Month: December 2017

Enlarge (credit: Open Grid Scheduler )

A New Jersey man has pled guilty to hacking charges and creating the devastating Mirai botnet, which spread via vulnerabilities in Internet-connected devices to unleash numerous massive distributed-denial-of-service attacks. As recently as last week, new Mirai strains continued to proliferate online.

As Ars reported in October 2016, the most serious DDoS degraded or completely took down Twitter, GitHub, the PlayStation network, and hundreds of other sites by targeting Dyn, a service that provided domain name services to the affected sites.

Paras Jha admitted to being behind Mirai according to court documents that were unsealed on Tuesday. The Rutgers University computer science student was originally publicly identified as a likely suspect in January 2017 by Brian Krebs, a well-known independent computer security journalist.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Linda Braucht)

A few Republican lawmakers are breaking with the party in order to oppose or express skepticism about tomorrow's Federal Communications Commission vote to eliminate net neutrality rules.

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) yesterday called on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to delay the commission's vote and give Congress time to "hold hearings on the net neutrality issue and to pass permanent open Internet legislation."

Thx to everyone who has contacted me in regards to #NetNeutrality. Below is the letter I sent to Chairman @AjitPaiFCC today to ensure the continuation of a free and open #internet. pic.twitter.com/oKqh7lxaLI

— Rep. Mike Coffman (@RepMikeCoffman) December 12, 2017

"The preceding four Chairmen of the Federal Communications Commission, two Republicans and two Democrats, all took steps to uphold the basic principles that guaranteed a free and open Internet," Coffman wrote in a letter to Pai.

Enlarge / Original sketches of Imperial Storm Troopers by artist Ralph McQuarrie. (credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Relax, this post contains no spoilers.

While most Star Wars pieces you'll see this week are focused on the soon-to-be-revealed adventures of Finn, Rey, Poe, and BB-8, today we've got a blast from the past to share with you—sort of. As any self-respecting nerd will tell you, the whole look-and-feel of the Star Wars universe owes a lot to Ralph McQuarrie. In 1975, George Lucas hired the conceptual artist to create the characters and worlds that then only existed on the pages of his scripts. So McQuarrie's paintbrush created the first images of C-3PO, R2-D2, Darth Vader, stormtroopers, and others, not to mention all those TIE fighters, X-Wings, and Y-Wings.

His paintings and concept art heavily informed Lucas' filmmaking, and the director reproduced many of McQuarrie's pieces in Star Wars. But quite a lot changed between the earlier scripts McQuarrie was working from and the film that audiences saw in 1977. Stormtroopers used lightsabers. Luke Skywalker was a girl. And the Millennium Falcon looked very, very different. Now, thanks to the 2017 graduating classes of the DAVE School, we have an idea of what a 1975-era movie—The Star Wars—would have looked like: