Month: July 2017

The alleged source of the animated GIF of Donald Trump beating down WWE Chief Executive Vince McMahon with a CNN logo superimposed on McMahon's face deleted many of his posts to Reddit. He also issued an apology on /r/the_donald for his trolling activities after being tracked down by the production team of CNN's KFile.

CNN reported on the source, who uses the Reddit username "HanAssholeSolo," and reserved the right to expose his identity later if he did not change his online behavior.

CNN is not publishing "HanA**holeSolo’s" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.

CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

That implied threat led to a widespread negative response, with some accusing CNN of bullying or blackmail. Hacker, troll, and self-described white supremacist Andrew “eev” Aurheimer has threatened, through the white supremacist site The Daily Stormer, to “dox” CNN’s reporting team and its family members. Aurheimer is a fan of the Trump tweet, including the photoshopped WWE video.

Enlarge (credit: ESA)

Satellites seem like an obvious technological solution to the considerable challenge of tracking changes in Earth’s climate. But Earth-observing ain’t easy. A single instrument can zoom over the locations of thousands of stationary thermometers—but that puts thousands of eggs in one instrumental basket. Measuring temperatures from space takes a lot more than some mercury in a tube, and you can’t fix your instrument if something goes wrong.

Illustrating that fact is a new update to one of the major satellite temperature datasets, which ends up changing the recent part of the record in a subtle but significant way.

As we’ve explained before, satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature are actually more dependent on adjustments than measurements done using weather stations or ships. The datasets are based on measurements of microwave radiation on a series of relatively short-lived satellite instruments going back to 1978.

Enlarge (credit: National Police of Ukraine)

The third-party software updater used to seed last week's NotPetya worm that shut down computers around the world was compromised more than a month before the outbreak. This is yet another sign the attack was carefully planned and executed.

Researchers from antivirus provider Eset, in a blog post published Tuesday, said the malware was spread through a legitimate update module of M.E.Doc, a tax-accounting application that's widely used in Ukraine. The report echoed findings reported earlier by Microsoft, Kaspersky Lab, Cisco Systems, and Bitdefender. Eset said a "stealthy and cunning backdoor" used to spread the worm probably required access the M.E.Doc source code. What's more, Eset said the underlying backdoored ZvitPublishedObjects.dll file was first pushed to M.E.Doc users on May 15, six weeks before the NotPetya outbreak.

"As our analysis shows, this is a thoroughly well-planned and well-executed operation," Anton Cherepanov, senior malware researcher for Eset, wrote. "We assume that the attackers had access to the M.E.Doc application source code. They had time to learn the code and incorporate a very stealthy and cunning backdoor. The size of the full M.E.Doc installation is about 1.5GB, and we have no way at this time to verify that there are no other injected backdoors."

Enlarge / The entrance to the cave where the Neanderthal thigh bone was found in 1937. (credit: Wolfgang Adler, © Photo Museum Ulm)

Modern humans and Neanderthals have a confusing genetic relationship. One set of data suggests our two species diverged around 650,000 years ago—but other clues point to an ongoing close (that is, sexual) relationship between our ancestors that persisted until around 300,000 years ago. This is made all the more muddled by the fact that Neanderthals look like they were living in Eurasia 300,000 years ago while our own ancestors were still in Africa. And then the two groups clearly intermingled once humans did leave Africa.

One way to account for all this contradictory information is to suggest that another group of humans left Africa sometime between the Neanderthals' departure and our own. An analysis of Neanderthal DNA, published this week in Nature Communications, adds new weight to this hypothesis.

Sisters? First cousins? The genes are confusing

When people talk about DNA, most often they’re talking about nuclear DNA. That’s the DNA that combines genetic material from a mother and a father and sits in the nucleus of each cell. But the mitochondria—little energy-producing blobs that sit inside cells—have their own DNA, which comes exclusively from the mother. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is a fantastically useful tool for understanding evolutionary lineages, in part because there's so much more of it that it's still detectable in very old samples.

Enlarge / In some cases, stray methane is burned to limit how much escapes into the atmosphere. (credit: Lawrence Berkeley Lab)

The Trump administration suffered a legal blow on Monday when the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled (PDF) that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must enforce methane emissions rules that were finalized by the Obama administration in mid-2016.

The rules established performance standards for new drilling operations, and they required many oil and gas companies to conduct an initial survey of methane leaks by June 3, 2017. Changing finalized rules is often a lengthy and painstaking process, and Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced his intention to start the reconsideration process for the rules in April. Pruitt, who sued the EPA as attorney general of Oklahoma over these rules, also announced a stay on the EPA’s enforcement of certain parts of the rules that could have lasted up to two years. Specifically, Pruitt said the EPA would not, for the time being, enforce four items specified in the rules, including regulation of low-production wells and the requirement that a professional engineer certify well vent system designs.

Environmental groups—including the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Integrity Project, Earthworks, the Clean Air Council, and the Sierra Club—challenged the EPA’s stay in court, however. The EPA argued that the stay was reasonable because the previous administration hadn’t given all stakeholders due opportunity to comment on certain parts of the rules’ final wording.

Resuming an activity in Windows Timeline. (video link)

Arguably the most interesting forthcoming Windows 10 features that Microsoft showed off at its Build developer conference this year were "Timeline" and "Pick Up Where I Left Off." Timeline lets you both go "back in time"—to recreate prior working environments and restore opened documents and files—while PUWILO would enable a working session to be moved between devices—for example, migrating that half-written e-mail from your phone to your PC when you get into work.

The assumption was that these features would be part of the Fall Creators Update (FCU), the next major Windows 10 update that's scheduled for around September this year. But Microsoft has now confirmed that that's not to be the case after all. Joe Belfiore, in charge of the Windows Experience and Edge browser, tweeted that Timeline won't be in the FCU after all. Instead, it'll be included in preview builds some time after the FCU release.

Enlarge / Ugh... do you smell that? (credit: Jeremy Tarling - Flickr)

The sense of smell is a very distant fifth place in our senses: sight, hearing, taste, and touch all come before smell in our thoughts. Because of that, we underestimate both its sensitivity and its influence. Our sense of smell is what makes food tasty and repels us from rotting things. Our sense of smell evokes some of our strongest memories.

But frankly, the sense of smell is confusing.

At one level, sensing odors is easy: a molecule sticks to something in our nose. The thing it sticks to then sends a signal to the brain, which instructs our hand to grab the last cookie. But those two sentences sweep all the complexity under the carpet. Why does a molecule stick? And how do the nose (and brain) distinguish different molecules?

Data cap cash. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

There's good news and bad news on data caps for home Internet users.

Cox, the third largest US cable company, last week started charging overage fees to customers in four more states. Internet provider CenturyLink, on the other hand, recently ended an experiment with data caps and is giving bill credits to customers in the state of Washington who were charged overage fees during the yearlong trial.

Cox, which operates in 18 states with about six million residential and business customers, last week brought overage fees to Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, and Oklahoma. Cox was already enforcing data caps and overage fees in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Ohio. California, Rhode Island, and Virginia technically have monthly caps but no enforcement of overage fees, according to Cox's list of data caps by location. Massachusetts and North Carolina seem to be exempt from the Cox data caps altogether.

Enlarge / Will the third time be a charm for SpaceX and its Intelsat 35e payload? (credit: SpaceX)

After a full review of its launchpad systems and the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX has declared that it is ready to make a third attempt to launch a heavy communications satellite. The launch window for the Intelsat 35e mission opens at 7:38pm ET on Wednesday (00:38am UK), and it will remain so for about an hour. The launch-time weather at Kennedy Space Center is forecast to be excellent—with a 90 percent chance of favorable conditions.

SpaceX tried on Sunday and Monday to launch the satellite, but both times an unspecified technical issue with the rocket's guidance, navigation, and control system led the rocket's flight computer to stop the countdown within 10 seconds of launch time. The rocket company then stood down an attempt on July 4 so it could investigate the problem and has apparently resolved the issue. But we won't know for sure until the countdown this evening.

With a mass of 6,761kg, the Intelsat 35e communications satellite is the heaviest payload SpaceX has ever launched toward geostationary orbit, about 36,000km above the Earth's surface. For this reason, the rocket will not have enough fuel reserves to attempt a safe return to Earth—even to a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. This booster, therefore, will be expended.