Month: May 2018

Just one example of a Russian-created Facebook ad used in the run-up to the 2016 election. (credit: House Committee on Intelligence)

On Thursday morning, the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a vast trove of thousands of Russian-bought Facebook and Instagram ads designed to sow doubt among the American population in the run-up to the November 2016 presidential election. The committee had promised to publish the ads late last year.

While a limited number of ads had been released previously, the new cache reveals a scale and scope previously unseen.

According to the committee, there were 3,393 advertisements purchased, which were seen by more than 11.4 million Americans. The Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency created 470 Facebook pages, which made “80,000 pieces of organic content” seen by more than 126 million Americans.

Enlarge / Warm sea surface temperatures on August 23, 2017, just before Hurricane Harvey. (credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

We’ve covered several studies seeking to clarify the role of human-caused climate change in the unbelievable amounts of water Hurricane Harvey dumped on Houston last year. The general approach of these studies was to simulate today’s climate and a pre-global-warming climate, and to then compare the behavior of hurricanes around Houston.

Since most people understand that hurricanes are fueled by warm ocean water, however, perhaps it would be conceptually simpler to focus on the seawater beneath Harvey.

That has now been done by a new study led by Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. By analyzing the heat energy present in the Gulf of Mexico—and how much was lost as Harvey spun through—researchers get a fairly direct measure of Harvey’s fuel.

Enlarge / Michael Cohen, longtime personal lawyer and confidant for President Donald Trump, arrives at the United States District Court Southern District of New York on April 26, 2018 in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Spencer Platt )

Congressional Democrats are asking US regulators for information on whether AT&T payments to President Trump's personal lawyer were made in order to influence the government's review of AT&T's merger with Time Warner Inc.

AT&T paid $600,000 to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's shell company, Essential Consultants, "the same vehicle he used in October 2016 to direct $130,000 to the adult-film actress known professionally as Stormy Daniels to stay silent about an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump in 2006," The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday.

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) yesterday asked the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division for answers.

Blizzard Entertainment just released Rialto, a new map for its hero-based first-person shooter Overwatch. Set in Venice, Italy, Rialto does a few things differently from past Overwatch maps—it has more water than any before it and uses 90° angles in tightly packed streets to create choke points in addition to narrow archways, to name a couple changes.

In this video, Overwatch Assistant Game Director Aaron Keller talks about how Blizzard approached designing the map and about the process for making Overwatch maps in general. I visited Blizzard HQ in Irvine, California, and among many other things, I asked Keller: How do you balance a map for nearly 30 characters? Do you design maps to be strong for specific characters? How do you make sure framerates stay high and the action stays fast? And do the differences between consoles and PCs affect map designs in any way?

If you want answers to all those questions and more, check out the video. Keller also revealed a hint about a new easter egg, and he explained how a fleet of small boats run by robot gondoliers saved players from getting booped into the water too much and helped keep the map balanced.

Enlarge (credit: Arterra/UIG via Getty Images)

As we've reported in the past, the death toll on US roads keeps increasing despite ever-safer vehicles. And people are overwhelmingly to blame; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration calculates that 97 percent of all fatal crashes are due to human error. One factor in all this unsafe road behavior is distracted driving, and the past few weeks have seen my inbox bombarded with new studies on the topic. After a while, a deluge like that becomes hard to ignore, so I figured it was time to sit down and read through them. And the findings reveal that drivers aren't really getting any better about focusing on the road.

The various reports use a number of different methodologies: combing through NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Report System (FARS), data collected from smartphone apps, plus surveys of drivers and companies. So taken together, they ought to give us a decent picture of the problem. As we'll see, however, you can infer very different things depending on how you look at the data, particularly when you try to break it down geographically. Let's start with the analyses of NHTSA's crash data.

Safewise looked at FARS data for 2016 (the most recent year with complete data) to investigate the prevalence of distracted driving. It found that nine percent of all road fatalities, and six percent of driver fatalities, were caused by distracted driving and that the total number of deaths had increased by 14 percent in just two years. It then broke things down by state; the deadliest place to drive appears to be Mississippi, with 23.1 deaths per year for every 100,000 people. Alabama and South Carolina also exceeded 20 deaths per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, the District of Columbia is the safest place to drive, with just four deaths per 100,000 people. For context, the national average for the country was 11.6 deaths per 100,000 people.

Enlarge / Researchers used a 10Gbps network card like this one in a Rowhammer attack that needed only packets sent over a LAN to work. (credit: Mellanox)

For the first time, researchers have exploited the Rowhammer memory-chip weakness using nothing more than network packets sent over a local area network. The advance is likely to further lower the bar for triggering bit flips that change critical pieces of data stored on vulnerable computers and servers.

Until now, Rowhammer exploits had to execute code on targeted machines. That hurdle required attackers to either sneak the unprivileged code onto the machines or lure end users to a website that hosted malicious JavaScript. In a paper published Wednesday, researchers at the Vrije Universitat Amsterdam and the University of Cyprus showed that standard packets sent over networks used by many cloud services, universities, and others were sufficient. The secret to the new technique: increasingly fast network speeds that allow hackers to send specially designed packets in rapid succession.

"Thus far, Rowhammer has been commonly perceived as a dangerous hardware bug that allows attackers capable of executing code on a machine to escalate their privileges," the researchers wrote. "In this paper, we have shown that Rowhammer is much more dangerous and also allows for remote attacks in practical settings. We show that even at relatively modest network speeds of 10Gbps, it is possible to flip bits in a victim machine from across the network."