Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: VirtualWolf)

Even as we wait for the Windows 10 Creators Update to receive its mainstream launch this coming Tuesday, Microsoft has pushed ahead and shipped the first post-Creators Update preview build of Windows 10. The next major version of Windows doesn't have a name yet, but its codename is Redstone 3, and it'll be released in about six months.

Coming so soon after the Creators Update, precious little is visibly different in the new build. Earlier in the week, Microsoft said that it's using these initial builds to make various process improvements to its internal development and engineering processes; this work changes how Windows is built without much changing what gets built.

As such, the new build fixes some bugs and changes the share icon used in Explorer and, er, not a whole lot else.

Enlarge / The interior of the GERDA detector, made reflective to increase the chance of picking up stray light. (credit: K. Freund, GERDA collaboration)

The Standard Model of physics, which explains the properties and interactions of the fundamental particles, does a phenomenal job with the things it gets right, and there's nothing that it obviously gets wrong. But that's not to say it doesn't have its issues. There are a variety of rather fundamental topics that it doesn't cover at all, like why neutrinos have a mass and what constitutes dark matter.

A variety of extensions of the Standard Model deal with these topics, but they're entirely theoretical—we don't have experimental evidence for them. This week, one of the most exquisitely sensitive tests yet to look for validation of alternative versions of the Standard Model has been reported, and it has turned up blank. The test had to be sensitive, as it was looking for a radioactive decay with a half-life at least 15 orders of magnitude longer than the age of the Universe.

Spinning antiparticles

The issue being tested has to do with one of the more notable missing pieces of the Standard Model. There's obviously a lot more matter than antimatter present in our Universe, and the Standard Model gives few hints as to why that should be, since it mostly treats matter and antimatter as functionally equivalent. A number of extensions have been proposed that do produce a matter-filled Universe, but many of them rely on a specific and peculiar idea about neutrinos.

Enlarge / The logo of the CIA's Engineering Development Group (EDG), the home of the spy agency's malware and espionage tool developers. (credit: Central Intelligence Agency)

WikiLeaks has published what it says is another batch of secret hacking manuals belonging to the US Central Intelligence Agency, as part of its Vault7 series of leaks. The site is billing Vault7 as the largest publication of intelligence documents ever.

Friday's installment includes 27 documents related to "Grasshopper," the code name for a set of software tools used to build customized malware for Windows-based computers. The Grasshopper framework provides building blocks that can be combined in unique ways to suit the requirements of a given surveillance or intelligence operation. The documents are likely to be of interest to potential CIA targets looking for signatures and other signs indicating their Windows systems were hacked. The leak will also prove useful to competing malware developers who want to learn new techniques and best practices.

"Grasshopper is a software tool used to build custom installers for target computers running Microsoft Windows operating system," one user guide explained. "An operator uses the Grasshopper builder to construct a custom installation executable." The guide continued:

Enlarge (credit: Twitch)

Amazon-owned video streaming site Twitch is taking a scorched-earth approach in a bid to ferret out who is behind a "malicious spambot." The bots have been flooding streamers' public chats with offensive, repetitive messages that have sometimes rendered their channels "unusable."

Twitch says the bots, beginning February 24, were posting an average of 34 messages per minute, with some channels being bombarded with up to nearly 700 a minute. Twitch says the attacks are "undermining its brand"—so far hitting about 1,000 channels with more than 150,000 spam messages that are racist and homophobic. Other messages, which were no match for Twitch's AutoMod tool to prevent such attacks, involved sexual harassment and the solicitation of child sex.

Twitch, which bills itself as the "leading video platform and community for gamers," says it has traced the attacks to Chatsurge.net, which offers spambot attacks for sale. From there, Twitch investigators believe the perpetrator is associated with the e-mail address of obnoxious@dongcorp.org and a Shaw Communications IP address of 70.68.65.141 located in Coquitlam, British Columbia. In addition, Twitch thinks a PayPal account associated with the e-mail feelmorebirds@gmail.com is connected, according to court documents.

Enlarge / A close-up of Polykrilos kofoidii. (credit: Urban Tillmann.)

When you think of plankton, you might think of docile, intricately shaped microbes gently swaying in ocean currents while generously providing food for all manner of sea creatures. Serene. Charming. In reality, they’re little savages who constantly take each other out with sophisticated ballistic weapons.

In a new study published in Science Advances, researchers nabbed the first high-resolution images of those impressive arsenals. The militarized microbes are packing spears, harpoons, and miniaturized versions of a Gatling gun, complete with up to 15 barrels. The images and analysis provide the most detailed assessment yet of plankton’s elaborate weaponry. Those ballistics were hypothesized by some to be the evolutionary root of similar ballistics seen in other, distantly related sea creatures, such as jellyfish. But with the new data, the authors, led by researchers at the University of British Columbia, suggest that the microbes’ arms evolved separately and are uniquely complex.

To get the money shots, the researchers used focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy and assembled the images to create 3D reconstructions. They started with Polykrikos kofoidii, a single-celled eukaryote in a group called dinoflagellates. They’re known to use a harpoon-like weapon to hunt down other plankton critters, including ones that cause toxic algae blooms.

(credit: Global Panorama / flickr)

After launching a preliminary test in October, Google has officially rolled out an automatic fact check tag program on its search pages.

When Google determines that a search is worth a fact-check notice, that data will be placed at the very top of those search results. It will always tell users what the claim is, who claimed it, and what a fact-checking organization determined about that claim.

The trick is, you won't find these results unless you specifically type in an oft-repeated claim, as opposed to a question. If you search for the phrase "how many undocumented immigrants are in the United States," normal search results appear with a mix of answers and data points. Searching specifically for "34 million undocumented immigrants" will bring up a fact-check box that credits President Donald Trump with that claim, along with a direct link to Politifact's "pants on fire" fact-check rating.