Month: November 2018

Enlarge / Scientists on board the spaceship Nightflyer find their mission to discover other life forms at the edges of our Solar System has gone horribly wrong. (credit: SyFy)

With the final season of the blockbuster Game of Thrones series fast approaching, everyone is scrambling to find the next George R.R. Martin cash cow. Debuting this weekend, Nightflyers  is SYFY's adaptation of Martin's 1980 Hugo-nominated novella. Set in the year 2093, this sci-fi/horror genre-buster is as far removed from the medieval-like world of Westeros as you can get. But you can bet there will be blood—and a very high body count.

(Spoilers for novella below.) 

Nightflyers tells the story of a scientific expedition at the fringes of the known universe with the aim of studying a mysterious alien race known as the volcryn. Their spaceship, the Nightflyer, is sufficiently advanced to require only one human operator—Captain Royd Eris, who communicates only through voice or hologram projections. But there is also a strange malevolent presence on board, sensed by the team's telepath. A bloody murder spree ensues, with the humans pinning their hopes for survival on a genetically enhanced crew member, Melantha Jhirl.

More than 45,000 Internet routers have been compromised by a newly discovered campaign that’s designed to open networks to attacks by EternalBlue, the potent exploit that was developed by, and then stolen from, the National Security Agency and leaked to the Internet at large, researchers said Wednesday.

The new attack exploits routers with vulnerable implementations of Universal Plug and Play to force connected devices to open ports 139 and 445, content delivery network Akamai said in a blog post. As a result, almost 2 million computers, phones, and other network devices connected to the routers are reachable to the Internet on those ports. While Internet scans don’t reveal precisely what happens to the connected devices once they’re exposed, Akamai said the ports—which are instrumental for the spread of EternalBlue and its Linux cousin EternalRed—provide a strong hint of the attackers’ intentions.

The attacks are a new instance of a mass exploit the same researchers documented in April. They called it UPnProxy because it exploits Universal Plug and Play—often abbreviated as UPnP—to turn vulnerable routers into proxies that disguise the origins of spam, DDoSes, and botnets. In Wednesday’s blog post, the researchers wrote:

Enlarge / Uh, Mario, that thing you're so proudly presenting doesn't exist anymore, dude.

For nearly three years now, creators who wanted to make money from videos that included footage of Nintendo games had to go through the onerous approval and content requirements of the Nintendo Creators Program, which also gave Nintendo a 30 percent cut of any ad revenues. Today, Nintendo announced it would be halting that program at the end of the year, in favor of a new set of "basic rules" for video creators. If those rules are followed, Nintendo now says, "we will not object to your use of gameplay footage and/or screenshots captured from games for which Nintendo owns the copyright."

The guidelines, as written, encourage creators to use Nintendo content in videos with "that include your creative input and commentary." Direct, unedited videos of Nintendo game footage without such additional content "are not permitted," Nintendo says, unless they are shared through "system features, such as the Capture Button on Nintendo Switch."

That's a requirement that could impact the popular genre of YouTube longplays, which capture hours of direct gameplay footage for countless games.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Discussions about batteries often revolve around energy density. What we want is a battery that stores a whole lot of energy in a very tiny volume, preferably in a manner that does involve explosions or fire. At the cutting edge of research, what we get are batteries that are a mix of amazing and amazingly bad.

Modern batteries are, quite frankly, a miracle compared to ye olde lead acid battery. Yet they still contain less energy per unit mass than the equivalent mass of wood. Essentially, we simply don’t pack enough atoms into a small enough volume to compete with hydrocarbons. But, now it seems that graphene—it’s always graphene—might help pack lithium in.

The invisible metal

Although there are many ways to make a lithium-ion battery, the chemistry boils down to the following: lithium is stored in some form at one electrode. The lithium is released as an ion, where it travels to another electrode and reacts. At the same time, the electrons that complete the reaction travel out into the world via one electrode, do some work, and end up at the other electrode, where they complete the reaction.

Enlarge (credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

Starbucks will begin filtering pornography from public Wi-Fi networks in its US stores, the company has told multiple news outlets, including Business Insider and the Verge.

"We have identified a solution to prevent this content from being viewed within our stores and we will begin introducing it to our US locations in 2019," the company told the Verge in an emailed statement.

Viewing pornography has long been banned at Starbucks locations, but until now the company has not had a technological way to enforce the policy in its US locations.