Month: July 2016

Enlarge / Hillary Clinton's campaign acknowledged systems used by the campaign, hosted at the DNC, had been hacked, allegedly by a group tied to Russian intelligence agencies. (credit: Clinton campaign.)

An analytical system hosted by the Democratic National Committee and used by Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign team was accessed by hackers. In a statement issued by the Clinton campaign, a spokesperson said that a network intrusion had exposed data on the system maintained by the DNC, but that the campaign organizations's own systems did not appear to have been breached. No financial or personal identifying data other than voter information was stored on the analytical system.

In a separate statement, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee acknowledged that its network and systems had been hacked. Upon discovering the breach, "we immediately took action and engaged with CrowdStrike, a leading forensic investigator, to assist us in addressing the incident," said Meredith Kelly, a spokeswoman for the DCCC.

The New York Times cited information from an unnamed federal law enforcement official that both the breach of the Clinton campaign system hosted at DNC and the DCCC hack—which redirected would-be donors to a lookalike site that collected their personal data—were executed by groups of hackers affiliated with Russia's intelligence services. Both the DNC and DCCC attacks were attributed to the group behind the "Fancy Bear" family of malware and intrusions, which the official identified as being tied to the Russian military intelligence agency known as Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye (GRU), or Main Intelligence Directorate. "It's the same adversary," the official told the Times.

Sometimes you need to escape from the news by plunging into a fictionalized version of it. Malka Older's second novel Infomocracy is a sci-fi thriller about the third election cycle in the world's first global government, a data-driven "microdemocracy." The first in a trilogy, Infomocracy manages to be incredibly action packed while also exploring plausible political futures you may never have imagined.

Election integrity in the world of Infomocracy is guaranteed by a techno-political organization called "The Information" (think Google merged with Facebook). Committed to non-partisan transparency, The Information is supposed to give citizens the data they need to vote wisely. Its real mission, of course, is more ambiguous. The action reaches a fever pitch and stays there, as our protagonists race to find out who is behind a series of bombings aimed at shutting down the election.

Life in a global democracy

From page one, Older plunges us into a bewildering global election season with only two semi-trustworthy guides to the madness. Ken is an idealistic campaigner for the progressive Policy1st party, which is devoted to openness and free exchange. Mishima is an operative for The Information with ninja powers and a mysterious "narrative disorder" that helps her find patterns in vast quantities of data. After hooking up randomly at a drunken party in Tokyo, the two discover they are the only people who seem to care that Liberty, a political party that's one of the top contenders for the next Supermajority, is quietly spreading propaganda about the need to start a war.

(credit: M. Garlick/University of Warwick/ESO)

When observing AR Scorpii, researchers noticed that its brightness varied over a 3.5 hour period. So they labelled it a periodic variable and paid it no further attention. Now, however, a large international team of astronomers has gone back and taken a more careful look at the star. The astronomers found that AR Scorpii is much more variable than first thought, with 400 percent changes in brightness occurring within only 30 seconds. The reason for this? AR Scorpii is actually two stars, and one of them is launching relativistic electrons at the other.

The paper describing these results was published this week in Nature.

The researchers were drawn to AR Scorpii because of seven years of archival images that revealed a lot of additional variability layered on top of its well-described 3.5 hour period. Rather than peaking at a similar level each time, the output could vary by as much as a factor of four.

(credit: freshwater2006)

In an e-mail to Ars on Friday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) confirmed that the regulator was ready to begin testing hardware and software that could potentially fix pollution issues with 475,000 2.0L diesel vehicles from Volkswagen Group. The German automaker was caught last year adding illegal software to its cars in order to cheat on US emissions tests—the cars turned on their emissions control system when they were being tested in a lab and turned the emissions control system off when they were being driven under real world conditions.

According to Reuters, CARB now says there will be fixes for three generations of diesels, involving both hardware and software updates. The regulator has said that VW Group must bring its cars within 80 to 90 percent of pollution limits to have any fixes approved. CARB head Mary Nichols told Reuters that VW Group need not bring its cars to 100 percent compliance with pollution limits because the company has agreed to put up $2.7 billion in a pollution mitigation fund that will offset the damage of the still-polluting cars.

CARB is working closely with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and any fix approved by California’s air regulator stands a good chance of being approved by the EPA, too. In January, CARB rejected VW Group’s proposed recall plan by saying the company did not provide enough necessary information to the regulator. The EPA issued a quick statement after CARB’s decision saying that it agreed.

(credit: Rob Rhinehart)

The City of Los Angeles filed criminal charges Friday against Soylent CEO Rob Rhinehart, who owns a property on a hillside known as “Flat Top,” east of downtown LA. The company makes a product of the same name that consists of a “food substitute.” (In 2013, Ars editor Lee Hutchinson ate and drank nothing but Soylent for five days.)

According to a statement released by City Attorney Mike Feuer, Rhinehart has been “allegedly performing unpermitted work and refusing to remove a vandalized and abandoned cargo container from a Montecito Heights hillside.”

The Los Angeles Times reported that Rhinehart bought the property last year and put a shipping container on it in the name of “experimental living.” Since then, the site has attracted graffiti and trash.