Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: Gammew)

Last week, Ars introduced readers to Hajime, the vigilante botnet that infects IoT devices before blackhats can hijack them. A technical analysis published Wednesday reveals for the first time just how much technical acumen went into designing and building the renegade network, which just may be the Internet's most advanced IoT botnet.

As previously reported, Hajime uses the same list of user name and password combinations used by Mirai, the IoT botnet that spawned several, record-setting denial-of-service attacks last year. Once Hajime infects an Internet-connected camera, DVR, and other Internet-of-things device, the malware blocks access to four ports known to be the most widely used vectors for infecting IoT devices. It also displays a cryptographically signed message on infected device terminals that describes its creator as "just a white hat, securing some systems."

Not your father's IoT botnet

But unlike the bare-bones functionality found in Mirai, Hajime is a full-featured package that gives the botnet reliability, stealth, and reliance that's largely unparalleled in the IoT landscape. Wednesday's technical analysis, which was written by Pascal Geenens, a researcher at security firm Radware, makes clear that the unknown person or people behind Hajime invested plenty of time and talent.

Any programmer of a certain age likely has a horror story about some rinky-dink coding and workflow environment that forced them to hack together a working app under extreme hardware and software constraints. Still, we're pretty sure none of those stories can beat the keyboard-free coding environment that Masahiro Sakurai apparently used to create the first Kirby's Dream Land.

The tidbit comes from a talk Sakurai gave ahead of a Japanese orchestral performance celebrating the 25th anniversary of the original Game Boy release of Kirby's Dream Land in 1992. As reported by Game Watch (and wonderfully translated by the Patreon-supported Source Gaming), Sakurai recalled how HAL Laboratory was using a Twin Famicom as a development kit at the time. Trying to program on the hardware, which combined a cartridge-based Famicom and the disk-based Famicom Disk System, was “like using a lunchbox to make lunch,” Sakurai said.

As if the limited power wasn't bad enough, Sakurai revealed that the Twin Famicom testbed they were using "didn’t even have keyboard support, meaning values had to be input using a trackball and an on-screen keyboard." Those kinds of visual programming languages may be fashionable now, but having a physical keyboard to type in values or edit instruction would have probably still been welcome back in the early '90s.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Controversial UK cardiologist Aseem Malhotra has once again published an editorial disputing decades of research linking diets high in saturated fats with heart disease—much to the annoyance of health experts and researchers.

Malhotra, who maintains a high profile on media sites and television, has long advocated for high-fat diets, and he has blamed the rise of obesity and other health problems solely on sugar and processed foods. He has written scores of editorials and recently produced a documentary on the matter. Last year, Malhotra drew intense backlash from health experts after co-writing a report that encouraged people with type II diabetes and obesity to fight their diseases by eating more fat and ditching efforts to keep track of calories.

The report was written secretly and released by the National Obesity Forum, for which Malhotra was also a senior advisor. The Forum is funded by the meat industry and drug companies.

Enlarge / NASA's current plans for its next generation of spacesuits. (credit: NASA Inspector General)

When NASA began developing a rocket and spacecraft to return humans to the Moon a decade ago as part of the Constellation Program, the space agency started to think about the kinds of spacesuits astronauts would need in deep space and on the lunar surface. After this consideration, NASA awarded a $148 million contract to Oceaneering International, Inc. in 2009 to develop and produce such a spacesuit.

However, President Obama canceled the Constellation program just a year later, in early 2010. Later that year, senior officials at the Johnson Space Center recommended canceling the Constellation spacesuit contract because the agency had its own engineers working on a new spacesuit and, well, NASA no longer had a clear need for deep-space spacesuits. However, the Houston officials were overruled by agency leaders at NASA's headquarters in Washington, DC.

A new report released Wednesday by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin sharply criticizes this decision. "The continuation of this contract did not serve the best interests of the agency’s spacesuit technology development efforts," the report states. In fact, the report found that NASA essentially squandered $80.6 million on the Oceaneering contract before it was finally ended last year.

It's going to be a busy year for racing games. At some point, we expect Gran Turismo Sport to finally arrive, Forza Motorsport 7 is on its way, and then there's Project Cars 2. The first Project Cars, which arrived a couple of years ago, was an uncompromising sim racer of the kind hitherto unknown on consoles. It was also fiendishly difficult, something fans seized upon as proof of just how good a simulation it was compared to, say, Forza. But here's the thing: just because a game is very hard to master, that doesn't necessarily mean it's accurate to the real thing. Reassuringly, that's a view shared by Rod Chong, COO at Slightly Mad Studios, the game's developer.

"If you look at sim racing as a whole, there's this misconception that it needs to be really, really difficult, or it's not a sim. This is not simulation, that's not reality," Chong told me. So it's heartening to hear that in the quest to improve the game's physics—particularly the tire model—Project Cars 2 should be both a more accurate simulation of real life but also a much more accessible game.

Enlarge (credit: Comcast)

The nation's biggest home Internet and mobile broadband providers say they're big fans of net neutrality—but they're also really glad that the Federal Communications Commission is preparing to dismantle its net neutrality rules.

"We continue to strongly support a free and open Internet and the preservation of modern, strong, and legally enforceable net neutrality protections," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said in a statement today. "We don’t block, throttle, or discriminate against lawful content delivered over the Internet, and we are committed to continuing to manage our business and network with the goal of providing the best possible consumer experience.”

Comcast's blocking of BitTorrent traffic in 2007 helped start a decade-long debate over how the FCC should enforce net neutrality. Net neutrality rules were issued by the FCC in 2010, but they were struck down by a federal appeals court in 2014 after a lawsuit was filed by Verizon. The court said that the FCC could not enforce its net neutrality rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization without reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

The thinner-and-lighter trend isn't just dominating smartphones and laptops—fitness tech companies are constantly trying to make "the next big thing" as thin and light as they possibly can. Fitbit recently slimmed down its $150 Alta HR fitness tracker, and now Garmin is countering with its new $139 Vivosmart 3 wristband.

The newest device in the accessible Vivo line takes last year's Vivosmart HR to the next level with new rep counting and stress-evaluating features, as well as a slimmer design. Garmin just manages to undercut Fitbit on price here, but just because it's cheaper and has the Garmin name doesn't mean it's the better choice.