Month: October 2017

Enlarge / A cutaway of the forthcoming TVR Griffith, showing the iStream construction.

Put yourself in Gordon Murray's shoes. You've designed some of the most successful Formula 1 cars of all time. You followed that up with a couple of road cars—the Light Car Company Rocket and the McLaren F1—that were hailed as genius but only built in tiny numbers. So what's next?

Rethinking the entire way cars are made, obviously. Disturbed by the trend of ever-heavier vehicles and their resource- and energy-intensive manufacturing, Murray came up with iStream, which attempts to solve all of those problems at once. After several years of trying to license the system to existing car makers, he has decided to do it himself. Gordon Murray Automobiles will start off with "a return to the design and engineering principles that have made the McLaren F1 such an icon," Murray said in a statement.

These days, most of the cars on our roads use a monocoque chassis. Most of those are usually made from steel, the stamping of which uses a lot of energy. iStream-constructed cars do it a little differently. There's a laser-cut steel frame that provides all the mounting points for the engine, suspension, and so on. But a welded steel frame isn't stiff enough on its own, so composite honeycomb-cored panels (which could be made from expensive composites or cheap stuff like fiberglass and cardboard) are bonded onto it, significantly boosting structural rigidity.

The Bad Rabbit ransom page.

Despite early reports that there was no use of National Security Agency-developed exploits in this week's crypto-ransomware outbreak, research released by Cisco Talos suggests that the ransomware worm known as "Bad Rabbit" did in fact use a stolen Equation Group exploit  revealed by Shadowbrokers to spread across victims' networks. The attackers used EternalRomance, an exploit that bypasses security over Server Message Block (SMB) file-sharing connections, enabling remote execution of instructions on Windows clients and servers. The code closely follows an open source Python implementation of a Windows exploit that used EternalRomance (and another Equation Group tool, EternalSynergy), leveraging the same methods revealed in the Shadowbrokers code release. NotPetya also leveraged this exploit.

Bad Rabbit, named for the Tor hidden service page that it directs victims to, initially landed on affected networks through a "driveby download" attack via compromised Russian media websites. Arriving disguised as an Adobe Flash update, Bad Rabbit has multiple ways of spreading itself across networks. It can exploit open SMB connections on the infected Windows system, and it can also exploit the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) scripting interface to execute code remotely on other Windows systems on the network, according to analysis by EndGame's Amanda Rousseau. And the malware has a collection of hard-coded usernames and passwords, as Rousseau and researcher Kevin Beaumont noted.

But according to Talos, Bad Rabbit also carries code that uses the EternalRomance exploit (patched by Microsoft in March), which uses an "empty" SMB transaction packet to attempt to push instructions into the memory of another Windows computer. In unpatched Windows 7 and later Windows operating systems, the exploit can use information leakage returned by the exchange to determine if it is successful; on older systems, a different version of the same exploit is used but may crash the targeted computer's operating system in the process.

(credit: Alpha six)

Low-cost cloud backup and storage company Backblaze has published its latest set of hard disk reliability numbers for the second quarter of 2017. While the company has tended to stick with consumer-oriented hard disks, a good pricing deal has meant that it also now has several thousand enterprise-class disks, allowing for some large-scale comparisons to be drawn between the two kinds of storage. The company has also started to acquire larger disks with capacities of 10TB and 12TB.

The company is using two models of 8TB Seagate disk: one consumer, with a two-year warranty, and the other enterprise, with a five-year warranty. Last quarter, Backblaze noted some performance and power management advantages to the enterprise disks, but for the company's main use case, these were of somewhat marginal value. The performance does help with initial data migrations and ingest, but the performance benefit overall is limited due to the way Backblaze distributes data over so many spindles.

(credit: Backblaze)

In aggregate, the company has now accumulated 3.7 million drive days for the consumer disks and 1.4 million for the enterprise ones. Over this usage, the annualized failure rates are 1.1 percent for the consumer disks and 1.2 percent for the enterprise ones. At least for now, then, the enterprise disks aren't doing anything to justify their longer warranty; their reliability is virtually identical. The focus now is on what happens to the consumer disks as they pass their two-year warranty period. Will they show the same reliability, or will deterioration become more apparent?

Enlarge (credit: Verizon)

Verizon Wireless customers will soon regain the ability to stream mobile video at the highest resolution, but it's going to cost extra. Starting November 3, Verizon Wireless customers will have the option of paying another $10 a month to remove the cap on video resolution.

This is the latest in a series of changes at Verizon related to unlimited data plans and video quality. In February, Verizon offered unlimited data plans for the first time in years, boasting that it would not impose limits on video quality (unlike some other carriers).

But that changed in August when Verizon imposed video limits on both unlimited data plans and plans with monthly data caps. This resulted in a somewhat confusing array of options.

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

Waymo announced on Thursday that it is bringing its Chrysler Pacifica minivans to the Detroit area to test how the company's technology performs in the region's harsh winters.

"Our ultimate goal is for our fully self-driving cars to operate safely and smoothly in all kinds of environments," Waymo CEO John Krafcik writes.

Krafcik says that Waymo has been doing cold-weather tests since 2012. But so far Waymo has done most of its testing in sunny places like Mountain View, Calif.; Phoenix, and Austin, Tex. where snow is rare. Waymo believes it has largely mastered driving in sunny climates and is preparing to launch a commercial service in the sun-drenched Phoenix area.

NASA

NASA will soon set a new date for the maiden flight of its massive Space Launch System rocket, which will send the Orion spacecraft on a test flight around the Moon. Previously, this flight had been scheduled for 2018, but NASA officials acknowledged earlier this year that the launch date would slip into 2019.

Now, there is the possibility of further delays, although NASA isn't saying this publicly just yet. On Wednesday, at the Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium in Huntsville, Ala., a key official said a 2019 date is still on the table, because Marshall Space Flight Center expects to deliver the rocket's core stage to the launch site in Florida by the end of 2018.