Month: September 2018

Enlarge / Finding a distraction is key for young children trying to resist the marshmallow. (credit: Igniter Media)

The psychologist who famously demonstrated the importance of being able to delay gratification to achieving later success in life died on September 12 in New York City. Walter Mischel, emeritus professor of psychology at Columbia University and self-proclaimed "Marshmallow Man," was 88.

Per Columbia University's announcement:

"Professor Mischel is revered for his work in self-regulation. He is the author of the popular book The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. In it, he describes his groundbreaking studies of young children in the 1960s and 1970s, during which they were given the choice between receiving one immediate treat and receiving two treats 15 minutes later. The tactics used by the youngsters to distract themselves had implications for delayed gratification in adults. For example, when faced with the urge to smoke or a choice between arguing versus compromise, Mischel recommended keeping a goal in mind and focusing on the consequences of losing self-control."

Mischel's landmark behavioral study involved 600 kids between the ages of four and six, all culled from Stanford University's Bing Nursery School. He would give each child a marshmallow and gave them the option of eating it immediately if they chose. But if they could wait 15 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow as a reward. Then Mischel would leave the room and a hidden video camera would tape what happened next.

Nvidia's new 20-series video cards, due to ship next week, will introduce a new overclocking system: Scanner.

Overclocking is typically a trial-and-error process: increase the clock speed, run some intensive workloads to make sure everything works OK, maybe fiddle with the GPU voltage to eke out a bit more stability. Push the clock speed too high, and the system stands a good chance of locking up and crashing. This means that finding the optimal settings can cause lots of rebooting and adjustment. Verifying that the GPU really is stable at a given speed is also a challenge, as not all workloads use all parts of the chip. A given clock speed might be fine for some kinds of software but not others.

Scanner will make this process a lot more automatic and trustworthy. It will run incrementally and increase the clock speed and voltage of the GPU to build a profile of a specific card's capabilities, testing the GPU's computing ability at each speed to make sure that it's operating properly. Generally there will be arithmetic errors, rather than outright crashes, when the GPU is being operated only very slightly faster than it can support. So by making only small adjustments, Scanner can probe the limits of what the chip can handle without the crashes and reboots, and without human intervention. The whole process takes about 20 minutes.

Enlarge / This old mine is still yielding somebody Monero. (credit: Max Pixel (CC))

In May of 2017, the WannaCry attack—a file-encrypting ransomware knock-off attributed by the US to North Korea—raised the urgency of patching vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system that had been exposed by a leak of National Security Agency exploits. WannaCry leveraged an exploit called EternalBlue, software that leveraged Windows' Server Message Block (SMB) network file sharing protocol to move across networks, wreaking havoc as it spread quickly across affected networks.

The core exploit used by WannaCry has been leveraged by other malware authors, including the NotPetya attack that affected companies worldwide a month later, and Adylkuzz, a cryptocurrency-mining worm that began to spread even before WannaCry. Other cryptocurrency-mining worms followed, including WannaMine—a fileless, all-PowerShell based, Monero-mining malware attack that threat researchers have been tracking since at least last October. The servers behind the attack were widely published, and some of them went away.

But a year later, WannaMine is still spreading. Amit Serper, head of security research at Cybereason, has just published research into a recent attack on one of his company's clients—a Fortune 500 company that Serper told Ars was heavily hit by WannaMine. The malware affected "dozens of domain controllers and about 2,000 endpoints," Serper said, after gaining access through an unpatched SMB server.

Enlarge (credit: Getty / NOAA)

Earlier this week, Tesla made headlines when it announced it was temporarily unlocking extra battery capacity in a number of cars of customers affected by Hurricane Florence. The 60kWh configurations of the Model S and Model X electric vehicles—which were short-lived due to minimal demand—actually shipped with 75kWh battery packs, which could be software-unlocked for a fee. To help out any owners who need to evacuate from Florence, Tesla temporarily deactivated the software lock. But Tesla isn't the only connected car company to take steps to help out those affected by Florence. General Motors is also doing its part, activating OnStar Crisis Assist for every vehicle in the storm area with the correct onboard hardware.

GM's OnStar network is the granddaddy of connected car platforms, which started providing safety monitoring and a concierge service more than two decades ago. Since then, OnStar's services have expanded. I'm not sure you can buy a new vehicle from GM that doesn't contain an embedded 4G LTE modem and Wi-Fi, and the platform's services can even tell you if your kid's driving—or your own—needs improvement.

Not everyone chooses to keep paying for OnStar services after the initial free period. But for at least the next 30 days, if you have a Model Year 2006 or newer Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, or Cadillac vehicle with OnStar hardware and you live in one of the mid-Atlantic states being attacked by Florence, GM wants you to have access to the service.

Enlarge / Chuck (Alyson Hannigan) offers timely advice to summer camp counselor Sam (Fran Kranz) who finds himself dealing with a crazed killer. (credit: Curmudgeon Inc)

Last July, Twitter denizens relished a hilarious improvisational thread between fantasy authors Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes, in which the latter was a summer camp counselor in the midst of a massacre, wondering if, you know, he might be the killer. Now, Wendig has announced on his website that the impromptu story is a feature-length slasher film: You Might Be the Killer, starring Whedonverse superstar Alyson Hannigan (Buffy, How I Met Your Mother) and Fran Kranz (Cabin in the Woods).

The trailer just dropped, and it looks like it could be a hoot—like a low-budget Scream or Cabin in the Woods. Hannigan plays Chuck—sporting a mug quoting Scream quoting Psycho—who gets a panicked call from her friend Sam, covered in blood, who informs her that "everyone's dead" and there's a serial killer on the loose. "Sometimes that happens," Chuck deadpans. "Especially the counselors." It remains to be seen whether the inventiveness of a Twitter thread can translate to a feature film, but Sykes and Wendig produced the film, so we're hopeful the bonkers joy of the original thread should survive intact.

You Might be the Killer will premier at the Fantastic Film Fest in Austin on September 21. Here's hoping it finds a distributor fast so we can all revel in its gory absurdity.

Enlarge (credit: Formula 1)

Formula 1 has become quite forward-thinking since getting new owners interested in more than just sucking as much profit out of the sport as possible. That was certainly on display in a series of concept cars for the 2021 season the racing series showed to the world on Friday ahead of this weekend's Singapore Grand Prix. All three ideas are much more dramatic in appearance than current F1 machinery, showing how the Halo cockpit protection can be cohesively integrated with the styling. It turns out that 18-inch wheels actually do look pretty damn good.

Of course, the three concepts are about more than just aesthetics. As we've previously discussed, the sport's technical rulebook is going to be thoroughly revised for the 2021 season in an attempt to cure a number of ills including the inability of one car to follow closely behind another due to the effect of turbulent air.

"When we started looking at the 2021 car, the primary objective was to enable the cars to race well together,” said Ross Brawn, F1 motorsport director, in a post on the Formula 1 website. "Once the cars get within a few car lengths of each other, they lose 50 percent of their downforce. That’s a substantial amount of performance lost. So we set about understanding why that was and how we can improve it. I’m pleased to say we’re at about 80 [percent]."