use by millions of people, according to research scheduled to be published Monday.

The attack combines exploits for at least two critical vulnerabilities contained in Android versions 4.0 through 4.3, including an exploit known as Towelroot, which gives attackers unfettered "root" access to vulnerable phones. The exploit code appears to borrow heavily from, if not copy outright, some of these Android attack scripts, which leaked to the world following the embarrassing breach of Italy-based Hacking Team in July. Additional data indicates devices running Android 4.4 may also be infected, possibly by exploiting a different set of vulnerabilities.

It's the first time—or at least one of only a handful of times—Android vulnerabilities have been exploited in real-world drive-by attacks. For years, most Android malware has spread by social engineering campaigns that trick a user into installing a malicious app posing as something useful and benign. The drive-by attack—which has been active for at least the past 60 days and was discovered by security firm Blue Coat Systems—is notable because it's completely stealthy and requires no user interaction on the part of the end user.

Andrew Cunningham

The MacBook is still a thin-and-light laptop that can go pretty much anywhere.

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Designing a portable gadget is all about compromise. The main tension is between power and portability: how light can I make this phone without making it unacceptably slow or killing battery life, and how fast can I make this laptop without making the battery and necessary heatsinks and fans too large to comfortably carry around?

Every laptop you can buy exists somewhere on this spectrum, and the new version of Apple’s Retina MacBook still prioritizes portability over pretty much everything else. At two pounds, it’s one of the thinnest, lightest full-fledged laptops you can buy today. But to achieve that feat, Apple uses low-voltage processors, offers a super-shallow keyboard and trackpad, and sheds all but one of this laptop's ports (headphone jack excepted).

It’s not a laptop for everyone. It’s not going to make every MacBook Air and Pro user happy. It probably won’t make most people who disliked the 2015 MacBook happy. But for OS X users who value portability over all else, it’s a decent generational bump that gets you more speed for the same price.