Month: November 2018

Enlarge / A DDR3 DIMM with error-correcting code from Samsung. ECC is no longer an absolute defense against Rowhammer attacks. (credit: Samsung)

In early 2015, researchers unveiled Rowhammer, a cutting-edge hack that exploits unfixable physical weaknesses in the silicon of certain types of memory chips to transform data they stored. In the 42 months that have passed since then, an enhancement known as error-correcting code (or ECC) available in higher-end chips was believed to be an absolute defense against potentially disastrous bitflips that changed 0s to 1s and vice versa.

Research published Wednesday has now shattered that assumption.

Dubbed ECCploit, the new Rowhammer attack bypasses ECC protections built into several widely used models of DDR3 chips. The exploit is the product of more than a year of painstaking research that used syringe needles to inject faults into chips and supercooled chips to observe how they responded when bits flipped. The resulting insights, along with some advanced math, allowed researchers in Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's VUSec group to demonstrate that one of the key defenses against Rowhammer isn't sufficient.

Enlarge / Romaine lettuce, looking innocuous. (credit: Chimpr / Flickr)

Step away from the salad, advises the CDC. Specifically, you should stay away from romaine lettuce in every possible form: baby romaine, spring mix, whole heads, precut, the works. An outbreak of pathogenic E. coli across 11 states and Canada has been traced to romaine lettuce, an echo of a similar outbreak that happened at the same time last year.

The warning extends to lettuce in restaurants, shops, and your home, and the CDC recommends taking no risks: if you think you bought the lettuce before the current outbreak, trash it anyway. If you’re not sure it’s romaine, trash it anyway. If you had romaine in your fridge, they recommend washing down the entire fridge with warm, soapy water; and, if you're inclined to be extra cautious, a bit of diluted liquid bleach to follow.

Why the high level of alarm? The outbreak is caused by a particularly nasty strain of E. coli that can, in some cases, lead to a type of kidney failure; it’s not to be trifled with. So far, 32 people in the US got sick between October 8 and 31, of whom 13 have been hospitalized. In Canada, six people have been hospitalized out of a reported 18 cases. So far, no deaths have been reported. Because of how long it can take before the CDC gets wind of a case, the agency thinks it won’t yet know about cases happening since the first few weeks of November, so those numbers will probably change.

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by another suite of early Black Friday deals that'll remain available through the big day itself. Those discounts include a PS4 Slim bundle with Spider-Man for $200, discounts on various high-performing TVs from Samsung, Vizio, and TCL, a nice drop on Lenovo's latest ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop, and Samsung's Galaxy S9 for $520.

The latter is not the best phone in that price range—we'd give that honor to the OnePlus 6T—and Samsung's take on Android is always a mess. But its OLED screen is still top-notch (and sans notch), its camera is excellent, and it has an actual headphone jack and microSD slot. If you don't mind having a worse camera and a notch staring back at you, we'll note the OnePlus 6 is also on sale for $429. Either way, you can see the whole deals list for yourself below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Enlarge / Visualization of the spread through social media of an article falsely claiming 3 million illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 presidential election. (credit: Filippo Menczer)

Shortly after the 2016 election, newly elected President Donald Trump—peeved at losing the popular vote to Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton—falsely claimed he would have won the popular vote if not for the supposed votes of 3 million illegal immigrants. The lie spread rapidly across social media—far faster than factual attempts to debunk it. And Twitter bots played a disproportionate role in spreading that false information.

That's according to a new study by researchers at Indiana University, published in Nature Communications. They examined 14 million messages shared on Twitter between May 2016 and May 2017, spanning the presidential primaries and Trump's inauguration. And they found it took just six percent of Twitter accounts identified as bots to spread 31 percent of what they term "low-credibility" information on the social network. The bots managed this feat in just two to 10 seconds, thanks in large part to automated amplification.

Why are bots so effective at spreading false information? Study co-author Filippo Menczer attributes their success to so-called "social bias:" the human tendency to pay more attention to things that seem to be popular. Bots can create the appearance of popularity or that a certain opinion is more widely held than it actually is. "People tend to put greater trust in messages that appear to originate from many people," said Menczer's co-author, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia. "Bots prey upon this trust by making messages seem so popular that real people are tricked into spreading their messages for them."