Month: August 2019

Enlarge / Elon Musk. (credit: Charley Gallay/Getty Images for E3/Entertainment Software Association)

Last October, after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released crash test data for the Model 3, Tesla declared that it had the "lowest probability of injury of any vehicle ever tested by NHTSA."

Two days later, the NHTSA responded in the understated way typical of a federal agency. Without naming Tesla, the NHTSA argued that its "5-star rating is the highest safety rating a vehicle can achieve. NHTSA does not distinguish safety performance beyond that rating, thus there is no 'safest' vehicle among those vehicles achieving 5-star ratings."

But documents recently obtained by the website Plainsite using a freedom-of-information request show that the NHTSA's private communications with Tesla weren't so diplomatic.

Enlarge / A eukaryotic cell has a lot of complex structure that bacteria and archaea lack. (credit: NHGRI)

The cells of all animals, plants, and fungi have an impressive complexity, with a variety of compartments specialized in various tasks, like generating energy, digesting proteins, or holding DNA. If you look at bacteria or archaea, however, their interiors are essentially featureless. How did this cellular complexity come about?

A key thing that has limited our understanding here is that we've never gotten a sense of what the ancestors of complex cells looked like. Over the last several years, we've found increasing genetic evidence of the existence of modern descendants of these organisms, but we've never been able to grow them to have a look at them. On Tuesday, however, a paper reports on the success of a decade-long attempt to get one of these to survive in culture. And the resulting microbes look very weird—but weird in a way that hints at how complex cells evolved.

Welcome to Asgard

Complex cells, called eukaryotes, carry a mixture of three types of genes. Some come from the bacteria that were incorporated as mitochondria and chloroplasts. Others seem to have evolved after the origin of complex cells. And yet others seem to have originated in archaea, a distinct type of simple, single-celled organisms that were once classified as bacteria. This provided key support to the idea that complex cells originated when archaea somehow swallowed bacteria and started using them to produce energy.

Enlarge (credit: Collin Mulliner)

Developing and maintaining secure firmware for tablets, cars, and IoT devices is hard. Often, the firmware is initially developed by a third party rather than in-house. And it can be tough as projects move from inception and prototyping to full-force engineering and finally to deployment and production.

Now, an engineer at self-driving car service Cruise is easing the pain with the release of FwAnalyzer, a tool he and his Cruise colleagues developed themselves. Collin Mulliner spent more than a decade scouring firmware found in phones and other devices before becoming Cruise’s principal security engineer. He helped write FWAnalyzer to provide continuous automated firmware analysis that could aid engineers at any phase of the code’s lifecycle.

“It's peace of mind that there's constant analysis,” Mulliner said of the tool, which he’ll be discussing at a panel on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. “At any step in development… it runs checks.”

Enlarge / MSDN Magazine's heyday fell firmly in the era of Windows XP Professional. (credit: Jeff Christensen / ContributorChristensen/WireImage)

It's the end of an era, albeit an era you probably already thought had ended. Microsoft announced this week that it will discontinue the publication of MSDN Magazine, which had been a part of the Windows developer community since 2000. The final issue will publish this November.

The print magazine was born out of a merger between Microsoft Systems Journal and Microsoft Internet Developer; Microsoft Systems Journal had previously run since it was introduced in 1986 as Microsoft's first publication focused on developers. So this marks the end of a 33-year run of print publications supporting the Microsoft programming community.

“The time is right to combine the two magazines because the technologies each covered are converging," said Editor-in-Chief Michael Longacre in 2000 when the magazine's current form was born. "MSDN Magazine will continue the strategic editorial focus of both publications while moving forward as new technologies and solutions emerge.” In those early days, the magazine's focus was on "C++ Q & A, Basic Instincts, Security Briefs, House of COM, Serving the Web, Web Q & A, and The XML Files."

Enlarge / A monitor seen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The Federal Communications Commission has finally gotten around to denying a net neutrality complaint filed against Verizon in July 2016, two years before the commission eliminated its net neutrality rules.

The complaint by Verizon Wireless customer Alex Nguyen was the only formal net neutrality complaint the FCC received during the three years its rules were in place. Nguyen alleged that Verizon took numerous actions that blocked third-party devices and applications from being used on its network. His complaint said that Verizon's actions violated both the net neutrality rules and the open access rules applied to C Block spectrum licenses owned by Verizon.

While the FCC received tens of thousands of informal net neutrality complaints, which could be filed for free, Nguyen had to pay a $225 filing fee for his formal complaint and go through a court-like proceeding in which the parties appear before the FCC and file numerous documents to address legal issues.

Enlarge / SEM image of Milnesium tardigradum in active state. Totes adorbz. (credit: Schokraie E., et al./PLOS ONE)

Tardigrades, more commonly known as "water bears," are microscopic creatures capable of surviving the harshest extreme conditions. In fact, they were the first animal to survive in the vacuum of space in 2007. Now, it seems, they might be ready to colonize the Moon. BBC News reports that an Israeli spacecraft carrying the tiny creatures in a state of dehydration crash-landed on the Moon back in April. All they need is a bit of water to reanimate, and voila! We'd have a colony of lunar tardigrades.

First described by German zoologist Johann Goeze in 1773, they were dubbed tardigrada ("slow steppers" or "slow walkers") four years later by Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian biologist. That's because tardigrades tend to lumber along like a bear. Since they can survive almost anywhere, they can be found in lots of places: deep-sea trenches, salt and freshwater sediments, tropical rain forests, the Antarctic, mud volcanoes, sand dunes, beaches, and lichen and moss. (Another name for them is "moss piglets," immortalized in a 2017 South Park episode where the gang teaches tardigrades to dance to Taylor Swift songs for science class.)

They're not technically members of the extremophile class of organisms since they don't so much thrive in extreme conditions as endure, but they can endure for an impressively long time. Their secret? They can suspend their metabolism, enabling them to go without food or water for 30 years or more, and they can survive dehydrated for at least five years. Once revived, they go on with their lives, even capable of reproducing to replenish their numbers.

Enlarge / There doesn't appear to be much hosted on Epik's 45.88.202 netblock right now—all we discovered was TDS and this site, which dubs itself "The World's #1 Source of National Socialist Material." (credit: Jim Salter)

As of Monday, 8chan was down due to a complete disconnection of its host Epik's services from the netblock it leased from its upstream provider, Voxility. The disconnection took notorious white nationalist site The Daily Stormer—and any other Epik customers hosted at Voxility—down with it.

Today, 8chan and The Daily Stormer are both back up. The Daily Stormer is up on its original Epik/Voxility netblock, while 8chan has popped up on a netblock owned by Reno, Nevada-based N.T. Technology.

We first discovered that 8chan was back online after testing its deep Web site, using the Tor browser. The site appeared to be offline entirely, and there's little in the way of diagnostic tools available for the Tor network—but after leaving a window open and unresponsive for over 12 minutes, the site loaded. Hovering over links within the .onion site showed they were targeted to a non-deep-Web 8chan subdomain—and to our surprise, those links loaded. This led us to re-examine both the site's DNS and overall hosting status.