Month: August 2017

Enlarge (credit: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)

Whoever was behind the WannaCry cryptoransomware worm that ravaged networks worldwide in May has finally collected the ransom paid by some of the worm's victims. The value of bitcoins had grown to about $140,000, but the currency's value got about a 20 percent boost on August 1 triggered by a split in the Bitcoin market, as Quartz reports.

After the initial wave of infections in May 2017, the three wallets identified by security researchers as being associated with ransomware's code collected an estimated $70,000 in bitcoin. The ransom payments continued to roll in over the summer, but the value of the gains amassed by the ransomware—which spread with the aid of a National Security Agency exploit leaked by the Shadowbrokers—got that 20 percent bump on August 1. That surge is because a project called Bitcoin Cash managed to recently "fork" the Bitcoin blockchain, creating what is effectively a new cryptocurrency that bypasses the transaction limits on the established Bitcoin blockchain.

The movement of the WannaCry-related bitcoins was first reported by Quartz' Keith Collins, who had set up a "bot" to track transactions involving the wallets.

Enlarge / Hypoxic areas are shown in red, where the amount of dissolved oxygen is 2 milligrams per liter, or lower. (credit: N. Rabalais, Louisiana State University & Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium)

Every summer for the last three decades, researchers have cruised the northern Gulf of Mexico during July to study the extent of hypoxia, or low oxygen levels. This summer they found the largest area ever on record: 22,720 square kilometers. This is about the size of New Jersey.

This year's "dead zone," where oxygen levels are so low they threaten fish and other small aquatic life, is about 50 percent larger than normal. The average size of the dead zone over the last 31 years has been 14,037 square kilometers, according to Nancy Rabalais, a researcher at Louisiana State University who has long studied the issue. This year's dead zone was likely even larger than what the scientists found, but there was insufficient time on board the ship to measure its entire extent.

Based upon the hypoxia report released this week, this year's large dead zone was driven primarily by high nitrogen loads from the Mississippi River, due to heavy use of fertilizers in the midwestern United States. In some locations conditions were especially extreme. "A notable feature of this year’s distribution of low oxygen is the mostly continuous band of extremely low oxygen concentrations alongshore at the nearshore edge of the zone," the report states. "Values there were very often less than 0.5 milligrams per liter and close to 0 milligrams per liter."

Enlarge (credit: Getty | FRANCOIS GUILLOT )

Cheers!—not to your health, but to your memory.

Drinking alcohol after learning information appears to aid the brain’s ability to store and remember that information later, according to a study of at-home boozing in Scientific Reports. The memory-boosting effect—which has been seen in earlier lab-based studies—linked up with how much a person drank: the more alcohol, the better the memory the next day.

The study authors, led by psychopharmacologist Celia Morgan of University of Exeter, aren’t sure why alcohol improves memory in this way, though. They went into the experiment hypothesizing that alcohol blocks the brain’s ability to lay down new memories, thus freeing up noggin power to carefully encode and store the fresh batch of memories that just came in. In other words, after you start drinking, your ability to remember new things gets wobbly, but your memory of events and information leading up to that drink might be sturdier than normal.

Enlarge / Well, it certainly doesn't look like other phones.

Many were confused earlier in July when Red, makers of ultra high-end 4K and 8K cameras for Hollywood, announced it was making an Android smartphone.

Dubbed Red Hydrogen, the phone's substantial $1,595 price tag was accompanied by all manner of lofty promises about shattering "the mould of conventional thinking" and "nanotechnology." And it supposedly has a "holographic" display, too.

Perhaps sensing some of that confusion, Red has revealed a little more about Red Hydrogen via the channel of premier tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee. While Brownlee was only able to take a look at a handful of prototypes—and even then, couldn't show off the holographic display—his video gives us a far better idea of what the phone looks like, and what it might do for photographers. I suspect, however, the first thing most people will notice is that the Red Hydrogen is freaking massive.

Enlarge (credit: HBO)

The next episode of Game of Thrones, S7E4 "Spoils of War," has leaked online in script, summary, and video storyboard form after HBO suffered a large hack earlier in the week.

HBO has been working hard to clean up the leaked files via a flurry of DMCA takedown notices—but conversely, one DMCA notice sent to Google, and apparently seen by Variety, reveals that "thousands" of internal company documents were obtained and leaked by the hackers, including personally identifiable data and passwords from at least one senior HBO exec.

Despite the takedowns, though, if you do a little googling you can turn up a short script, summary, and homemade video storyboard for next week's Game of Thrones episode, "Spoils of War." The short script (which is more of an outline) is dated April 2016, and so some details may have changed. It definitely contains some spoilers, though, if you really can't wait until Sunday/Monday to watch the full episode.