Month: May 2018

Enlarge / This phishing message used Google's link-shortening service, allowing researchers to learned details about potential targets. (credit: ProtectWise)

Researchers said Chinese intelligence officers are behind almost a decade's worth of network intrusions that use advanced malware to penetrate software and gaming companies in the US, Europe, Russia, and elsewhere. The hackers have struck as recently as March in a campaign that used phishing emails in an attempt to access corporate-sensitive Office 365 and Gmail accounts. In the process, they made serious operational security errors that revealed key information about their targets and possible location.

Researchers from various security organizations have used a variety of names to assign responsibility for the hacks, including LEAD, BARIUM, Wicked Panda, GREF, PassCV, Axiom, and Winnti. In many cases, the researchers assumed the groups were distinct and unaffiliated. According to a 49-page report published Thursday, all of the attacks are the work of Chinese government's intelligence apparatus, which the report's authors dub the Winnti Umbrella. Researchers from 401TRG, the threat research and analysis team at security company ProtectWise, based the attribution on common network infrastructure, tactics, techniques, and procedures used in the attacks as well as operational security mistakes that revealed the possible location of individual members.

A decade of hacks

Attacks associated with Winnti Umbrella have been active since at least 2009 and possibly date back to 2007. In 2013, antivirus company Kaspersky Lab reported that hackers using computers with Chinese and Korean language configurations used a backdoor dubbed Winnti to infect more than 30 online video game companies over the previous four years. The attackers used their unauthorized access to obtain digital certificates that were later exploited to sign malware used in campaigns targeting other industries and political activists.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

In the December 2017 System Guide, we discovered the unexpected. Given the bevy of pre-built computing devices now available, there's a lot of debate and confusion about building one yourself these days. What's the goal behind a custom PC build in 2018? What makes a certain hardware choice "right" to support that?

So rather than starting 2018 with a traditional guide—where Ars presents three build ideas and a set of specific hardware to accomplish each—we're going to take a step back. This will be more of a meta-guide than an actual guide; we're going to share the methods and mechanics behind putting together your favorite long-running PC building guide. So while this guide will build from a set of three major system design goals like always, this edition will go through each major PC hardware component one by one, focusing more on ideology than instruction, discussing how a specific part does (or doesn't) contribute to a specific construction goal.

Standard system design goals

It's not enough to say a system should be "fast" just like it's not enough to sum up a sports car with its 0-60 time on a track. A gaming-focused system that impressively renders the most demanding scenes in Crysis can still be frustratingly slow to boot... and may handle the same gaming scenes abysmally if you forgot to (or didn't want to) close your email client or your 30-tab Web browser first. A system with server intentions may effortlessly run five or 10 entire virtual machines but similarly stumble on a single demanding application. Meanwhile, a five-year-old system that doesn't have very impressive specs might feel surprisingly fast. You know you're not going to play the latest AAA games in 4K on it, and you don't expect it to handle 200 tabs in Chrome, but somehow, despite how old it is, such a build can feel comfortable.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Barcroft Media)

Last year, futurist Elon Musk announced a new project: a medical research company called Neuralink set to develop a new generation of brain implant devices—which may, among other things, help us in the coming AI apocalypse. But evil robots aside, the devices first have to face a more nefarious foe: lightning.

Doctors in Slovenia report that a 66-year-old woman with an existing brain implant experienced a close call with the device after lightning struck her apartment building. The strike ruined the woman’s television and air conditioning unit and managed to switch off her brain implant. Luckily, the woman and her device were not otherwise armed.

But in a report published this week in the Journal of Neurosurgery, the doctors say the situation could have easily been much worse, possibly zapping her brain or destroying her implant. They call for more precautions, such as surge protectors, as well as better awareness of the risks of lightning strikes with such implants—or deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices.

Enlarge / The Lenovo Mirage Solo headset with its WorldSense cameras clearly visible on the front. (credit: Lenovo)

Daydream, Google's foray into the crowded virtual reality space, has hitherto used headsets that are simply holsters, a way of holding an Android smartphone right in front of your face so that it works as a pair of VR goggles. This makes Daydream's cost of entry cheap—the headset can be a completely passive device with no electronics of its own—which is important for making VR accessible.

Lenovo's $400 Mirage Solo, out today, is the first standalone Daydream headset. You don't slot a phone into this one—the device has all the hardware it needs to provide a standalone VR experience. The hardware inside the headset is certainly phone-like; it has a Snapdragon 835 processor with 4GB RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 4,000mAh battery. It also contains phone-like sensors, with a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer. But because it's built for VR, it has a couple of extra sensors: a pair of world-facing cameras that Google calls "WorldSense."

WorldSense is Google's inside-out, six-degree-of-freedom motion-tracking solution. As with similar systems in Microsoft's HoloLens and the various Windows Mixed Reality headsets, the system combines data from the device's internal sensors with data from the cameras to track the headset's position and orientation in space, without requiring the fixed-base stations that are used on the first-generation HTC Vive and Oculus Rift devices.

Enlarge / A reverse osmosis facility. (credit: South Florida Water District)

Alan Turing is rightly famed for his contributions to computer science. But one of his key concepts—an autonomous system that can generate complex behavior from a few simple rules—also has applications in unexpected places, like animal behavior. One area where Turing himself applied the concept is in chemistry, and he published a paper describing how a single chemical reaction could create complex patterns like stripes if certain conditions are met.

It took us decades to figure out how to actually implement Turing's ideas about chemistry, but we've managed to create a number of reactions that display the behaviors he described. And now, a team of Chinese researchers has figured out how to use them to make something practical: a highly efficient desalination membrane.

From hypothesis to chemistry

Many chemical reactions end up going to completion, with all the possible reactants doing their thing and producing a product that's distributed uniformly within the reaction chamber. But under the right conditions, some chemical reactions don't reach equilibrium. These reactions are what interested Turing, since they could generate complex patterns.

Enlarge / A reverse osmosis facility. (credit: South Florida Water District)

Alan Turing is rightly famed for his contributions to computer science. But one of his key concepts—an autonomous system that can generate complex behavior from a few simple rules—also has applications in unexpected places, like animal behavior. One area where Turing himself applied the concept is in chemistry, and he published a paper describing how a single chemical reaction could create complex patterns like stripes if certain conditions are met.

It took us decades to figure out how to actually implement Turing's ideas about chemistry, but we've managed to create a number of reactions that display the behaviors he described. And now, a team of Chinese researchers has figured out how to use them to make something practical: a highly efficient desalination membrane.

From hypothesis to chemistry

Many chemical reactions end up going to completion, with all the possible reactants doing their thing and producing a product that's distributed uniformly within the reaction chamber. But under the right conditions, some chemical reactions don't reach equilibrium. These reactions are what interested Turing, since they could generate complex patterns.