Month: April 2017

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Federal prosecutors say they've dealt a fatal blow to Kelihos, a network of more than 10,000 infected computers that was used to deliver spam, steal login passwords, and deliver ransomware and other types of malware since 2010.

The US Justice Department announced the takedown on Monday, one day after authorities in Spain reportedly arrested alleged Kelihos operator Pyotr Levashov, according to Reuters. The programmer and alleged botnet kingpin was apprehended after traveling with his family from their home in Russia, which doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US, to Spain, which does have such a treaty. A search warrant application unsealed Monday said prosecutors tied Levashov to Kelihos because he used the same IP address to operate Kelihos and to access his pete777@mail.ru e-mail account. The e-mail address and IP addresses were also associated with multiple online accounts in Levashov's name, including Apple iCloud and Google Gmail accounts.

On Monday, US officials also unsealed a criminal complaint against Levashov that charged him with wire fraud and unauthorized interception of electronic communications. Levashov allegedly operated Kelihos since 2010. According to authorities, he used the botnet to further a spamming operation that distributed hundreds of millions of e-mails per year pushing counterfeit drugs, work-at-home, and pump-and-dump stock scams. Prosecutors also alleged the defendant used Kelihos to install malware on end-user computers and to harvest passwords to online and financial accounts belonging to thousands of Americans.

(credit: Lawrence Berkeley Lab)

A new study tracking global investment in renewable energy found that investors spent less money in 2016 to add more renewable energy capacity than in any previous year. In total, investors only spent about $241.6 billion in renewable energy investments in 2016, down 23 percent from 2015.

But they got a lot of bang for their buck. According to the collaborative report from the UN, the Frankfurt School, and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, investments in “wind, solar, biomass, and waste-to-energy, geothermal, small hydro, and marine sources [like wave and tidal energy]” resulted in the addition of 138.5 GW of energy capacity in 2016. That represents a nine percent increase year-over-year from the 127.5 gigawatts added in 2015.

The difference in trends—falling investment but rising capacity—reflects the plummeting prices of certain kinds of renewable energy, especially solar photovoltaic panels and wind installations. In effect, investors are spending less and getting more capacity. And that’s a good thing for reducing pollution that contributes to climate change. According to the report, the proportion of global energy derived from renewable sources rose from 10.3 percent to 11.3 percent year-over-year.

Enlarge / What's all this gaming blather about Ryzen? Let us explain. (credit: Mark Walton)

While AMD's new Ryzen processors offer impressive performance to workloads such as software compilation, media encoding, 3D rendering, and indeed, anything that can take advantage of the 8 cores and 16 simultaneous threads, certain aspects of its gaming performance were uneven.

It's still a very strong performer in games, especially for those who like to stream their gameplay to Twitch, but not consistently so. Some games that were expected to perform well on Ryzen didn't. Testers also observed that there were some troublesome interactions with both power management and Ryzen's simultaneous multithreading (SMT), with certain titles showing unexpectedly high performance drop-offs from having these features enabled. There was widespread hope that some combination of game patches and perhaps even operating system changes would go some way toward boosting Ryzen's gaming performance, or at least, making Ryzen perform in a more consistent way.

The last few weeks have seen the release of a couple of game patches designed to address certain Ryzen issues. AMD has also released guidance to game developers on how best to use its processor, as well as a new power management profile for Windows 10. Together, we can gain some insight into some of the complexities of developing game software for modern processors and get some understanding of what kind of performance gains gamers might hope to see.

Enlarge / This Nexus 5X, when we reviewed it in 2015, did not malfunction. (credit: Ron Amadeo/Ars Technica)

A few weeks ago, Ars wrote about a proposed class-action lawsuit targeting two of LG's flagship devices, the G4 and V10. The suit (PDF) complained of a well-known bootloop issue that either bricked the devices or slowed them to a snail's pace—all to the backdrop of warranties or LG failing to fix the problem. After we published the story, many Android fans were wondering why other LG phones that suffered the same issues were not included in the original lawsuit.

Wait no longer: the Southern California federal lawsuit has been amended (PDF) to now include the Nexus 5X, and the LG G5 and LG V20. The updated lawsuit covers every high-profile LG phone from 2015 and 2016.

Random reboots

Among other things, the suit claims that the phones' processors were inadequately soldered to the motherboard, rendering them "unable to withstand the heat." Initially, the phones begin to freeze, suffer slowdowns, overheat, and reboot at random. Eventually, the suit says, they fail.

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The LeEco/Vizio merger is cancelled. The $2 billion deal, announced last year, would have seen Chinese electronics firm LeEco purchase Vizio, creator of cheap, data-mining smart TVs. In a joint statement today, the two companies said that "the merger agreement to acquire VIZIO will not proceed due to regulatory headwinds." The companies say they will "continue to explore opportunities" to collaborate, but this particular professional marriage is off.

LeEco is frequently called "The Netflix of China" due to its popular "LeTV" video service. The cash from LeTV funds the rest of the company, which it has used to aggressively expand into consumer electronics, movie production, car manufacturing, and other areas.

The company's purchase of Vizio was a little odd to begin with. LeEco already has its own line of smart TVs and already sells them in the US, so it was never clear what purchasing Vizio have accomplished. For Vizio, the company will have to figure out what "life after LeEco" looks like. Previously Vizio was planning an IPO, but that was derailed by the LeEco purchase.