Month: August 2018

Enlarge / Chaco Canyon ruins in New Mexico. (credit: Erik Terdal / Flickr)

Lots of macaw parrot skeletons and feathers have turned up at human settlements in the southwestern US and northwestern Mexico dating back to at least 900 CE. Given that these sites are at least 1,000 kilometers north of the bird’s natural range, it has long been clear that there was an interesting story here. How were macaws traded between cultures and over such long distances, long before the arrival of the Spanish and their horses?

Between 1250 and 1450, a settlement discovered at Paquimé in Mexico seems to have hosted a macaw-breeding program that must have met the demand for this culturally significant bird in the region. But what about before Paquimé? Archaeologists have debated the possibilities: that traders frequently traveled the long route to bring back macaws, that birds were haphazardly traded between settlements, or that there was an earlier breeding post.

A study led by Penn State’s Richard George sought to answer this question using DNA from scarlet macaw skeletons found at New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon and Mimbres settlements. Techniques to recover fairly complete DNA sequences from archaeological specimens have advanced in recent years, allowing researchers to test hypotheses with much more confidence.

Enlarge / An artist's approximation of what Diablo III: Eternal Collection may look like when it arrives on Nintendo Switch by year's end. (credit: Blizzard / Aurich Lawson)

Blizzard's first-ever video game for the Nintendo Switch, Diablo III, was unveiled on Wednesday following an article's apparent accidental publication.

Forbes published an article on Wednesday confirming that the developer's popular slash-and-loot series would arrive on Nintendo Switch by the end of 2018 in the form of an "Eternal Collection." The outlet quickly removed the article from its site, but its copious details (screengrabbed by Reddit members) appear legitimate, and publications like Kotaku confirmed that Forbes' article ran one day before Blizzard's official unveil scheduled for Thursday of this week.

As you might imagine from a name like "Eternal Collection," this version of Diablo III will include all of the 2012 game's subsequent paid expansions, including Reaper of Souls and Rise of the Necromancer, along with all of the game's free updates and patches up to this point. It will launch at an MSRP of $59.99.

The trick to breaking spaghetti in half is to bend and twist, new MIT study says. (credit: Tom Smith / EyeEm: Getty Images)

Pasta purists insist on plonking dry spaghetti into the boiling pot whole, but should you rebel against convention and try to break the strands in half, you'll probably end up with a mess of scattered pieces.

Now, two MIT mathematicians have figured out the trick to breaking spaghetti strands neatly in two: add a little twist as you bend. They outlined their findings in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This isn't the first time scientists have been fascinated by the physics of breaking spaghetti. The ever-curious Richard Feynman famously spent hours in his kitchen one night in a failed attempt to successfully break spaghetti strands neatly in half. It should have worked, he reasoned, because the strand snaps when the curvature becomes too great, and once that happens, the energy release should reduce the curvature. The spaghetti should straighten out and not break any further. But no matter how hard he tried, the spaghetti would break in three or more pieces.

Enlarge / The SkimReaper, shown here with a sample card skimming device, can help law enforcement find and shut down card skimming operations. (credit: Sean Gallagher)

BALTIMORE—At the USENIX Security Symposium here today, University of Florida researcher Nolen Scaife presented the results of a research project he undertook with Christian Peeters and Patrick Traynor to effectively detect some types of "skimmers"—maliciously placed devices designed to surreptitiously capture the magnetic stripe data and PIN codes of debit and credit cards as they are inserted into automated teller machines and point-of-sale systems. The researchers developed SkimReaper, a device that can sense when multiple read heads are present—a telltale sign of the presence of a skimmer.

Nolen and his fellow researchers worked with data provided by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to assess the types of credit-card-skimming gear currently in the wild. They uncovered four broad categories of skimming gear:

• Overlays—devices that get placed on top of the slot for the ATM or point-of-sale system. They can be modeled to match a specific ATM type's card slot or, in some cases, overlay an entire device such as a credit card reader at a retail point of sale. Overlays on ATM machines are sometimes accompanied by a keypad that is placed atop the actual keypad to collect PIN data.
• Deep inserts—skimmers engineered to be jammed deep into the card reader slots themselves. They're thin enough to fit under the card as it is inserted or drawn in to be read. An emerging version of this is a "smart chip" skimmer that reads EMV transactions passively, squeezed between the card slot and the EMV sensor.
• Wiretap skimmers—devices that get installed between a terminal and the network they connect to. This suggests there's a fundamental security problem to begin with.
• Internal skimmers—devices installed in-line between the card reader of a terminal and the rest of its hardware. These, Scaife said, are more common in gas-pump card readers, where the attacker has a greater chance of being able to gain access to the internals without being discovered.

Overlays and deep inserts are by far the most common types of skimmers—and are increasingly difficult to detect. Police, Scaife noted, often find them only by looking for the cameras used by skimmers to capture PIN numbers, because most of the common detection tips—including trying to shake the card slot to see if it dislodges—are ineffective.

Enlarge / Police attend the scene of a suspected murder on August 10, 2018 in Sydney, Australia. (credit: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images)

A new proposal by the Australian government that would mandate its ability to access encrypted data held by companies both foreign and domestic has been met with fierce opposition from many in the privacy and technology communities.

The bill, known as the "Assistance and Access Bill 2018," seeks to overcome what American authorities have spent years calling the "going dark" problem. The notion, as Canberra explains it, is to enhance "the ability of our law enforcement and security agencies to access the intelligible data necessary to conduct investigations and gather evidence."

It would create a new type of warrant that would allow what governments often call "lawful access" to thwart encryption, something that the former Australian Attorney General proposed last year.

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich)

Elon Musk left traders scratching their heads last week after tweeting that he was thinking about taking Tesla private for $420 per share—and had "funding secured" to do so. Musk finally cleared up some of the confusion on Monday, publishing a blog post saying that Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund was the funder he had in mind when he posted his "funding secured" tweet.

But Musk's Monday post mostly raised questions about whether he truly had the kind of commitment from the Saudis that would justify his tweet. Musk wrote that he came out of a July 31 meeting "with no question that a deal with the Saudi sovereign fund could be closed." Experts who talked to Ars this week questioned whether that's really sufficient for Musk to tweet that he had "funding secured" for a deal.

"That's not what anyone in the financial markets thinks of when you say 'funding secured,'" said Stephen Diamond, an expert on securities law at Santa Clara University. Ordinarily, he said, that kind of language would signal that Musk had a "term sheet, letter of intent, or some commitment from the other side of the table."