Month: May 2016

Some of the code behind the new Mr. Robot website. (credit: NBC Universal)

The USA Network show Mr. Robot has drawn a good deal of praise for its accurate (relative to other TV shows) portrayal of hacking and computer security. So, naturally, the site for the show has drawn a slightly different sort of adoring fan—"white hat" hackers looking for security holes.

On May 10, USA Network launched a new site for Mr. Robot promoting the July debut of the series' second season—a JavaScript-powered page that uses text input and mimics a Linux shell (complete with a GRUB bootup message). On the same day, as Forbes' Thomas Fox-Brewster reported, a hacker operating under the name Zemnmez reported a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Mr. Robot site that could have been used to trick visitors to the site into giving up their Facebook profile data. Zenmez sent an e-mail about the vulnerability to Mr. Robot writer Sam Esmail; within a few hours, according to NBC Universal (USA Network's corporate parent), the vulnerability was removed.

News of the vulnerability apparently piqued the interest of other hackers in the show's fanbase. On May 13, another "white hat" hacker who calls himself corenumb poked around the site's e-mail registration code and found that the PHP code behind it was vulnerable to a type of attack called blind SQL injection—an attack that embeds SQL commands into text sent to a website, bypassing error messages that would normally block those attacks. The vulnerability would have allowed a malicious attacker to execute SQL commands against the database used for the show's e-mail list. Corenumb was able to retrieve information about the backend database and the server it runs on using SQLmap, an open source penetration testing toolkit used specifically for checking for SQL injection vulnerabilities.

In this scatter plot, you can see the correlation between higher GINI coefficient, which measures economic inequality, and higher BPM (as determined by a free BPM analyzer called MixMeister). (credit: Eric Michael Johnson)

People who tuned in to the Eurovision finals this weekend may have noticed an odd trend. The often dance-friendly song contest was packed with ballads this year. Things felt a little subdued, despite the tear-away sparkle dress from Croatia and the Russian singer who climbed a wall that looked like it was exploding. Could it be that the year's political and economic turmoil somehow affected the tempo of Eurovision songs? We decided to find out.

The question of whether the speed of a given Eurovision song reflects internal problems in that country comes down to a simple numbers game. Beats per minute (BPM) is a measurement of tempo, and there are several available programs for analyzing BPM. For this test, we used the free Mac software called MixMeister and uploaded the 43 songs on the Eurovision 2016 double CD set in order to get a BPM value for each track. This data was then placed in a scatterplot on Excel along with the United Nations Gini Index for that country. The Gini Index is a measure of a country’s level of inequality. The higher a given Gini score, the greater the gap between rich and poor. Multiple analyses have shown that high Gini scores are correlated with increased social and political instability.

As the scatter plot above shows, there is a positive correlation between a song’s BPM (the x-axis going across) and the competing country’s Gini Index (the y-axis going up). While it isn’t the case for every country, on average the tempo of the song was faster when the level of inequality was higher in that country. Using Graph Pad’s Prism 7 statistical software, a student’s T-Test showed that this was a highly significant result with a p-value of 0.0001 and a t-value of 24.9838. (Scientific studies consider a statistical result to be “significant,” or less likely to be the result of a random error, if the p-value is below 0.05. Likewise, the further a t-value is from zero, the more likely it is that you can reject the “null” hypothesis that there is no significant difference.) In other words, this analysis shows that there is a strong positive correlation that is highly statistically significant.

The Missouri State Capitol. (credit: Missouri House of Representatives)

Proponents of municipal broadband in Missouri can breathe easy for a while, as the latest attempt to prevent cities and towns from offering Internet service to their residents has failed.

As we wrote two weeks ago, the Missouri House of Representatives tucked new rules for municipal broadband into a completely unrelated bill that prohibits traffic ticket quotas. The Senate had passed the same bill, but without the muni broadband restrictions, so the two chambers had to set up a conference committee to hash out the text. The final bill was passed Friday, without the restrictions on municipal broadband that had been proposed by Republican House member Lyndall Fraker.

After lobbying from muni broadband advocates, the "conference committee stripped Rep. Fraker’s language out of the bill," the Coalition for Local Internet Choice (CLIC) wrote. CLIC reports that proponents of the muni broadband restriction "also attempted to slide its language into HB 1912, a bill concerning county buildings. But under threat of filibuster, the sponsor of the amendment backed off and offered his own amendment to strip out his broadband language. The session ended on May 13, 2016, with no new restrictions on local Internet choice."

Oh god I just realized a lot of our readers weren't born when this movie came out.

Nintendo is in the early stages of a plan to bring its familiar characters to the big screen through feature films, the company said in reports from over the weekend.

President Tatsumi Kimishima told the Japanese Asahi Shimbun newspaper that the company is in talks with a number of movie-production houses to create Nintendo-branded films within the next two or three years. A Nintendo spokesperson speaking to the Wall Street Journal confirmed that report, saying that Nintendo would use some funds from its recent sale of the Seattle Mariners baseball team to help finance the projects.

The reports suggest that Nintendo wants a more direct role in managing its movie ambitions this time around, after 1993's live action Super Mario Bros. movie was a critical and commercial flop (a series of animated Pokemon movies were managed by The Pokemon Company, which is only part-owned by Nintendo). "We will be providing the funds, and we’ll be included more [in the decision-making]" Nintendo spokesman Makoto Wakae told the Journal about the current plans.

(credit: BMW)

Electric vehicles are making up an ever-increasing percentage of BMW's sales, both here in the US and worldwide, according to a statement released by the company on Friday. In April in the US, the BMW i3, i8, and X5 xDrive 40e accounted for just under 15 percent of all BMW passenger vehicle sales—a combined 2,572 cars out of a total of 17,786 cars sold last month.

More than half of BMW's EVs have been sold here in the US, which, along with Scandinavia and the UK, is the company's best market for hybrids and EVs. BMW's electrification strategy is a two-fold affair. There's the i sub-brand, which currently features the i3 city car and i8 sports car (two of our favorites here at Ars), and it's believed that a third i model is in the works, a crossover called the i6.

The company is also building hybrid versions of some of its regular vehicles, including the 330e, X5 xDrive40e, and now a 740e as well.

(credit: soumit)

Amazon's Fresh delivery service is only the tip of the online retailer's grocery iceberg. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Amazon will soon sell private-label goods on its website, including perishable food, starting as early as the end of May.

Happy Belly, Wickedly Prime, and Mama Bear are among the names of new brands Amazon will sell, and the company will stock items such as nuts, spices, baby food, and coffee. According to the report, Amazon has been developing private-label products for many years. The company reached out to branding consultants and manufacturers like TreeHouse Foods, Inc. to get ready for the launch.

Amazon is following in the footsteps of many large brick-and-mortar retailers like Walgreens and Sephora, who have their own private-label brands and products. Amazon already sells some private-label goods under its Amazon Basics brand, but those items are mostly limited to electronics like HDMI cables, batteries, and power strips. The company's currently private-label products have had some issues in the past. In 2014, Amazon had to recall its Elements diaper brand because of a design flaw. Undoubtedly, branching out into food, particularly perishable food, will pose its own unique challenges for Amazon.