Month: July 2016

With its August 2 release date growing closer, the Windows 10 Anniversary Update is nearing completion.

A steady stream of new builds for Windows Insiders on the fast track has been released over the past few weeks. The latest build, 14383, came out today and includes a wide range of fixes. As with many of its predecessors, this build has been made available simultaneously for Windows 10 on the desktop and Windows 10 Mobile; Microsoft is intending to ship the Anniversary Update simultaneously for PC, phone, and Xbox One when that release date arrives.

Windows Central is reporting that according to its sources, the build one newer than today's release, 14384, is the first candidate for what would formerly be known as Release To Manufacturing (RTM). With Windows now being delivered "as a service," the old RTM terminology isn't favored by Redmond any more—not least because many people will download the update rather than have it preinstalled by a PC manufacturer—but the concept that RTM represents endures. The "RTM" build will be the one released on August 2 to people in the stable channel, and then after several months of regular Patch Tuesday updates, it will be released as the Current Branch for Business.

Enlarge / World of Warcraft it ain't.

Probably only the oldest of old-school online gamers can remember playing Habitat, an MMO that ran on the Commodore 64's Quantum Link online service starting way back in 1986. The early LucasArts classic (dating back to the days when the company was still called LucasFilm Games) went offline in 1988, living on briefly as the revamped Club Caribe and in a short-lived Japan-exclusive version under electronics maker Fujitsu.

Now, after years of work by the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment and some partners, the source code for that early experiment in online game design has been fully preserved and posted on Github.

The effort to revive Habitat began back in 2013, when MADE was researching a "History of LucasArts" exhibit for the 2014 Game Developers Conference. As part of that effort, MADE recruited original designers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer to help decipher old bits of PL/1 code and 6502 Assembly.

Security experts have documented a disturbing spike in a particularly virulent family of Android malware, with more than 10 million handsets infected and more than 286,000 of them in the US.

Researchers from security firm Check Point Software said the malware installs more than 50,000 fraudulent apps each day, displays 20 million malicious advertisements, and generates more than $300 million per month in revenue. The success is largely the result of the malware's ability to silently root a large percentage of the phones it infects by exploiting vulnerabilities that remain unfixed in older versions of Android. The Check Point researchers have dubbed the malware family "HummingBad," but researchers from mobile security company Lookout say HummingBad is in fact Shedun, a family of auto-rooting malware that came to light last November and had already infected a large number of devices.

For the past five months, Check Point researchers have quietly observed the China-based advertising company behind HummingBad in several ways, including by infiltrating the command and control servers it uses. The researchers say the malware uses the unusually tight control it gains over infected devices to create windfall profits and steadily increase its numbers. HummingBad does this by silently installing promoted apps on infected phones, defrauding legitimate mobile advertisers, and creating fraudulent statistics inside the official Google Play Store.

(credit: HBO)

In the final episode of Silicon Valley’s third season, Pied Piper’s master BS artist Erlich Bachman is broke. But Bachman—who failed at running an incubator and then failed utterly to show up his enemies with his Bachmanity project—has a gift for spin. Somehow he turns a modest “uptick” in the number of daily active users into an incredible windfall for the company as well as the season’s most elaborate dick joke.

Problem is, the uptick is fake. Business manager Jared couldn’t face the possibility that Pied Piper—and his idol, founder Richard Hendricks—will soon collapse. In the series’ biggest twist, we discovered where the “uptick” came from—a crowded, smoky click farm in Bangladesh. The masterful sequence at the end of episode nine shows a Bangladeshi worker’s morning commute, biking his way through the crowded streets of one of the world’s poorest countries. There’s no hip music as the episode ends, just the quiet clacking of hundreds of keyboards. Is this how a bunch of coddled California techies define success?

Farming for fun and profit

The thing is, Jared isn’t the only one who knows about the scam. Pied Piper founder Richard (Thomas Middlebrook) knows, too. Actually, it turns out a lot of people know. In a hilarious sequence from the final episode, Dinesh and Gilfoyle congratulate Richard while Dinesh "accidentally” drops a flash drive with a "zombie script" that would "randomize user actions," making “fake users in click farms absolutely indistinguishable from real users." Richard is on the verge of being corrupted, and they love him for it. Finally, they have a boss ready to swim with the sharks. The click farm scam is some "serial killer level shit," Dinesh tells him. "I think I finally respect you as a CEO," Gilfoyle says. 

A human T cell under a scanning electron microscope. (credit: NIAID/NIH)

The human immune system—the powerful, complex network of cells that watches over and defends the body—just got a new weapon: autocorrect.

According to a report in Science, researchers were able to reverse an autoimmune disorder in mice by engineering certain healthy immune cells to weed out faulty ones. The method behind the treatment involves chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells and is identical the method used in an experimental therapy for certain types of leukemias and lymphomas which has so far proven successful in some small human trials. While researchers will need to do much more work to prove that the strategy holds up against autoimmune disorders in humans, the authors argue that its track record of beating cancers is reason to be optimistic.

"Our study effectively opens up the application of this anti-cancer technology to the treatment of a much wider range of diseases, including autoimmunity and transplant rejection," coauthor Michael C. Milone, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, said in a news release.

John Holdren, President Obama's science advisor, sits in the commander's chair of space shuttle Discovery in 2011. (credit: NASA)

Juno's insertion into orbit around Jupiter on July 4th made the US proud of its space agency, and NASA's planetary exploration program has certainly had a nice run during the last year. New Horizons revealed Pluto, and now a spacecraft will soon deliver new insights about the Solar System's largest planet.

But the party is just about over. NASA, and more particularly the Obama administration, have failed to invest in future planetary science missions. Earlier this year, I had a chance to catch up with Casey Dreier, director of space policy for The Planetary Society, which as its name implies advocates for increased exploration of the Solar System. Although generally an ally to the science-minded Obama administration—the society's chief executive Bill Nye often hobnobs with the president—Dreier did not mince words about the The Planetary Society's views.

"I think with President Obama you have a legacy of a missed opportunity to really build on the foundation that he inherited, which was a fleet of spacecraft from Mercury going out to Pluto," Dreier told me. "He had an opportunity to build political bridges. There’s a very high level of bipartisan support for that, and a huge amount of public engagement."