Month: October 2018

Video by Chris Schodt, production by Justin Wolfson (video link)

In our latest episode of Ars Technica Live, we talk about election security. My guest was Alex Stamos, a researcher at Stanford who just happened to be the CSO at Facebook when the company discovered Russian operatives meddling in the US presidential election. He told us about that experience, and what's worrying him about the future of UU democracy.

It was odd for technical experts like Stamos and his team at Facebook to find themselves at ground zero of a political propaganda war. Stamos explained that infosec researchers are not typically trained to deal with things like weaponized memes. "We had ignored that the vast majority of human harm caused online has no interesting technical component," he said wryly. "It's a technically correct use of the products we build."

Enlarge / Sherif Marakby, CEO of Ford's autonomous vehicle subsidiary, poses with DC Mayor Muriel Bowser. (credit: Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica)

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Waymo says it will launch a fully driverless taxi service later this year. GM's Cruise is aiming to do the same thing in 2019. Ford, by contrast, doesn't plan to launch a commercial service until 2021.

You could view this as a sign that Ford is far behind in the race to driverless cars. But in a Monday meeting with Ars Technica, Ford executives argued that they are laying the foundations to make Ford a major player in the autonomous vehicle market over the coming decade.

Ford was in Washington, DC—where both Ars car editor Jonathan Gitlin and I live—to announce that the nation's capital has been selected as Ford's second 2021 driverless cars launch city, alongside Miami. Mayor Muriel Bowser welcomed Ford to DC in a Monday press conference along the Potomac River waterfront.

Enlarge / Sherif Marakby, CEO of Ford's autonomous vehicle subsidiary, poses with DC Mayor Muriel Bowser. (credit: Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica)

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Waymo says it will launch a fully driverless taxi service later this year. GM's Cruise is aiming to do the same thing in 2019. Ford, by contrast, doesn't plan to launch a commercial service until 2021.

You could view this as a sign that Ford is far behind in the race to driverless cars. But in a Monday meeting with Ars Technica, Ford executives argued that they are laying the foundations to make Ford a major player in the autonomous vehicle market over the coming decade.

Ford was in Washington, DC—where both Ars car editor Jonathan Gitlin and I live—to announce that the nation's capital has been selected as Ford's second 2021 driverless cars launch city, alongside Miami. Mayor Muriel Bowser welcomed Ford to DC in a Monday press conference along the Potomac River waterfront.

Enlarge / Artistic representation of a shock wave experiment on water, used to form exotic ice-VII in the lab, against background of hypothetical ocean world. (credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle introduced the world to so-called "Ice Nine," a fictional form of water that freezes at room temperature. If it so much as touches a drop of regular water, that will freeze, too, and so on, spreading so rapidly that it freezes everything that comes into contact with it.

Fortunately for Earth, Ice-Nine doesn't exist. But there is an exotic form of ice dubbed "ice VII" that physicists can create in the laboratory. It's harmless in terrestrial conditions. But on an ocean world like Jupiter's moon, Europa, it could behave just like Ice-Nine under the right conditions, freezing an entire world within hours—with some key implications for the possibility of finding life on distant exoplanets. Now we know more about just how that special freezing process occurs, according to a recent paper in Physical Review Letters.

It's the shape formed by the water molecules that determine which phase of ice you get. That ice in your glass of whiskey is technically ice Ih—"h" for hexagon, since that's the shape that all the oxygen atoms line up in during freezing. But in theory, there should be at least 17 different crystalline phases of water—which one you get depends on the pressure and temperature of any given environment.

Enlarge / Artistic representation of a shock wave experiment on water, used to form exotic ice-VII in the lab, against background of hypothetical ocean world. (credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle introduced the world to so-called "Ice Nine," a fictional form of water that freezes at room temperature. If it so much as touches a drop of regular water, that will freeze, too, and so on, spreading so rapidly that it freezes everything that comes into contact with it.

Fortunately for Earth, Ice-Nine doesn't exist. But there is an exotic form of ice dubbed "ice VII" that physicists can create in the laboratory. It's harmless in terrestrial conditions. But on an ocean world like Jupiter's moon, Europa, it could behave just like Ice-Nine under the right conditions, freezing an entire world within hours—with some key implications for the possibility of finding life on distant exoplanets. Now we know more about just how that special freezing process occurs, according to a recent paper in Physical Review Letters.

It's the shape formed by the water molecules that determine which phase of ice you get. That ice in your glass of whiskey is technically ice Ih—"h" for hexagon, since that's the shape that all the oxygen atoms line up in during freezing. But in theory, there should be at least 17 different crystalline phases of water—which one you get depends on the pressure and temperature of any given environment.

Enlarge (credit: Eni An Energy Company)

Malware that caused a dangerous operational failure inside a Middle Eastern critical infrastructure facility was most likely developed by a Russian government-backed research institute, researchers from US security firm FireEye said Tuesday.

The malware, alternately dubbed Triton and Trisis, was most likely designed to cause physical damage inside critical infrastructure sites, such as gas refineries and chemical plants, FireEye researchers said in a report published in December. The attack worked by tampering with a safety instrumented system, which the targeted facility and many other critical infrastructure sites use to prevent unsafe conditions from arising. FireEye’s December report said a nation-state was most likely behind the attack but stopped short of identifying the country.

In a report published Tuesday, FireEye said its researchers now assess with high confidence that the malware used in the attack was developed with the help of the Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics in Moscow. The assessment was based on a variety of evidence that not only implicated the institute, which in Russian is abbreviated as CNIIHM, but also a specific professor who works there. Evidence linking the CNIIHM to the attack—which FireEye now calls TEMP.Veles—included malware that was tested inside the institute, artifacts left inside the malware used in the attack, an IP address belonging to CNIIHM, and the malware developer’s operating hours, which showed them observing a normal work schedule in Moscow.

Enlarge (credit: Eni An Energy Company)

Malware that caused a dangerous operational failure inside a Middle Eastern critical infrastructure facility was most likely developed by a Russian government-backed research institute, researchers from US security firm FireEye said Tuesday.

The malware, alternately dubbed Triton and Trisis, was most likely designed to cause physical damage inside critical infrastructure sites, such as gas refineries and chemical plants, FireEye researchers said in a report published in December. The attack worked by tampering with a safety instrumented system, which the targeted facility and many other critical infrastructure sites use to prevent unsafe conditions from arising. FireEye’s December report said a nation-state was most likely behind the attack but stopped short of identifying the country.

In a report published Tuesday, FireEye said its researchers now assess with high confidence that the malware used in the attack was developed with the help of the Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics in Moscow. The assessment was based on a variety of evidence that not only implicated the institute, which in Russian is abbreviated as CNIIHM, but also a specific professor who works there. Evidence linking the CNIIHM to the attack—which FireEye now calls TEMP.Veles—included malware that was tested inside the institute, artifacts left inside the malware used in the attack, an IP address belonging to CNIIHM, and the malware developer’s operating hours, which showed them observing a normal work schedule in Moscow.