Month: October 2019

Enlarge / Black ants marching along the stem of a leaf. Unlike humans, ants don't experience traffic jams, even at high densities. (credit: Bosca78/Getty Images)

Ants are notoriously much better than humans at organizing their collective traffic flow when foraging for food, but how they manage to do so isn't fully understood. Even in dense, crowded conditions, ant colonies still manage to maintain a smooth and efficient traffic flow, primarily by adjusting their behavior to adapt to changing circumstances, according to a new paper in the journal eLife.

Ants are a textbook example of collective behavior. A few ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they behave more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. There has been a number of studies over the last decade or so involving the collective behavior of these fascinating insects.

For instance, in 2008, German scientists built a tiny ant motorway in the lab, complete with the equivalent of highway interchanges, so that ants could navigate between their nest and a sugary food source. Then the scientists monitored how the ants quickly found the shortest possible route between the two. You'd expect jams to form near interchanges, as they do on human highways. Instead, whenever a route started to clog, the ants returning to the nest blocked ants traveling in the opposite direction, forcing them to find an alternate route.

Enlarge / The White House is kicking its information security team to the curb. (credit: Prasit photo / Getty Images)

An internal White House memo published today by Axios reveals that recent changes to the information operations and security organizations there have left the security team in tumult, with many members headed for the door. And the chief of the White House's computer network defense branch—who wrote the memo after submitting his resignation—warned that the White House was likely headed toward another network compromise and theft of data.

The White House Office of the Chief Information Security Officer was set up after the 2014 breach of an unclassified White House network by Russian intelligence—a breach discovered by a friendly foreign government. But in a July reorganization, the OCISO was dissolved and its duties placed under the White House Office of the Chief Information Officer, led by the new CIO Roger L. Stone. Stone pulled from the ranks of the National Security Council where he was deputy senior director for resilience policy. (Stone is not related to indicted Republican political consultant Roger J. Stone.)

The resulting changes have put an emphasis more on convenience than security. The Office of Administration at the White House has reportedly been purging information security staffers while responsibility for cybersecurity is outsourced from the streamlined IT operations team. In August, White House CISO Joe Schatz left the White House for a tech consulting job. And according to the memo, senior security experts have been leaving en masse since then as the White House has become increasingly hostile to the information security team.

Enlarge / Workers on cranes install the Tesla logo at the new Gigafactory in Shanghai, China. (credit: VCG | Getty Images)

Between June and September 2019, Tesla delivered 97,000 electric vehicles to customers. That's a new record for the decade-old carmaker and a strong performance for its Model 3 sedan; around 6,000 cars per week found new homes during the quarter. But sales of the higher-margin Models S and X have dropped precipitously this year, and ever since the early October deliveries news, speculation has been rampant as to what that means for the company's bottom line.

Now we have that answer. On Wednesday afternoon, Tesla announced that it made a profit of $143 million during the third quarter of 2019. The other headline figures from Q3 2019 are that, at the end of September, the company had $5.3 billion in cash and cash equivalents and $371 million in operating cash.

For comparison, Tesla lost $408 million in Q2 2019, which followed even heavier losses in Q1 2019. In a presentation to investors ahead of a conference call this afternoon, Tesla stated that this newfound profitability "was possible by removing substantial cost from our business." Despite the fact that average sale prices have decreased (as consumers buy many more, cheaper Model 3 variants and many fewer Model 3 Performance or Models S or X), Tesla says its automotive gross margin is now 22.8%. That's higher than it's been previously in 2019.

Enlarge / Mozilla is taking a pretty huge bite out of the current generation of tracking tools. Let the arms race continue! (credit: Mozilla)

Yesterday Mozilla released Firefox 70. The newest version of the most-popular fully open source browser expands on the Enhanced Tracking Protection we saw as an option in Firefox 69 and turns that protection on by default for all users. We already saw most of these new features in our Firefox 70 beta coverage, but since then, the features have been expanded upon and fine-tuned, and major new features have appeared or have been added in the Lockwise online password manager for users who have a Firefox cloud account.

• 

  To access a Protection Report showing you all the nefarious items Firefox has blocked, click the shield icon to the left of the progress bar, and you'll find the link to the report at the bottom of the drop-down. [credit: Mozilla ]

In addition to automatically generating pseudorandom passwords for you, saving them, and automatically filling out login forms with them, Lockwise continuously scans the Internet for password and database dumps that might contain leaked copies of your credentials. Lockwise does this by comparing a hash of each of your passwords to hashes of the passwords in the dumps and leaks—so you don't have to worry about Mozilla itself, or its employees, "knowing" your password.

We really like David Murphy of Lifehacker's idea of setting Firefox's homepage to about:protections. That way, the Privacy Report becomes the content of any new tab created before you actually head to a website. This makes it that much more likely you'll actually see the information and notice everything from changes to how sites are tracking you to whether your credentials have been leaked somewhere.