Month: August 2017

Enlarge / At right, Marcus Hutchins, the British security expert accused of creating and selling malware that steals banking passwords, arrives Monday with his lawyers Marcia Hofmann, left, and Brian Klein, at the federal courthouse in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He pleaded not guilty to the charges. (credit: Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

Marcus Hutchins, the British security researcher instrumental in neutralizing the virulent WCry ransomware worm that shut down computers worldwide in May, appeared in federal court Monday and pleaded not guilty to unrelated criminal charges that he created and distributed malware that steals banking credentials.

Hutchins, who is free on $30,000 bond, was arrested August 3 in Las Vegas following the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences. A six-count Wisconsin federal indictment (PDF) accuses him of developing the Kronos banking trojan. Along with an unnamed co-conspirator, Hutchins allegedly advertised the malware on the AlphaBay underground online market forum, according to the indictment. The document says the duo "sold a version of the Kronos malware in exchange for approximately $2,000 in digital currency" on June 11, 2015.

The indictment said the defendant, who goes by the online nickname of "MalwareTech," knowingly "disseminated by electronic means an advertisement of any electronic, mechanical, or other device, knowing and having reason to know that the design of such device renders it primarily useful for the purpose of the surreptitious interception of electronic communications...." Other charges include allegations that he sold an "electronic, mechanical, or other device, in interstate and foreign commerce, knowing and having reason to know that the design of such device renders it primarily useful for the purpose of the surreptitious interception of electronic communications."

Droid Life

LG's next flagship smartphone is the LG V30, and while we've skipped the continuous drip of information that has been coming out about the device, a slow Monday is a perfect time for a rumor roundup! Maybe "rumor" is not the best way to describe a lot of this information—LG has been sending out non-stop press releases about the V30 all month.

LG already released a flagship this year, the LG G6, but it also has the V series, which is usually a more experimental flagship released in the second half of the year. Last year, the LG V20 had a totally different design from the modular LG G5, but this year, it looks like most of the experimental features are out the door, and we're getting something that looks very much like a "G6 with upgrades."

Last week was the high point of the Dota 2 competitive year: it was the week of The International, Valve's biggest tournament. On Saturday, Team Liquid walked away with more than $10 million after defeating Newbee 3-0 in the grand final.

Right now, one of the requirements to be a good Dota 2 player is that you've got to be a living, breathing human. The game does include some basic computer-controlled bots to practice against, but any seasoned player of the game should have no trouble prevailing over these bots, even on their hardest "Unfair" difficulty (though the Unfair Viper bot is a legendary jerk that's utterly miserable to play against). Last Friday, however, we got a hint of a new, altogether more threatening kind of computer-controlled player: an AI-controlled bot built by Elon Musk's OpenAI. The OpenAI bot took on a number of professional players and it crushed them.

The OpenAI bot can't play the full game of Dota 2. It can play only one hero, Shadow Fiend, of the game's 113 playable characters (with two more coming later this year); it can only play against Shadow Fiend; and rather than playing in five-on-five matches, it plays a very narrow subset of the game: one-on-one solo matches.

Enlarge / Bitcoin has risen 300-fold in five years. (credit: Bitcoin Charts)

The virtual currency Bitcoin hit a new record over the weekend, surging past the $4,000 mark. As of press time, one Bitcoin is worth $4,250. It's an astonishing rally for a currency that was worth $580 a year ago and has risen 300-fold over the last five years.

It's not clear what's causing the currency's value to rise so rapidly.

One likely factor: last week, the Bitcoin network officially accepted a long-debated upgrade called segregated witness. The Bitcoin network limits the size of blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain, which in turn limits the number of transactions the network can process each hour. For the last year, the network has been bumping up against this limit, leading to congestion on the network and high transaction fees. Segregated witness aims to relax this bottleneck by moving part of each Bitcoin transaction outside the blockchain, allowing more transactions to be squeezed into each block.

Enlarge (credit: NIssan)

A year-long trial in Denmark is showing that utilities can use parked electric vehicles (EVs) as spare batteries, and those EVs can earn quite a bit of money for their owners from the utilities.

In an interview with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Nissan Europe’s director of energy services Francisco Carranza said that a fleet of 10 Nissan e-NV200 vans has earned €1,300 ($1,530) over the year.

Electricity grids around the world are facing an era of rapid change as more electric vehicles hit the road and as grid supply changes. For grid managers, sometimes small amounts of power are necessary to regulate current frequency and keep the grid working. At the same time, if a lot of electric vehicles draw power from the grid at the same time (for example, when they’re parked at home at night, or when they’re parked at work during the day), that threatens to change how grid operators plan to meet demand, as well.

Enlarge / A scanning electron microscopic image of Burkholderia cepacia (credit: CDC/ Janice Haney Carr)

The Food and Drug Administration advised consumers and healthcare providers Friday to avoid all liquid products made by PharmaTech LLC of Davie, Florida, after finding dangerous Burkholderia cepacia bacteria in the water system used to manufacture its products. Those products include liquid drugs and dietary supplements labeled under Rugby Laboratories, Major Pharmaceuticals, and Leader Brands.

An outbreak of B. cepaciai infections affecting at least 60 people in eight states led the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to PharmaTech. Late last year, the agencies tracked the source to more than 10 lots of PharmaTech’s oral liquid docusate sodium, a stool softener. But suspicion of contamination crept to the company’s other products, and this month PharmaTech issued a voluntary nationwide recall of its other liquid products, such as its liquid vitamin D drops and liquid multivitamins that are marketed for infants and children.

PharmaTech described the recall as “precautionary measure,” but the FDA seemed to suggest that the issue required more urgency, issuing an additional advisory.

Enlarge (credit: Sega)

Sonic Mania has finally made what various arms of Sega, including the official Sonic Team staff, haven't pulled off for decades: a great old-school Sonic game. That's a monumental thing in and of itself, considering how long Sonic has struggled as a series—and how many times his major contemporary rival Mario has lapped him, in both modern and retro flavors.

With that hindsight in mind, it's tempting to overlook some of Sonic Mania's shortcomings. This is a lean game, weighing in at around 3-4 hours for a first playthrough—which, to be fair, is comparable to how much you'll find in a Genesis or Mega Drive Sega game. A few peculiar design decisions (and, at launch, bugs) can hinder the fun you'll have in your first playthrough. And this game has no interest in holding your hand, so don't expect a relaxing reintroduction to the blue bomber.

But having a good Sonic game again means having a platformer that emphasizes the word "speed" and all it implies—including level density, tucked-away secrets, pitch-perfect controls, and satisfying run-and-jump pathing. Many games have tried to recapture Sonic's magic over the years (including Sega itself, with 2002's Sonic Advance 2 worth a shout-out). But this week's Mania combines the familiar and the new to declare that maybe, just maybe, only Sonic can do it best.

Infiniti

If the automotive world has an equivalent to the Met Gala, it would be the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance. It takes place later this week in Monterey, California, and each year it features an assortment of classic and historic cars that are more akin to four-wheeled works of art than the more mundane stuff you or I drive on a daily basis. (Unless you're Ralph Lauren, in which case, carry on.) It's not just car collectors that bring along their machines to show off; the OEMs get in on the act too. In Infiniti's case, that's a "what if" called Prototype 9, a 1940s-inspired electric race car.

"We discussed the idea of 'chancing' upon an unrecognized race car, hidden away for decades in a barn, deep in the Japanese countryside," explained Alfonso Albaisa, SVP of Global Design at Nissan (Infiniti's parent company). "We wanted to explore what this looked like, what it would have been made of. Open-wheeled racers of the age were beautiful machines, elegant and powerful and with a wonderful purity of purpose. It's an automotive fantasy, but the notion captured our imaginations enough to put pencil to paper."