Month: January 2018

Enlarge / Entrance of Hernan Cortes into Mexico (credit: Kurz & Allison)

In the wake of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, waves of epidemics slammed Mexico. By 1576, the population, which had been more than 20 million before the Spanish arrived, had crashed to two million. One brutal outbreak in 1545 was estimated to have killed between five and 15 million alone—or up to 80 percent of the population.

But, like the other epidemics, the disease behind the 1545 outbreak was a complete mystery—until now.

Genetic evidence pulled from the teeth of 10 victims suggests that the particularly nasty bacterium Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Paratyphi C contributed to the scourge of fever, bleeding, dysentery, and red rashes recorded at the time. The genetic data, published Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution, offers the first molecular evidence to try to explain what’s “regarded as one of the most devastating epidemics in New World history,” the authors conclude.

Enlarge / Entrance of Hernan Cortes into Mexico (credit: Kurz & Allison)

In the wake of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, waves of epidemics slammed Mexico. By 1576, the population, which had been more than 20 million before the Spanish arrived, had crashed to two million. One brutal outbreak in 1545 was estimated to have killed between five and 15 million alone—or up to 80 percent of the population.

But, like the other epidemics, the disease behind the 1545 outbreak was a complete mystery—until now.

Genetic evidence pulled from the teeth of 10 victims suggests that the particularly nasty bacterium Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Paratyphi C contributed to the scourge of fever, bleeding, dysentery, and red rashes recorded at the time. The genetic data, published Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution, offers the first molecular evidence to try to explain what’s “regarded as one of the most devastating epidemics in New World history,” the authors conclude.

Enlarge / This photo represents a previous project completed by the Green Power EMC and Silicon Ranch partnership. The 52 MW ac solar energy plant in Hazlehurst, Georgia incorporates 633,600 solar modules. (credit: PRNewsfoto/Silicon Ranch Corporation)

On Monday, Royal Dutch Shell announced that it is going to acquire a 43.86-percent stake in a Nashville-based solar plant company called Silicon Ranch Corporation. The deal could cost up to $217 million, according to Reuters.

The Netherlands-based oil and gas company is one of the biggest companies in the world, and, by its own account, it recorded revenue of $233.6 billion in 2016 and $4.8 billion in net income. The $217 million it has set aside for a US-based solar investment is a small fraction of that, but it does reflect some willingness to acknowledge a future, however far out, in which oil and gas may not dominate energy and transportation sectors.

The move follows oil and gas giant BP (formerly British Petroleum), which invested $200 million in European solar development company Lightsource just a month ago.

Enlarge (credit: Tavis Ormandy)

There's a critical weakness in the widely used Transmission BitTorrent app that allows websites to execute malicious code on some users' computers. That's according to a researcher with Google's Project Zero vulnerability reporting team, who also warns that other BitTorrent clients are likely similarly susceptible.

Researcher Tavis Ormandy published the proof-of-concept attack code last week, along with a detailed description of the underlying vulnerability it exploited. Normally, Project Zero withholds publication of such details for 90 days or until the developer has released a fix. In this case, however, Ormandy's private report to Transmission included a patch that completely fixed the vulnerability. The researcher went ahead and disclosed the vulnerability last Tuesday—only 40 days after the initial report—because Transmission developers had yet to apply it. Ormandy said the publication would allow Ubuntu and other downstream projects to independently install the fix.

"I'm finding it frustrating that the Transmission developers are not responding on their private security list," Ormandy wrote in Tuesday's public report. "I suggested moving this into the open so that distributions can apply the patch independently."

Enlarge (credit: Tavis Ormandy)

There's a critical weakness in the widely used Transmission BitTorrent app that allows websites to execute malicious code on some users' computers. That's according to a researcher with Google's Project Zero vulnerability reporting team, who also warns that other BitTorrent clients are likely similarly susceptible.

Researcher Tavis Ormandy published the proof-of-concept attack code last week, along with a detailed description of the underlying vulnerability it exploited. Normally, Project Zero withholds publication of such details for 90 days or until the developer has released a fix. In this case, however, Ormandy's private report to Transmission included a patch that completely fixed the vulnerability. The researcher went ahead and disclosed the vulnerability last Tuesday—only 40 days after the initial report—because Transmission developers had yet to apply it. Ormandy said the publication would allow Ubuntu and other downstream projects to independently install the fix.

"I'm finding it frustrating that the Transmission developers are not responding on their private security list," Ormandy wrote in Tuesday's public report. "I suggested moving this into the open so that distributions can apply the patch independently."

Enlarge (credit: Simon Smith)

Applications, operating systems, and firmware all need to be updated to defeat Meltdown and protect against Spectre, two attacks that exploit features of high-performance processors to leak information and undermine system security. The computing industry has been scrambling to respond after news of the problem broke early a few days into the new year.

But that patching is proving problematic. The Meltdown protection is revealing bugs or otherwise undesirable behavior in various drivers, and Intel is currently recommending that people cease installing a microcode update it issued to help tackle the Spectre problem. This comes as researchers are digging into the papers describing the issues and getting closer to weaponizing the research to turn it into a practical attack. With the bad guys sure to be doing the same, real-world attacks using this research are sure to follow soon.

Back when initially releasing its Windows patch, Microsoft acknowledged incompatibilities with some anti-virus software. To receive the Meltdown and Spectre fixes, anti-virus software on Windows is required to create a special registry entry indicating that it's compatible. Without this entry, not only are these patches blocked, but so too are all future Windows patches. Most anti-virus vendors should now have compatible versions of their products, but users with stale anti-virus software—expired trials or end-of-lifed products—are at this point much better off removing the third-party software entirely and using the built-in protection in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

Enlarge (credit: Simon Smith)

Applications, operating systems, and firmware all need to be updated to defeat Meltdown and protect against Spectre, two attacks that exploit features of high-performance processors to leak information and undermine system security. The computing industry has been scrambling to respond after news of the problem broke early a few days into the new year.

But that patching is proving problematic. The Meltdown protection is revealing bugs or otherwise undesirable behavior in various drivers, and Intel is currently recommending that people cease installing a microcode update it issued to help tackle the Spectre problem. This comes as researchers are digging into the papers describing the issues and getting closer to weaponizing the research to turn it into a practical attack. With the bad guys sure to be doing the same, real-world attacks using this research are sure to follow soon.

Back when initially releasing its Windows patch, Microsoft acknowledged incompatibilities with some anti-virus software. To receive the Meltdown and Spectre fixes, anti-virus software on Windows is required to create a special registry entry indicating that it's compatible. Without this entry, not only are these patches blocked, but so too are all future Windows patches. Most anti-virus vendors should now have compatible versions of their products, but users with stale anti-virus software—expired trials or end-of-lifed products—are at this point much better off removing the third-party software entirely and using the built-in protection in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

Enlarge / The fast radio burst in question, FRB 121102, is located in the top-right portion of the image. On the left is a large supernova remnant. (credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo (DeepSkyColors.com))

The Arecibo Observatory may be suffering along with the rest of Puerto Rico, but some of its data made a big appearance in last week's edition of Nature. The data comes from the only object of its type we've identified yet: a repeating source of fast radio bursts. And, while the new observations don't definitively tell us what's creating the bursts, they do suggest that whatever it is, it's buried in an extremely energetic cloud of material that's generating some of the most intense magnetic fields we've yet found in the Universe. So intense, in fact, that if the source of the magnetic field is a black hole, then it is as massive as 10,000 Suns.

What is that?

A bit over a decade ago, we didn't even know that fast radio bursts existed. Then a radiotelescope accidentally captured a sudden spike of immense energy that vanished within an instant. That might be dismissed as a hardware glitch, except the observatory eventually caught a few more; over time, dedicated searches revealed that fast radio bursts are a regular, if rare, phenomenon.

The amount of energy produced in a fast radio burst typically comes from a cataclysmic event, one that destroys its source. And indeed, there was no indication of a second burst from any of these sources—but no sign of anything interesting at their location in any other wavelength. The source of fast radio bursts remained a mystery.