Month: June 2018

Enlarge (credit: Oren neu dag / Wikimedia)

A single person or group may have made as much as $90,000 over 10 months by spreading 17 malicious images that were downloaded more than 5 million times from Docker Hub, researchers said Wednesday. The repository finally removed the submissions in May, more than eight months after receiving the first complaint.

Docker images are packages that typically include a pre-configured application running on top of an operating system. By downloading them from Docker Hub, administrators can save huge amounts of set-up time. Last July and August one or more people used the Docker Hub account docker123321 to upload three publicly available images that contained surreptitious code for mining cryptocurrencies. In September, a GitHub user complained one of the images contained a backdoor.

Eight months of inaction

Neither the Docker Hub account nor the malicious images it submitted were taken down. Over the the coming months, the account went on to submit 14 more malicious images. The submissions were publicly called out two more times, once in January by security firm Sysdig and again in May by security company Fortinet. Eight days after last month's report, Docker Hub finally removed the images. The following image, provided by security firm Kromtech, shows the chronology of the campaign.

Enlarge / Semi-automatic long guns for sale are on display at Texas Gun, one of the 6,700 firearm dealers located near the 2,000 miles long U.S.-Mexico border. (credit: Getty | Gilles Mingasson )

The doctors are in—and frustrated, according to a series of votes at the American Medical Association’s annual policymaking meeting wrapping up in Chicago.

The nation’s largest physicians group overwhelmingly voted on Tuesday to adopt a series of aggressive stances on gun control and other policies aimed at curbing gun violence, according to the Associated Press. These include blanket support of assault weapon bans and disapproval of arming teachers.

The sweeping support for the measures comes amid a streak of school shootings, high rates of gun violence in inner cities, and soaring suicide rates (firearms are the most common method of suicide, accounting for roughly 49 percent, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

(credit: Comcast)

Comcast today made a $65 billion offer to buy major portions of 21st Century Fox, setting up a potential bidding war with Walt Disney Company.

Disney already struck a $52.4 billion all-stock deal to buy the Fox properties, but Comcast announced that it is making an all-cash offer to "provide [Fox] shareholders with certain value and immediate liquidity."

The offer comes one day after a judge rejected the Trump administration's attempt to block AT&T's purchase of Time Warner Inc. The ruling suggests that Trump's Department of Justice wouldn't be able to stop a Comcast/Fox deal.

Enlarge / The vanishing Sun, progressively obscured by the dust storm on Mars. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/TAMU)

Over the weekend, NASA declared a spacecraft emergency for its remarkably durable rover Opportunity. The culprit? A dust storm blocked out a record amount of sunlight on the Martian surface, leaving the rover critically short on power. On Wednesday, NASA held a press conference to describe what was going on and explain why its scientists and engineers are optimistic that we'll hear more from the rover once the storm passes. That clearing may be several weeks from now, however, and said engineers will undoubtedly be very nervous until the storm is gone.

The storm causing the problems was first noted at the end of May, when it showed up in images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. By June 4, the storm was blocking out a significant part of the sunlight that powers the rover, causing NASA to reconfigure it for low-powered operations. By the following day, the opacity of the storm (a technical measure of how much light it blocks) had reached record levels, such that Opportunity's instruments could no longer measure it effectively.

At this point, NASA engineers put the rover in a low-power mode and ordered it not to check in until 48 hours had passed. At that check-in, they extended the low-power period to 72 hours. That's where things currently stand, although John Callas of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that "we're likely in a low-power fault right now," which implies that the rover will skip its next check-in.

Enlarge (credit: Alexander Koerner / Stringer / Getty Images)

A German court fined Volkswagen Group €1 billion ($1.2 billion) this week for its role in the 2015 diesel scandal. The fine is among the largest imposed on a company in Germany's history, according to the prosecutor in the case, and it shows that the German automaker is still dealing with the fallout from a persistent pattern of lying to regulators.

The diesel scandal first became public in the United States three years ago after regulators discovered that Volkswagen diesel vehicles were emitting significantly more nitrogen oxide (NO_x) while on the road than the legal limit. Later, researchers were able to find the exact code that suppressed the emissions control system on 2007-2015 diesel Volkswagens, Audis, and Porsches from Volkswagen Group.

The new German fine is related to "inadequate oversight" in the powertrain department, according to CNN Money.

Enlarge (credit: NASA/James Yungel)

The frozen continent of Antarctica holds a lot of ice. Like, a lot of ice. So finding out how much of it is melting into the oceans—raising sea level—and how much will melt in the future is a huge task. Not only do we need comprehensive measurements covering the most remote region on Earth, but even small measurement errors equate to very large differences in total ice mass.

This is largely a job for satellites, and we've got several different types of measurements being made from above, measuring things like ice surface elevation and even the gravitational attraction of the mass of ice. There are complicating issues, though, like the fact that the continent itself is responding to current and past ice loss by slowly rebounding upward. And we still need on-the-ground weather monitoring to track the accumulation of snow, among a host of other things.

The complex, multi-pronged nature of this effort means that researchers frequently publish separate estimates of change based on the type of data they are collecting, rather than integrating all sources of information. These numbers can naturally differ, making it hard to put your finger on one answer.

Enlarge / TV painting instructor/artist Bob Ross using a large paint brush to touch up one of his large seascapes in his studio at home. (credit: Acey Harper / Getty Images)

Blissful and soothing reruns of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting can make even hardened Internet users drift away to a sublime dream world, complete with happy little trees and happy little clouds. Now, for those that can’t get enough during the day—and have trouble drifting off at bedtime—there’s a happy little audio series.

The maker of popular meditation app Calm is recasting audio from episodes of The Joy of Painting to create “Sleep Stories” narrated by Ross that help users relax and slip off to a peaceful slumber.

The series marks the first time that Bob Ross Inc., which manages the late painting star’s estate and brand, has agreed to license audio from the show, according to a report by The New York Times.