Month: June 2018

Enlarge (credit: Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has accused a Tesla employee of "quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations," according to an email obtained by CNBC. In the all-hands email to Tesla staff, Musk wrote that the employee had made "direct code changes" to the company's production systems, as well as exporting "large amounts" of Tesla's data to unknown third parties.

According to Musk's email, the unnamed employee claimed he had become disgruntled after failing to receive a promotion. However, the Tesla CEO also suggested the alleged saboteur could have been working with short sellers, oil and gas companies—whom he described as "sometimes not super nice"—or "the multitude of big gas/diesel car company competitors." Of this last group, Musk reminded his employees that, since the traditional OEMs have been known to cheat emissions tests, "maybe they're willing to cheat in other ways."

On Monday, Musk sent out another email to the company about yet another factory fire—the fifth by our count—alluding to the possibility of sabotage. And in 2016, one of Musk's other companies, SpaceX, asked to inspect the roof of a competitor's building following the explosion on the launchpad of one of SpaceX's rockets.

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump, right, shakes hands with US Vice President Mike Pence during a National Space Council meeting in the East Room of the White House on Monday. (credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

For its third meeting, the National Space Council chose the White House as its venue. This allowed President Trump to stop by the meeting to sign a policy document on space-traffic management and also share a few thoughts. This event was supposed to focus on the relatively sedate topic of space debris, but the freewheeling president had other ideas.

Among his remarks, Trump declared that he was pressing ahead with the creation of a Space Force to become the sixth branch of the US military. Additionally, he mused about the high cost of rockets built by Boeing and Lockheed Martin and suggested they should not work together "because the pricing only goes up."

Space Force

Addressing the space council, with its titular head Vice President Mike Pence standing at his side, Trump said he was directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as a distinct entity outside of the Air Force.

Enlarge / Lorena Becerra-Valdivia used this equipment to extract hydroxyproline from the Anzick site bone samples. (credit: Becerra-Valdivia)

At sites scattered across western North America, long, fluted stone projectile points mark the presence of ancient people from a culture archaeologists now call Clovis. For much of the 20th century, the Clovis people were considered the very first Americans. But more recent data has shown that people arrived in North America several thousand years before the oldest known Clovis projectile points were made. But Clovis appears to be the first widespread culture, and it still represents a key chapter in the story of how people spread across two continents.

Beyond the things they left behind, there’s little trace of the Clovis people themselves. In fact, a lone infant skeleton may be the only known representative of the Clovis culture. Due to some discrepancies in radiocarbon dating, however, archaeologists still aren't sure whether the child's remains are Clovis. Now, a new study adds some evidence to that debate.

Meet Anzick-1

In 1968, construction workers near Anzick, Montana, unearthed the partial skeleton of an infant boy: fragments of his skull, his left collarbone, and a few ribs. At first glance, the boy now known as Anzick-1 seems to be the only member of the Clovis culture found so far. His skeleton was found with Clovis-style artifacts—more than 100 stone and bone objects, all dusted with red ochre. But radiocarbon dating of his remains didn't line up with dates from a pair of antler artifacts from the Clovis materials, raising questions as to how they ended up at Anzick together.

Enlarge (credit: Wardle and Regula)

Unbeknownst to many people, a macOS feature that caches thumbnail images of files can leak highly sensitive data stored on password-protected drives and encrypted volumes, security experts said Monday.

The automatically generated caches can be viewed only by someone who has physical access to a Mac or infects the Mac with malware, and the behavior has existed on Macs for almost a decade. Still, the caching is triggered with minimal user interaction and causes there to be a permanent record of files even after the original file is deleted or the USB drive or encrypted volume that stored the data is disconnected from the Mac. Patrick Wardle and Wojciech Reguła, who are macOS security experts at Digita Security and SecuRing, respectively, said for many people, it’s unnecessarily risky to store snapshots of files related to passwords or other sensitive matters in an unprotected folder. In a blog post published Monday, they wrote:

For a forensics investigation or surveillance implant, this information could prove invaluable. Imagine having a historic record of the USB devices, files on the devices, and even thumbnails of the files...all stored persistently in an unencrypted database, long after the USB devices have been removed (and perhaps destroyed).

For users, the question is: "Do you really want your Mac recording the file paths and 'previews' thumbnails of the files on any/all USB sticks that you've ever inserted into your Mac?" Me thinks not…

As the researchers note, the caching may cause there to be a permanent record of every drive that connects to a Mac. It also creates a thumbnail image that can leak key details about many of the images stored on the drives, as well as password-protected folders or encrypted volumes. The thumbnails will live on in an SQLite database stored indefinitely in the macOS file system.

Enlarge / Rupert Stadler, chief executive officer of Audi AG, speaks during an opening ceremony for the company's new production plant in Puebla, Mexico, on Friday, Sept. 30, 2016. German authorities have taken Stadler, chief executive officer of Volkswagen AGs Audi unit, into custody, making his the highest-profile arrest in the group's diesel-cheating probes. (credit: Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Monday, Rupert Stadler, the head of Volkswagen Group's Audi unit, was arrested in Germany, marking the first arrest of a VW Group high-ranking official in connection with the diesel scandal that became public in 2015.

Stadler, who took Audi's helm in 2007, had his house raided by German investigators last week. The raid occurred around the same time that VW Group agreed to pay a €1 billion ($1.2 billion) fine for "inadequate oversight" in its powertrain department.

According to local paper Sueddeuschte Zeitung as reported by Bloomberg, the arrest was made after law enforcement tapped Stadler's phone. The executive was taken into custody because prosecutors thought he might tamper with evidence. "Last week, authorities raided his house and named him a suspect in their probe of fraud and falsifying public documents in relation to selling diesel cars in Europe," Bloomberg reported.