Month: March 2018

Enlarge (credit: Sergei Konkov / TASS / Getty Images)

In the wake of the ongoing Cambridge Analytica debacle, Facebook has now been sued in federal court in San Francisco and San Jose. These new cases claim violations of federal securities laws, unfair competition, and negligence, among other allegations.

The pair of cases stem from recent revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British data firm that contracted with the Donald Trump presidential campaign, retained private data from 50 million Facebook users despite claiming to have deleted it. New reporting on Cambridge Analytica has spurred massive public outcry from users and politicians with CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling it a "breach of trust."

These two cases, which were filed on March 20, could be just the first among what could be a coming wave of similar lawsuits.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Everything Is In Stock)

There's something very wrong with Uber's driverless car program.

On Wednesday night, police released footage of Sunday night's deadly car crash in Tempe, Arizona, where an Uber self-driving car crashed into 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg. The details it reveals are damning for Uber.

"The idea that she 'just stepped out' or 'came out in a flash' into the car path is clearly false," said Tara Goddard, an urban planning professor at Texas A&M University, after seeing the video. "It seems like the system should have responded."

Enlarge / Inside of the Vindija Cave, Croatia. (credit: M. Hajdinjak)

Mezmaiskaya Cave offered shelter to Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years. The cave, located near Russia's border with Georgia, preserved Neanderthal remains so well that researchers have now been able to extract genetic information from two different individuals who lived approximately 20,000 years apart. And it's just one of the sites that's featured in a new collection of Neanderthal genomes: two from caves in Belgium, one from France, one from Croatia, and one from Mezmaiskaya.

As scientists publish more Neanderthal genomes, they’re able to start sketching more details of the long-ago drama and danger these people experienced. The new genomes are all from 39,000 to 47,000 years ago—late in the history of the population. The new data helps us piece together new details on Neanderthal population groups, their movements across Europe, and when they’re most likely to have bred with humans.

Replacement

The researchers, led by Mateja Hajdinjak at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, extracted tiny amounts of bone or tooth powder—sometimes as little as 9mg—and used a chemical process to remove modern genetic contamination. They also checked for the telltale signs of degradation found in ancient DNA.

Enlarge / The message posted to social media by the city of Atlanta in the wake of an apparent ransomware attack. (credit: City of Atlanta)

The city of Atlanta government has apparently become the victim of a ransomware attack. The city's official Twitter account announced that the city government "is currently experiencing outages on various customer facing applications, including some that customers may use to pay bills or access court-related information."

According to a report from Atlanta NBC affiliate WXIA, a city employee sent the station a screen shot of a ransomware message demanding a payment of $6,800 to unlock each computer or $51,000 to provide all the keys for affected systems. Employees received emails from the city's information technology department instructing them to unplug their computers if they noticed anything suspicious. An internal email shared with WXIA said that the internal systems affected include the city's payroll application.

In a statement sent to Ars, a city spokesperson said, "At this time, our Atlanta Information Management team is working diligently with support from Microsoft to resolve the issue. We are confident that our team of technology professionals will be able to restore applications soon." The city's primary website remains online, and the city government will continue to post updates there, the spokesperson added.

Enlarge (credit: TSA)

Batteries supply electrons by undergoing reversible chemical reactions. That has meant that all the reactants have to be inside the battery, which adds to its weight and volume. Lithium-air batteries could potentially change that. At one electrode, they have pure lithium metal, rather than a lithium-containing chemical. At the other, the lithium reacts with oxygen in the air. When the battery is charged, this reaction is reversed, and the oxygen is returned to our atmosphere.

With far fewer chemicals permanently inside the battery, it's possible to achieve a much higher energy density—there have been demonstrations of lithium-air batteries with an energy density five times that of current lithium-ion tech. The only drawback? They have a lifespan of about a month, in part because both oxygen and metallic lithium are pretty reactive and in part because air offers a lot of things other than oxygen that can react.

Now, a team of researchers has figured out a way to protect against many of these reactions and showed that the resulting battery can survive hundreds of charge/discharge cycles in an air-like atmosphere. Which probably means the researchers are ready to figure out what goes wrong when this material meets actual air. The hope is that will be an easier issue to solve.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Every now and then, Amazon runs a collection of deals on Logitech accessories—today is one of those days. This haul isn't as far-reaching as some incarnations but still includes discounts on a few popular peripherals, including the Logitech MX Master, which is down to $58. That's about $15 off its usual going rate, and it's close to the lowest it has been on Amazon to date.

The MX Master is technically a generation behind the newer MX Master 2S, but it comes with a similarly sturdy, contoured, and wireless design and still works on most surfaces. The newer model does get you longer battery life (about 70 days instead of 40 days) and the ability to copy and paste between multiple computers, but it also costs $92 as of this writing.

If you want nothing to do with Logitech, though, we've also got discounts on Dell laptops, Amazon's entire line of Fire tablets, the Amazon Echo Spot, the Essential Phone, Nintendo's Switch Pro controller, and more. Take a look for yourself below.

Enlarge (credit: Mike Pratt)

Thousands of servers operated by businesses and other organizations are openly sharing credentials that may allow anyone on the Internet to log in and read or modify potentially sensitive data stored online.

In a blog post published late last week, researcher Giovanni Collazo said a quick query on the Shodan search engine returned almost 2,300 Internet-exposed servers running etcd, a type of database that computing clusters and other types of networks use to store and distribute passwords and configuration settings needed by various servers and applications. etcd comes with a programming interface that responds to simple queries that by default return administrative login credentials without first requiring authentication. The passwords, encryption keys, and other forms of credentials are used to access MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, content management systems, and other types of production servers.

Collazo said he wrote a simple script that ran through the 2,284 etcd servers found in his Shodan search. Using the query GET http://:2379/v2/keys/?recursive=true, the script was designed to return all credentials stored on the servers in a format that would be easy for hackers to use. Collazo stopped the script after it collected about 750 megabytes of data from almost 1,500 of the servers. The haul included: