Month: October 2016

Theranos CEO and founder, Elizabeth Holmes (credit: NBC Today)

In the past year, Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, has proven impressively tenacious. She stood firm as her once promising biotech company faced scandal after scandal—from the revelation that its “revolutionary” blood testing technology doesn’t work and her lab endangered patients’ health, to the federal sanctions that shut down the company’s labs and banned Holmes from the business altogether. Equally tenacious, it seemed, were Theranos’ investors. Amid the blows, they stood quietly by or professed their faith in Holmes and her embattled company.

All that has changed. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of Theranos’ largest investors, a California-based hedge fund named Partner Fund Management LP, filed a lawsuit against the company Monday afternoon. The suit, filed in Delaware under seal, alleges that Theranos deceived PFM in order to net a nearly $100 million investment from the hedge fund in 2014.

In a letter to its own investors that was reviewed by the WSJ, the hedge fund wrote:

A few months after hackers broke into Bangladesh's central bank and came close to getting away with $1 billion, researchers have uncovered evidence that a separate hacking group is targeting the same payment network.

The researchers, from security firm Symantec, said in a blog post published Tuesday that they recently found new tools that target users of SWIFT, a payment network banks use to transfer payments that are sometimes in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars. The malicious tools monitor Swift messages sent to infected computers for International Bank Account Numbers or other keywords relating to specific transactions. When the tools encounter a message that contains a targeted text string, they use a "suppressor" component to move it out of the local file system to prevent it from being seen or recovered by the intended recipient.

"One of the files found along with the suppressor was a small disk wiper, which overwrites the first 512 bytes of the hard drive," Symantec researchers wrote. "The area contains the Master Boot Record (MBR) which is required for the drive to be accessible without special tools. We believe this tool is used to cover the attackers' tracks when they abandon the system and/or to thwart investigators."

If you were concerned that the online team-combat game Overwatch didn't have enough blatant similarities with online team-combat game Team Fortress 2, this week's seasonally themed update is for you. Overwatch's first Halloween-themed patch went live for all of its platforms on Tuesday, and like TF2's spooky annual updates, it includes Halloween-themed unlocks for its characters, a new map, and a co-op brawl.

This, by the way, marks Overwatch's first pure "player vs. environment" (PvE) content, as opposed to existing "versus bots" versions of its deathmatch modes, and it pits four human players against waves of computer-controlled "zombie robots," along with a few higher-powered, AI super-soldiers. The time-limited "Junkenstein's Revenge" brawl dumps a team of four into a haunted-house setting where enemies appear from roughly three spawn points, and it asks players to not only survive seven minutes of enemy waves but also keep those baddies from breaking down a door in the back of the room.

Unlike co-op PvE modes in series such as Gears of War and Call of Duty, players aren't tasked with building fortifications or upgrading their own weapons. This is just pure action-survival stuff (with three selectable difficulties). Players can pick from one of four heroes (Ana, Hanzo, McCree, or Soldier 76), and once a hero is picked, that hero is no longer selectable by teammates.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday outed Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for feeding a Chicago-based company their user streams—a feed that was then sold to police agencies for surveillance purposes.

After the disclosure, the social media companies said they stopped their data firehouse to Chicago-based Geofeedia. In a blog post, the ACLU said it uncovered the data feeds as part of a public records request campaign of California law enforcement agencies. Geofeedia touts how it helped police track unrest during protests.

In one document, Geofeedia hailed its service because it paid for Twitter's "firehose" and because it is the "only social media monitoring tool to have a partnership with Instagram."

Enlarge / That melting ice? It's just a figment of the scientists' imagination. (credit: NASA)

Last week, amid all the attention devoted to presidential polls, a couple of different polls came out examining how one of the issues in the presidential campaign is perceived by the voters. Climate change has come up in both presidential debates so far, and the positions of the candidates on this issue are radically different (stay tuned to Ars for more on that). But as the polls reveal, these differences reflect fundamental differences between the members of the two parties.

In a small bit of good news, however, there is a group of people who self-identify as concerned about the climate. But even within this group, there's a partisan divide.

Don’t trust those scientists

One of the new polls comes from the Pew Research Center, which surveyed more than 1,500 US adults (the survey has a margin of error of 4 percent). In addition to answering questions about their view on climate science and policy, the participants were asked about their political affiliations, which were divided into four categories based on strong or moderate affiliation with one of the two major parties.

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Shortly after announcing the Google Pixel phones and Android 7.1, Google said that Nexus phones wouldn't get the update until later this year (and that they wouldn't receive all of the features that the Pixel phones are shipping with). Today, a blog post from Android engineering VP Dave Burke gives a more concrete timeline: the first developer beta for Android 7.1 will hit the Nexus 5X and 6P and the Pixel C "later this month," and a final release will be available for supported Google devices in December.

Google's support list says that the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 are no longer guaranteed version updates after October of 2016, but it looks like they'll be getting the 7.1 update after all. Later betas and the final release will run on anything that can run Android 7.0, a list that includes the Nexus 6, 5X, 6P, 9, and Player, as well as the Pixel C "and supported Android One devices."

Android 7.1 on these Nexus devices and the Pixel C will be missing the new Pixel launcher, the Google Assistant, and a handful of other cosmetic and functional changes. But owners of Nexus devices will still get access to a decent list of new features and APIs, including a f.lux-esque Night Light mode, touch and display performance improvements, new storage manager, and more. Stay tuned for a full look at the newest version of Nougat on both Pixel and Nexus devices when the final versions are out.

Enlarge / This naked mole rat may look a little goofy, but it lives for over 30 years, doesn't get cancer, and is impervious to acid burns. Plus, it feels no pain from heat. Welcome your new hairless rodent overlord. (credit: Laura Nadine Schuhmacher)

Beneath the hot, dry grasslands of East Africa, there lives an animal whose weirdness and hardiness are legendary. The naked mole rat, a hairless rodent with a tiny, pig-like snout and nubby ears, lives in underground colonies of tunnels and nests that can stretch for miles. As many as 300 of the rodents work together in these burrows, united around a single queen, who is the only member of the colony who can reproduce. It's a hardscrabble life, with little food and even less water.

And yet in this harsh environment, under extremely crowded conditions, the naked mole rat has evolved to be virtually indestructible: these small mammals don't get cancer, live to be over 30 (much longer than other rat species), and they are insensitive to acid burns. Now a new study in Cell Reports reveals one secret behind these rats' abilities. Evolutionary tweaks to the amino acids in their pain receptors make naked mole rats extremely insensitive to pain after they are born.

Naked mole rats probably wouldn't have evolved this incredible adaptation if it weren't for their unusual habitat and social arrangements. These rodents are one of only two mammals known to be eusocial like ants and bees—as mentioned earlier, they have one reproductive female per colony (the other eusocial mammal is also a mole rat). Females fight, often to the death, for the privilege of becoming queen and can reign for more than 15 years. Successful colonies become very large, with workers digging out tunnels and rooms with their teeth. Though their nests are big, many individuals are still crowded together in them, which no doubt causes some discomfort.

Cyrus Farivar

SANTA MONICA, Calif.—BMW has been celebrating its centenary this year under the tagline, "The Next 100 Years." As part of that celebration, the company has created a number of concepts that imagine its future vehicles, and, today in Los Angeles, the company took the wraps off the latest, the BMW Motorrad Vision Next 100.

Concept cars and bikes fall into two distinct categories; thinly veiled production machines designed to get consumers ready for a new model and more outlandish, forward-looking affairs that often include technology that's still just a twinkle in the design team's eye. The latter is definitely the case for BMW's Vision Next 100 concepts, but that makes them no less interesting.

Enlarge (credit: XDA Developers)

Samsung has been forced to cease production of its disastrous Galaxy Note 7 Smartphones because they keep catching fire, but it still has to address the problem of cleaning up its mess. The phone has been recalled twice, and owners now have to send their incendiary handsets back to the South Korean firm. And that poses a bit of a problem: if you need to issue a recall for a phone that is prone to spontaneously combust, you don't want those phones catching fire in transit.

This concern has already seen the phones banned from planes, and the UK's Royal Mail is also refusing to handle them. Samsung's solution is a fancy "Note 7 Return Kit," and it has sent one to XDA Developers.

The kit contains a special "Recovery Box" that's lined with ceramic fiber paper to provide some protection against incineration. Samsung warns that some people will have a bad reaction to this lining, so the recovery kit also includes some gloves to protect your hands. They don't appear to be flame retardant, so if your Note 7 is currently ablaze, we'd suggest minimizing contact with it.