Month: November 2016

Enlarge (credit: North Charleston)

A newly released federal court hearing transcript reveals that one warrant issued as part of a massive child porn investigation in the US was also used to authorize government malware that targeted more than 8,000 users across 120 countries, including a “satellite provider.”

As Vice Motherboard first reported, the remarks came from the November 1 hearing in the case of United States v. Tippens and two other related cases, which are ongoing in Tacoma, Washington. These cases, and more than 100 others like them, are part of a global effort to target people suspected of accessing the now-defunct Tor-hidden child porn site known as “Playpen.”

As Colin Fieman, a federal public defender who represents David Tippens and other Playpen defendants in that area, said during the November 1 hearing in Tacoma:

Enlarge (credit: Glenn Dunbar/Williams)

As is the case for so many industries in recent years, Formula 1 has been transformed by data. Each team designs and tests its cars in silico, with vast server farms competing with onsite wind tunnels to see which can use more electricity. Up to 300 sensors per car constantly measure every parameter, beaming that info back to the garage—and in turn to home base—each lap. It's a far cry from the garagiste days of drawing boards and pens or even the active suspension era and its rugged 286 laptops. It's a highly competitive sport, for the financial rewards for success are many, and so that data represents a gold mine for each team.

Under CIO Greame Hackland, Williams Martini Racing provides an illuminating example of how an F1 team can use that data and the steps it has to take to protect it. And while some of the challenges are unique to Formula 1, many of them might be familiar to anyone working in a large IP-heavy organization.

"When I joined Williams in 2014, 70 percent of our race strategists' time was spent getting data and putting it into spreadsheets, whether that was at the track or back at the factory," Hackland told Ars. To help find a way around this, the team started working with Avanade (a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture), which brought fresh viewpoints to bear on old problems. "The last year and half has been a huge transformation. We can't allow an engineer who's been in F1 for 25 years to dictate how the tools we use look," Hackland told us.

Mine your own diamonds, I guess.

I was watching Dota 2 videos on YouTube last night when I was shown perhaps one of the most peculiar promotions I've ever seen. Jeweler Helzberg Diamonds, which specializes in selling overpriced lumps of carbon, has an extraordinary offer: spend $999 or more on jewelry and, for a limited time only, you'll get a free Xbox One S.

Any inferences about what this implies about the margins on diamond jewelry are left to the reader.

I suppose it makes a little sense; diamonds are mined, one of the $299 Xbox One S bundles includes Minecraft, and one of the things you can mine in Minecraft are diamonds... but still, games consoles and diamond rings aren't the most obvious of companions.

Enlarge / Cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko climbs the stairs to enter the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft during the final check of the spacecraft, with NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly. (credit: NASA)

Eight months have passed since NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko returned to Earth from a nearly year-long mission aboard the International Space Station. During that time, the long-duration fliers completed a battery of follow-up tests, and US and Russian scientists have busily crunched away at data collected before, during, and after the extended space mission. Researchers plan to present preliminary results at a scientific meeting in January.

The one-year mission was just the beginning, however. NASA’s Human Research Program, which supports safe and productive space travel, has begun devising follow-up missions to ensure it knows enough about prolonged stays in microgravity before astronauts venture into deep space for extended periods of time. And as important as Kelly's and Kornienko’s data is, a study with just two participants doesn’t allow scientists to draw meaningful conclusions.

“It’s just not enough,” said William Paloski, the director of the Human Research Program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “To extrapolate we need to have more time in space, and more observations. We started working on additional missions two years ago.” The question is how best to collect that additional data.

Enlarge (credit: Steve Evans)

Intergroup conflict, also called civil conflict, is one of the world’s most serious problems, as warfare has shifted from the battlefield toward something enmeshed within civilian life. The constant exposure to high-stress conflict situations affects everyone, but it may have an outsized influence on developing adolescent brains. A recent study published in PNAS found that adolescents who grow up in protracted civil conflicts end up more empathetic and cognitively attuned to the people within their own group and less sensitive to pain felt by others.

The researchers who conducted this study recruited 85 adolescents from a conflict-ridden region in Israel. They categorized the participants as identifying either as Arab-Palestinian or Jewish-Israeli. The participants were shown a set of well-validated photographs of other people who clearly belonged to one of these groups, either in painful or non-painful conditions. During this task, each participant's brain activity was measured using MEG (magnetoencephalography), a functional neuroimaging technique that tracks the magnetic effects of currents moving through neurons to visualize brain activity.

The authors found that adolescents from both groups (Arab and Jewish) responded differently to ingroup and outgroup images. All the subjects showed significant brain activation in pain-empathy regions when the pain images contained in-group characters. But when an outgroup figure was shown, there was no difference in the response, regardless of whether that figure was experiencing pain. So all participants could have an empathetic response, but only to members of their own group