Month: October 2019

Enlarge / Johannesburg City Hall (credit: Chris Eason)

Johannesburg, the biggest city in South Africa and the 26th largest city worldwide, has shut down its website, billing and electronic services after being hit by a serious network attack, the second one in three months, municipality officials said.

A group calling itself Shadow Kill Hackers took to Twitter to take credit for the attack, claiming it took Johannesburg's “sensitive finance data offline.” The group is demanding 4 Bitcoins, valued at about $32,000 US, for the safe return of the data.

A Johannesburg spokesman said the city took down the site after it detected a breach and that so far no formal ransom demands had been made. He also played down the extent of the breach.

Enlarge / Sony's PlayStation 4, for which Vue is currently the only cable-lite streaming subscription available. (credit: Kyle Orland)

Sony is seeking to sell off its PlayStation Vue TV business for a figure in the "tens of millions," ending a multi-year experiment in taking on cable companies with lower-cost, "skinny" streaming TV bundles.

Citing people familiar with the situation, The Information reports that Sony began working with Bank of America Merrill Lynch to explore the possibility of selling Vue as the company seeks to raise its stock price by shedding businesses that are not making money. The sources said that Vue loses money largely because of high costs for content, for which Sony believes it pays more than some direct competitors in this space like Hulu or DirecTV because it has less leverage in the TV and film industries.

Sony has approached one potential buyer, sports streaming service FuboTV, but apparently to no avail. The report claims Sony's service has 500,000 US households ad subscribers, and it has raised the prices of its bundles multiple times in a failed effort to achieve profitability. The sale would transfer those subscribers, along with Sony's technology, to the potential new owner. But not all of the service's hard-to-secure content deals would necessarily transfer in the sale, potentially complicating the sale's prospects.

Enlarge / Pints of frothy beer sit on a bar at the Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany, on Thursday, Sept. 26, 2019. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

After years of inexplicably getting drunk without drinking alcohol, having mood swings and bouts of aggression, landing a DWI charge on the way to work one morning, and suffering a head injury in a drunken fall, an otherwise healthy 46-year-old North Carolina man finally got confirmation of having alcohol-fermenting yeasts overrunning his innards, getting him sloshed any time he ate carbohydrate-laden meals.

Through the years, medical professionals and police officers refused to believe he hadn’t been drinking. They assumed the man was lying to hide an alcohol problem. Meanwhile, he went to an untold number of psychiatrists, internists, neurologists, and gastroenterologists searching for answers.

Those answers only came after he sought help from a support group online and then contacted a group of researchers at Richmond University Medical Center in Staten Island, New York.

Enlarge / A Comcast van in Sunnyvale, California, in November 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Andrei Stanescu)

Comcast has gone on the record to say that it does not track its broadband users' Web browsing histories, even though the company is lobbying against a Google plan that could make it harder for ISPs to track their users.

Comcast yesterday released a statement titled, "The Facts about Privacy with Comcast's Xfinity Internet Service." Comcast said:

Where you go on the Internet is your business, not ours. As your Internet Service Provider, we do not track the websites you visit or apps you use through your broadband connection. Because we don't track that information, we don't use it to build a profile about you and we have never sold that information to anyone.

Comcast further said that it does not and has never sold "information that identifies who you are to anyone," and the company claims it has never sold location data gathered from Comcast's mobile service. Comcast also said it deletes DNS queries generated by its Internet customers every 24 hours "except in very specific cases where we need to research a security or network performance issue, protect against security threats, or comply with a valid legal request."

Enlarge / "My boys and I caught in a jar what before now has only flashed across the night sky." Benedict Cumberbatch plays Thomas Edison in The Current War. (credit: 101 Studios)

Before Macs vs. PCs, before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos struggled for dominance in building reusable rockets, there was the late 19th century battle to determine whether direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC) technology would ultimately bring electricity to the world at large. That fascinating period of history has been brought to vivid life in The Current War: Director's Cut. This may be well-worn territory for hardcore fans of science history, but plenty of people have never heard of the so-called "war of the currents," and Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) has put his own fresh stamp on the saga.

(Some spoilers below, especially for those unfamiliar with the history.)

The Current War is a fictionalized account of the historical rivalry between Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) to bring electricity to the masses. Hundreds of central power stations were cropping up across America, each using different combinations of circuits and equipment. Edison’s Pearl Street generating station in Manhattan supplied DC power to a few hundred mansions of wealthy New Yorkers, as well as a smattering of mills, factories, and theaters in the city.

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  The Red phone. It's scary-looking.

Red, the high-end cinema camera company, started teasing the world with its first smartphone in 2017. The Red "Hydrogen One" was a gigantic, $1,300 slab of a smartphone, with an aluminum or titanium body, ribbed hand grips on the sides, a "holographic" 3D display, and a modular system that, one day, promised to put an actual Red camera module on your Red smartphone. Red said the phone would "shatter the mold of conventional thinking," calling it a "holographic media machine in your pocket."

Red, it turns out, was all talk.

After the release of a single phone and zero camera modules, Red's smartphone division is now dead. The company's founder, Jim Jannard, announced the death of the project—and his retirement—on the Hydrogen forums. Jannard simply writes, "I will be shutting down the HYDROGEN project" without offering any other thoughts on his foray into the smartphone market.

Enlarge / Dr. Tyler Lyson, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, holds open a split concretion and reveals the cross section of a vertebrate skull inside. (credit: HHMI Tangled Bank Studios)

Paleontologists in Denver have uncovered a treasure trove of fossils that give a thrilling new insight into the rise of the mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The discovery, detailed in a paper published this week in Science, has yielded a colossal amount of data showing how tiny mammal species grew and diversified dramatically after the extinction. The finding throws a spotlight on a previously unknown part of our own history: the very early days of a period that eventually produced all current mammal species on Earth.

The mystery of the first million years

There's still a ton that nobody understands about what happened after the extinction 66 million years ago. Researchers have been piecing together evidence about the event itself, which wiped out around three-quarters of all species on Earth and ended the era of the dinosaurs. "The time afterward has been shrouded in mystery," said paleobotanist Ian Miller, one of the lead researchers in the team that found the fossils, in a Q&A published by the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.