Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Protestors object to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to eliminate net neutrality rules before Pai's appearance at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, on May 5, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla)

Republicans in Congress are continuing to push a net neutrality law that would preempt state net neutrality rules and let Internet service providers charge online services for prioritized access to Internet users.

The Open Internet Preservation Act would prohibit ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful Internet content but clear the way for paid prioritization or "fast lanes."

US Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) declared that "some cable companies and content providers aren't going to be happy with this bill because it prohibits them from blocking and throttling Web content."

Enlarge (credit: Gabriel Andrés Trujillo Escobedo Follow)

It just got much easier to wage distributed denial-of-service attacks of once-unthinkable sizes, thanks to the public release of two ready-to-run exploits that abuse poorly secured memcached servers to flood targets with record amounts of junk traffic.

As Ars reported last week, DDoSers last month started bouncing specially developed traffic off of so-called memcached servers, which then respond by bombarding a targeted third party with a malicious flood that's thousands of times the size of the original payload. Attackers have long used such amplification techniques to magnify or augment the damage coming from the computers they control. What's special about memcached-based attacks is the size of the amplification—as much as 51,000 times, compared with about 50 to 60 fold for techniques seen previously. The attacks work by sending requests to servers that leave open port 11211 and adding spoofed packet headers that cause the responses to be sent to the target.

Within days of the new technique going public, security firms reported it being used in a record-setting 1.3 terabit-per-second DDoS against Github and then, two days later, a record-topping 1.7 Tbps attack against an unnamed US-based service provider.

Don't be alarmed! Your Alexa-enabled device may lapse into a sudden fit of giggles, but Amazon is aware of the problem. Recent reports detail a quirky bug that has Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa laughing for no apparent reason, scaring the daylights out of unsuspecting users.

According to a Bloomberg report, Amazon is aware of the issue and is working to fix it. The news comes a few days after users took to social media to share their stories of strange laughter coming from their Echo devices. Some claim Alexa laughed in response to unrelated or misunderstood commands, while others claim Alexa simply laughed out of the blue.

It's not uncommon for Echo devices to hear sounds and mistake them for a user's wake word. Amazon's smart speakers can be programmed to respond to a few words: "Alexa" is the most common, but other options like "Echo" and "Amazon" are available as well. These bouts of laughter could be a byproduct of Echo devices mistakenly hearing their wake words.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM

Scientists studying data from NASA's Juno spacecraft have published a trove of papers in Nature this week, making a number of intriguing and surprising findings about the atmosphere of the largest planet in our Solar System. The papers are summarized and linked in this NASA news release.

Some of the most striking discoveries come from visible and infrared observations made by Juno during its first five science passes in its elongated orbit around Jupiter. (The spacecraft entered Jupiter's orbit on July 4, 2016. It will make its 11th pass on April 1.) In these initial passes, scientists found clusters of strange and long-lasting cyclones orbiting the north and south poles of Jupiter.

Enlarge / Grumpy? Maybe it's because you're 6 minutes late to macaroni time. (credit: Getty Images)

In a press release on Tuesday, Europe's electric transmission lobby said that ovens, microwaves, and radios across continental Europe could be running almost six minutes slow due to a power grid dispute between Serbia and neighboring Kosovo.

Power-connected clocks on appliances generally tell time by counting the rate of the electrical current, which in Europe is supposed to hold a constant frequency of 50Hz. If that frequency drops below 50Hz, connected appliance clocks will be slow, and if it rises above 50Hz, clocks will be fast. Since mid-January, clocks that are on the Continental Europe Power System, a synchronized area that reaches through 25 countries across the continent, have seen a deviation from grid-time based on an average frequency of 49.996 Hz.

What do grid disputes have to do with anything? Serbia and Kosovo are part of the Continental Europe Power System, and, per an agreement, Kosovo is required to balance electrical supply and demand on its grid, while Serbia is required to help Kosovo manage that balancing. But the agreement between Serbia and Kosovo appears to have fallen apart, and neither side is talking to the other. That has resulted in 113GWh of unmet demand from Kosovo, which, spread across the whole synchronized area, has led to a decline in frequency—not big enough to cause power outages (at measurements below 47.5 Hz and above 52.5 Hz, the grid and devices connected to it disconnect) but big enough to warp time.

(credit: Oculus)

Oculus Rift users worldwide found today that their headsets stopped working completely. Users encountered a "Can't Reach Oculus runtime Service" error, which prevented further use of the headset. The problem appears to affect most, if not all, Oculus Rift headsets.

Users began reporting the issue in the Oculus forums, and Oculus tweeted an acknowledgment of the problem at 12:26 PM today, along with a link to a support forum post on the subject, which simply says the following:

We are aware of and actively investigating an issue impacting ability to access Rift software. Our teams apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you and appreciate your patience while we work on a resolution. We'll share more updates here as we have them. Thanks.

Users on the Oculus forums and Discord discovered that OculusAppFramework.dll failed to validate with OVRServer. Oculus forum user Mace404 shared a screenshot that suggested the issue may be caused by an expired certificate. If that's the case, the only way to fix it would be for Oculus to release an update.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Nurphoto)

For some, musical notes conjure flashes of color, letters and numbers have their own particular hues, and certain sounds tickle. Researchers have reported these extraordinary cases of sensory mixing, called synesthesia—loosely translated to perceived together—for more than 130 years. But the molecular underpinnings of the vibrant experiences have been a complete mystery—until now.

With the help of three large families of synesthetes, researchers identified a smattering of genes that may help explain their mingled senses. Several of the genes were involved in making connections among neurons within and across various brain regions. And additional data suggested that these genes are active in regions of the brain involved in receiving and processing visual and auditory information while those regions develop.

The findings, published this week in PNAS, appear to support the hypothesis that synesthesia is caused by hyper-connectivity among brain regions that handle our senses. Essentially, the idea is that dense, trippy sensory networks load up with signals that may spill over to each other or that extra connections bridge the different sensory systems, breaking down their “modularity.”