Month: June 2019

Enlarge / Oh, Baltimore. (credit: Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)

Over the past few weeks, a Twitter account that has since been confirmed by researchers to be that of the operator of the ransomware that took down Baltimore City's networks May 4 has posted taunts of Baltimore City officials and documents demonstrating that at least some data was stolen from a city server. Those documents were posted in response to interactions I had with the ransomware operator in an attempt to confirm that the account was not a prank.

In their last post before the account was suspended by Twitter yesterday, the operator of the Robbinhood account (@robihkjn) answered my question, "Hey, so did you use EternalBlue or not?":

absolutely not my friend

The account was shut down after its operator posted a profanity and racist-tinged final warning to Baltimore City Mayor Bernard "Jack" Young that he had until June 7 to pay for keys to decrypt files on city computers. "In 7 Jun 2019 that's your dead line," the post stated. "We'll remove all of things we've had about your city and you can tell other [expletives] to help you for getting back... That's final dead line." The same messages have been posted to the Web "panel" associated with the Baltimore ransomware, according to Joe Stewart, independent security consultant working on behalf of the cloud security firm Armor, and Eric Sifford, security researcher with Armor’s Threat Resistance Unit (TRU).

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  You won't find many human NPCs in the wasteland, but there are plenty of deadly robots. [credit: Bethesda ]

There's a famous quote around the game industry often attributed to legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." That may have been true when he said it, but it seems a little outdated in today's "launch now and patch it later" game industry.

I've been thinking about this a lot since listening to an IGN interview with Bethesda's Todd Howard yesterday about what he admits was a "bumpy" rollout for Fallout 76 last year. In the interview, Howard acknowledges it was a "very difficult development on that game to get it where it was," noting that "any time you're going to do something new like that you know you're going to have your bumps."

Fallout 76 was savaged by critics (including our own) at launch for widespread glitches and half-baked content. Looking back, Howard now says he and his team knew "even from the beginning this is not going to be a high Metacritic game."

Enlarge / Normal rice (bottom), the first version of golden rice (right), and the current strain (left). (credit: Environmental Health Perspectives/NIH)

One of the arguments that has been advanced to promote genetically engineered crops is that the techniques have the potential for improving the food we eat. Crops could be engineered so that they provide nutrients they currently don't or so that good nutrition is in reach of poor people in developing nations.

In fact, the technology does have that potential, and a couple of efforts have been made to do exactly this. Yet, decades into the GMO era, all of the engineered crops on the market provide enhanced productivity and other benefits to farmers but nothing for the people who ultimately end up eating the results. So why the huge gap between potential and reality? The huge number of problems involved is the subject of a review in Nature Plants.

Far from golden

The people behind the review come from the Rothamsted Research, a UK-based nonprofit agricultural science institution. The nonprofit aspect is rather critical. Rothamsted's work does include developing genetically modified crops, but it's not doing so to make money; instead, the organization is dedicated to improving farming in developing economies and sees GMO crops as a potential contributor there. But even with those things going for it, the organization has been caught up in the public's disapproval of GMOs, with protesters having threatened to destroy one of its test plantings in 2012.

Enlarge / A rendering of the Flying-V wearing KLM's livery. (credit: Edwin Wallet, Studio OSO)

On Monday, news started to spread about a radical new design of passenger plane. Shaped like the letter V, (and called the Flying-V), it does away with a conventional fuselage and even the middle bit of a blended wing body design—this plane is all wing. As a result, sections of the wings are much thicker than on a normal passenger jet, with a pair of engine nacelles mounted above the rear trailing edges. Passengers sit along the leading edges, with fuel and cargo also stored in the wings. The advantage of this unusual shape? It could carry as many passengers as an Airbus A350—314 of them in a standard configuration—but use 20 percent less fuel for the same journey.

The design is courtesy of TU Delft, a Dutch university, which has been partnering with Dutch airline KLM on the project to make air travel more sustainable. "Radically new and highly energy-efficient aircraft designs such as the Flying-V are important in this respect, as are new forms of propulsion. Our ultimate aim is one of emission-free flight. Our cooperation with KLM offers a tremendous opportunity to bring about real change," said Henri Werij, Dean of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft.

A flying model is meant to take to the air during KLM's 100th anniversary celebration in October, along with a full-size mockup of part of the interior. The interior will also be a little out of the ordinary, according to Peter Vink, a professor of applied ergonomics and design at TU Delft. "The new shape of the aircraft means we have exciting opportunities to design the interior, making flying more comfortable for passengers. For instance, as part of the Flying-V research, we’re looking into new options to having a rest or taking meals on a plane," he said.