Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Marcus Hutchins. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Marcus Hutchins, the popular British security researcher, has a new legal headache beyond the criminal charges against him.

Hutchins, AKA "MalwareTech," pleaded not guilty two weeks ago to criminal charges in Wisconsin that accuse him of creating and distributing the Kronos malware that steals banking credentials. Now comes word that his legal defense fund was riddled with illicit donations.

At least $150,000 in donations originated from stolen credit cards or fake credit card numbers, according to Tor Ekeland, a  criminal defense attorney who is not on Hutchins' defense team. Ekeland, who became popular in hacking circles for successfully defending Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, had started a legal fund on Hutchins' behalf.

Enlarge / Volkswagen AG Turbocharged Direct Injection (TDI) vehicles sit parked in a storage lot at San Bernardino International Airport (SBD) at dusk in San Bernardino, California, U.S., on Wednesday, April 5, 2017. Volkswagen agreed last year to buy back about 500,000 diesels that it rigged to pass U.S. emissions tests if it can't figure out a way to fix them. In the meantime, the company is hauling them to storage lots, such as ones at an abandoned NFL stadium outside Detroit, the Port of Baltimore and a decommissioned Air Force base in California. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty Images)

James Liang, a California-based engineer who was Volkswagen’s Leader of Diesel Competence during the time when the company installed emissions control-cheating software on millions of vehicles, was sentenced to 40 months in prison and two years of supervised release on Friday. Liang, 63, pleaded guilty last September to defrauding the US, committing wire fraud, and violating the Clean Air Act.

In his guilty plea, Liang attested that Volkswagen gave him and his colleagues a mandate to build a new diesel engine for sale in the US. When the engineers realized they couldn’t build the engine to meet the US’ emissions standards, Liang and his colleagues designed software to help the car recognize when it was being tested for emission compliance and turn on the control system that would otherwise be off during normal driving. “VW tasked Liang with making the defeat device work by calibrating it to recognize specific US emissions tests’ drive cycles,” the Justice Department (DOJ) wrote in a press release.

Liang also said he personally attended meetings with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and deceived those regulators by omitting the fact that the new VW diesel models were in not compliance with emissions standards. Additionally, he “admitted that he helped his co-conspirators continue to lie to the EPA, CARB, and VW customers even after the regulatory agencies started raising questions about the vehicles’ on-road performance,” the DOJ said.

Enlarge / The 3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet known as Plympton 322 turned out to be a trig table, expressed in ratios of the lengths of the sides of the triangles, rather than angles. (credit: UNSW/Andrew Kelly)

The Babylonian civilization was at its peak roughly 4,000 years ago, with architecturally advanced cities throughout the region known today as Iraq. Babylonians were especially brilliant with math, and they invented the idea of zero as well as the base 60 number system we still use today to describe time (where there are 60 minutes in an hour). Now it appears that the Babylonians invented trigonometry, almost 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born.

University of New South Wales mathematicians Daniel Mansfield and Norman Wildberger discovered this after a breakthrough analysis of an ancient cuneiform tablet, written between 1822-1762 BCE in the Babylonian city of Larsa. Long a mystery, the tablet shows three columns of numbers. Describing their work in Historica Mathematica, the researchers call the tablet "a trigonometric table of a completely unfamiliar kind and... ahead of its time by thousands of years."

What made it hard for scholars to figure this out before was the complete unfamiliarity of the Babylonians' trigonometric system. Today we use the Greek system, which describes triangles using angles that are derived from putting the triangle inside a circle. The Babylonians, however, used ratios of the line lengths of the triangle to figure out its shape. They did it by putting the triangle inside a rectangle and completely circumvented the ideas of sin, cos, and tan, which are key to trigonometry today.

Enlarge / Shervin Pishevar speaking at the 2016 TechCrunch conference in San Francisco. Pishevar wrote a letter to Uber's board urging Benchmark Capital to drop its lawsuit against ex-CEO Travis Kalanick. (credit: Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Uber's ex-CEO Travis Kalanick is under fire, but he's hardly out of supporters.

Kalanick, who resigned in June under pressure, got sued earlier this month by Benchmark Capital. Benchmark, a VC firm that's a major investor in Uber, accused Kalanick of "gross mismanagement and misconduct" and withholding material information. Lawyers for Benchmark are seeking to block Kalanick from filling the two vacant board seats he still controls.

Uber investors are far from united in that view, however. That became more clear than ever yesterday, when another major Uber investor, Shervin Pishevar of Sherpa Capital, sent a letter to the Uber board of directors that was sharply critical of Benchmark's move. The letter was reported on by Reuters and published in full by TechCrunch.

Enlarge (credit: Michael Theis)

Security researchers have unearthed a sprawling list of login credentials that allows anyone on the Internet to take over home routers and more than 1,700 "Internet of things" devices and make them part of a destructive botnet.

The list of telnet-accessible devices, currently posted at this Pastebin address, was first posted in June, but it has been updated several times since then. It contains user names and passwords for 8,233 unique IP addresses, 2,174 of which were still running open telnet servers as of Friday morning, said Victor Gevers, chairman of the GDI Foundation, a Netherlands-based nonprofit that works to improve Internet security. Of those active telnet services, 1,774 remain accessible using the leaked credentials, Gevers said. In a testament to the poor state of IoT security, the 8,233 hosts use just 144 unique username-password pairs.

It is likely that criminals have been using the list for months as a means to infect large numbers of devices with malware that turns them into powerful denial-of-service platforms. Still, for most of its existence, the list remained largely unnoticed, with only some 700 views. That quickly changed Thursday with this Twitter post. By Friday afternoon, there were more than 13,300 views.

Enlarge (credit: Continental)

When it comes to making a car slow down, for the last few decades pretty much every car on the road has used the same idea: a brake disc mounted to the axle with calipers that press high-friction pads onto the disc's surface, slowing its rotation. It's a tried-and-tested formula, one that car makers adopted from the aerospace industry as a better solution than the venerable drum brake. But the boffins at Continental (the tire company) have been rethinking the standard way of doing things, specifically in the context of small and medium-size electric vehicles. Enter the New Wheel Concept.

The focus on EVs is logical, since, in their case, deceleration is often achieved via regenerative braking using the electric motor instead—at least on the driven wheels. Obviously, EVs can't ditch the conventional brake. There needs to be a redundant system for situations when regenerative braking isn't possible, like when the battery is full and can't accept more energy. A consequence of using regenerative braking is that the friction brakes get much less use than in a conventional car, so they tend to last a lot longer. But there is a downside to this: a buildup of rust that can impair their performance when you need to use them, according to Continental. (This is only an issue with cast iron brakes, but we're not aware of many hybrids that use carbon ceramic discs outside of the hypercar crowd.)

"In EVs, it's crucial that the driver expends as little energy as possible on the friction brake," said Paul Linhoff, head of brake pre-development in the Chassis & Safety Business Unit at Continental. "During a deceleration, the momentum of the vehicle is converted into electricity in the generator to increase the vehicle’s range. That's why the driver continues to operate the brake pedal—but it certainly doesn't mean that the wheel brakes are active, too."

Enlarge / Net neutrality supporters march past the FCC headquarters before a commission meeting on May 15, 2014. (credit: Getty Images | The Washington Post)

The Federal Communications Commission plan to repeal net neutrality rules depends partly on the argument that antitrust rules can protect consumers and websites from bad behavior by Internet service providers.

"I think that antitrust and consumer protection authorities stand at the vanguard to make sure that consumers and competition are protected," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a recent interview with NPR.

Pai's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that proposes overturning the rules seeks comment on whether "the existence of antitrust regulations aimed at curbing various forms of anticompetitive conduct" makes the current net neutrality rules unnecessary.