Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and founder of Kaspersky Lab, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. (credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In October, Kaspersky Labs found itself in a situation familiar to many tech companies: it was sued (PDF) by a do-nothing patent holder in East Texas who demanded a cash settlement before it would go away.

The patent-licensing company, Wetro Lan LLC, owned US Patent No. 6,795,918, which essentially claimed an Internet firewall. The patent was filed in 2000 despite the fact that computer network firewalls date to the 1980s. The '918 patent was used in what the Electronic Frontier Foundation called an "outrageous trolling campaign," in which dozens of companies were sued out of Wetro Lan's "headquarters," a Plano office suite that it shared with several other firms that engage in what is pejoratively called "patent-trolling." Wetro Lan's complaints argued that a vast array of Internet routers and switches infringed its patent.

Most companies sued by Wetro Lan apparently reached settlements within a short time, a likely indicator of low-value settlement demands. Not a single one of the cases even reached the claim construction phase. But Kaspersky wouldn't pay up.

Enlarge / Assessing data on schools doesn't always have much to do with numbers. (credit: Jonathan Ernst/World Bank)

There are few types of people we like to complain about more than politicians. They’re often painted as two-faced, blockheaded liars—with the possible exception of the ones you voted for. But politicians’ views are typically in line with the bulk of the people who identify with their party, and it’s not always clear whether the politicians are driving their party or if everyone’s just marching to the beat of the same drum.

After all, politicians’ thought processes shouldn’t be much different from those of voters. All of us are subject to biases and cognitive cheats that block out information we don’t like. Is it fair to hold politicians to a higher standard, given that they’re the people we elect to process decisions carefully for the rest of us?

Ask a Dane

Politicians aren’t the easiest group to study, but a group of researchers at Aarhus University, led by Martin Baekgaard, gave it a shot by sending surveys to Danish city councilors—a large enough group (950 people) for a meaningful study. The surveys (which were also filled out by a representative group of about 1,000 Danish citizens) were aimed at evaluating the subjects' tendency toward motivated reasoning.

Enlarge / The eruptions that produced the rocks of Fingal's Cave also triggered a massive climate event. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

If we want to know what to expect from our climate as it continues to warm over the next few centuries, looking at similar examples of climate change in Earth's past would be helpful. But there certainly haven't been any similar temperature excursions in the instrumental record. Using indirect measures, we can tell that there probably haven't been any since the last ice age. Even the exit from that ice age isn't especially relevant; while the planet warmed considerably, it was driven by a complicated mixture of orbital changes, greenhouse gases, and melting ice.

To find a sudden warming that's driven entirely by greenhouse gases, you have to go back 56 million years to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). At the start of the PETM, a geologically sudden surge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere caused warming and a large change in the ocean's pH. It took well over 100,000 years for conditions to return to anything normal. During that time, the extinction rate rose, and many ecosystems were disrupted or shifted by thousands of miles.

But understanding the PETM has proven a challenge, as it's not clear how much carbon entered the atmosphere or where it came from. A new paper in today's issue of Nature takes existing information about carbon dioxide levels and isotope ratios and combines them with data on the amount of carbon that dissolved into the oceans. The results provide a new indication of how much carbon entered the atmosphere—10,000 gigatonnes—and suggests volcanoes put it there.

Enlarge (credit: Steven Fruitsmaak)

Talk about painful software updates. An estimated 465,000 people in the US are getting notices that they should update the firmware that runs their life-sustaining pacemakers or risk falling victim to potentially fatal hacks.

Cardiac pacemakers are small devices that are implanted in a patient's upper chest to correct abnormal or irregular heart rhythms. Pacemakers are generally outfitted with small radio-frequency equipment so the devices can be maintained remotely. That way, new surgeries aren't required after they're implanted. Like many wireless devices, pacemakers from Abbott Laboratories contain critical flaws that allow hijackers within radio range to seize control while the pacemakers are running.

"If there were a successful attack, an unauthorized individual (i.e., a nearby attacker) could gain access and issue commands to the implanted medical device through radio frequency (RF) transmission capability, and those unauthorized commands could modify device settings (e.g., stop pacing) or impact device functionality," Abbott representatives wrote in an open letter to doctors.

Enlarge / Scanning electron micrograph of a human T cell. (credit: NIAID/NIH)

For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a therapy that involves genetically engineering a patient’s own cells, the agency announced Wednesday.

The therapy, called Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) by Novartis, will be used to reprogram the immune cells of pediatric and young adult patients with a certain type of leukemia, called B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. During a 22-day out-of-body retraining, patients’ immune cells—specifically T cells that patrol the body and destroy enemies—get a new gene that allows them to identify and attack the leukemia cells.

Such therapies, called CAR-T therapies, have shown potential for effectively knocking back cancers in several trials, raising hopes of researchers and patients alike. But they come with severe safety concerns—plus potentially hefty price tags.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

It seems like we hear about a new data breach every day. Today, we're bringing news of yet another—but this one happened in the old-school sense of the term. And it has earned the Aetna insurance giant a class-action lawsuit.

Aetna is accused of breaching the privacy rights of 12,000 customers in 23 states by snail-mailing them letters in which the words "filling prescriptions for HIV" could be read through the transparent window on the envelopes.

The Legal Action Center filed the suit (PDF), which includes the following:

Enlarge (credit: Codemasters)

When Codemasters released F1 2016 last year, it was my surprise hit of the year. DiRT Rally proved that the studio's new EGO engine was right up there with the very best, and here was a Formula 1 title that combined plenty of realism and difficulty with a game that was also sheer fun to play. Since then the sport itself has undergone quite a shake up. It's under new ownership, and the cars have more downforce and better tires. There's even a bit more competition; these days we can go into a Grand Prix weekend without knowing that a Mercedes win is almost certain.

And with all that, there's a new F1 game, the logically titled F1 2017. It captures the current technical changes to the sport, but the folks at Codemasters have done more than just tweak tire widths and downforce levels. The big question is whether that's enough to make it worth purchasing a new game.

Codemasters