Month: August 2017

Enlarge / A syringe of cells prepared for stem cell therapies (credit: Getty | The Washington Post)

The Food and Drug Administration just put dubious stem cell clinics on notice.

The agency announced plans on Monday for new policies and enforcement efforts to stamp out what it called “unscrupulous actors” peddling unproven, potentially dangerous, and often expensive stem cell therapies—including a bizarre and troubling instance involving smallpox vaccine.

As an initial demonstration of its harder stance, the agency today posted information on two enforcement efforts. One was a warning letter to a Florida stem cell clinic that had posed as legitimate clinical research and ended up blinding three patients after injecting stem cells directly into their eyeballs. The other was a concerning announcement that the agency had seized five vials of smallpox vaccine from stem cell clinics in California.

HBO

Game of Thrones' short, penultimate season ended last night with a bang (heh), and I suspect that every one of you has a hot take about what went down. Regardless of whether you loved or hated this dragon-fueled season, one thing is obvious: the show has completely changed its approach to pacing, which has resulted in an enormous tonal shift over the past seven episodes.

Spoilers ahead.

Enlarge / “PRESS ENTER TO PLAY”? Sweeter words have never been written, Bungie. (credit: Bungie)

October 24 already felt like a significant amount of time to wait for the PC version of shooting game Destiny 2. After strapping into the game's first beta on PC, however, that two-month span began to feel a little more epic.

The Destiny 2 PC beta is now live for anybody who pre-ordered the game via the Battle.net platform (or Blizzard Battle.net if you're keeping track), and it will become freely available for any Windows gamer to test starting on Tuesday, August 29. Both betas last until Thursday, August 31. I'd consider it a must-download for whichever side of the pre-order camp you land in because, while I have talked about the PC platform's many benefits, it's something else to put those in your hands.

I didn't go into my own test of the beta expecting any surprises. I own a GeForce 1080 Ti-powered system, which is similar to the ones we've used at events like the D2 reveal and an impressive E3 demo, and my PC defaulted to roughly the same settings loaded at those events. But how much harder could I push the game?

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Victims of a tech support scam are about to get refunds, but on average they will recover less than 10 percent of what they lost.

The Federal Trade Commission is sending e-mails to victims of the scam with instructions on how to claim a partial refund, the agency said today. Scam victims will have until October 27 of this year to apply for a refund.

The case stems from November 2014, when the FTC announced that "a federal court has temporarily shut down two massive telemarketing operations" that raked in more than $120 million "by deceptively marketing computer software and tech support services."

Enlarge / Meme artist’s conception of what’s going on at Valve these days. (credit: Twitter @ItMeIRL)

If there's one thing we know about online user reviews, it's that they often bear little resemblance to the actual quality of the product in question. Today's evidence: the user reviews section for Dota 2 on Steam, which in recent days has been flooded with people complaining not about Dota 2 directly but about Valve's refusal to work on Half-Life 3.

PCGamesN was among the first to notice the review bombing this weekend, and the timing of this coordinated online "protest" may seem odd, considering that over 11 years have passed since Half-Life 2: Episode 3 was first announced. It seems likely that former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw's recent publication of a "fanfic" potential plotline for Half-Life 3 may have spurred some of the newfound backlash against Valve. The announcement of a microtransaction-powered Dota 2 card game earlier this month also seems to be spurring at least some of the ire against the company's priorities.

A few choice quotes from the hundreds of recent negative reviews:

Enlarge (credit: portal gda)

Last year, a series of record-setting attacks hitting sites including KrebsOnSecurity and a French Web host underscored a new threat that had previously gone overlooked: millions of Internet-connected digital video recorders and similar devices that could easily be wrangled into botnets that challenged the resources of even large security services.

Now, for the first time, researchers are reporting a new platform recently used to wage powerful denial-of-service attacks that were distributed among hundreds of thousands of poorly secured devices: Google's Android operating system for phones and tablets. The botnet was made up of some 300 apps available in the official Google Play market. Once installed, they surreptitiously conscripted devices into a malicious network that sent junk traffic to certain websites with the goal of causing them to go offline or become unresponsive.

At its height, the WireX botnet controlled more than 120,000 IP addresses located in 100 countries. The junk traffic came in the form of HTTP requests that were directed at specific sites, many of which received notes ahead of time warning of the attacks unless operators paid ransoms. By spreading the attacks among so many phones all over the world and hiding them inside common Web requests, the attackers made it hard for the companies that defend against DDoS attacks to initially figure out how they worked. The attacks bombarded targets with as many as 20,000 HTTP requests per second in an attempt to exhaust server resources.

Jonathan Gitlin

WASHINGTON—We've been for rides in quite a few autonomous cars of late, but today was something a little more special. Today, we went for a ride in Project SAM—short for Semi Autonomous Motorcar.

It all started back in 2000, when a promising racing career was cut short as a pre-season crash left Sam Schmidt paralyzed from the neck down. In the decade-plus since, Schmidt has gotten on with his life, and he now runs a successful IndyCar team. But as a quadriplegic, he's been dependent on others for many things you or I take for granted—except driving, that is.