Month: February 2020

Enlarge (credit: Jung Yeon-Je/Getty Images)

The US Pentagon, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security on Friday exposed a North Korean hacking operation and provided technical details for seven pieces of malware used in the campaign.

The US Cyber National Mission Force, an arm of the Pentagon’s US Cyber Command, said on Twitter that the malware is “currently used for phishing & remote access by [North Korean government] cyber actors to conduct illegal activity, steal funds & evade sanctions.” The tweet linked to a post on VirusTotal, the Alphabet-owned malware repository, that provided cryptographic hashes, file names, and other technical details that can help defenders identify compromises inside the networks they protect.

Malware attributed to #NorthKorea by @FBI_NCIJTF just released here: https://t.co/cBqSL7DJzI. This malware is currently used for phishing & remote access by #DPRK cyber actors to conduct illegal activity, steal funds & evade sanctions. #HappyValentines @CISAgov @DHS @US_CYBERCOM

— USCYBERCOM Malware Alert (@CNMF_VirusAlert) February 14, 2020

An accompanying advisory from the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the campaign was the work of Hidden Cobra, the government’s name for a hacking group sponsored by the North Korean Government. Many security researchers in the private sector use other names for the group, including Lazarus and Zinc. Six of the seven malware families were uploaded to VirusTotal on Friday. They included:

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  Your 3D printer is not a real 3D printer until you print 3D Benchy, a popular torture test that takes the form of this cute toy boat. [credit: EPFL ]

3D printers are great for rapid prototyping and building low-volume, specialized parts, but they sure can take a while. Today's 3D printers might be called "3D printers" but really, the print heads work in 2D. A 3D model is sliced up into hundreds of 2D horizontal layers and slowly built up, one layer at a time. This layer-by-layer process can take hours or even days, but what if we could print the entire model at once? A new technique demonstrated by researchers from Switzerland's Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)—and further detailed in this Nature article— does just that and can print an entire model in seconds.

The new technique builds a model by hardening a photosensitive resin with a laser, not unlike existing stereolithography (SLA) printers. The big difference here is the application of tomographic techniques, the same used in x-rays and ultrasounds, that allows for rotational printing. Laser light is modulated with a DLP chip (just like in old rear-projection HDTVs) and is blasted into a container full of resin. The laser covers the entire build volume, and the container of resin actually rotates while it's being exposed to the light. The laser projects the model at different rotational perspectives, which is synced up with the spinning resin, and a whole 3D model can be produced in seconds.

The EPFL writes, "The system is currently capable of making two-centimeter structures with a precision of 80 micrometers, about the same as the diameter of a strand of hair. But as the team develops new devices, they should be able to build much bigger objects, potentially up to 15 centimeters." In this first public demonstration, the build volume is 16mm × 16mm × 20mm, making it one of the smallest 3D printers on earth. An 80 um resolution is also nothing to write home about and can be bested by ~$500 consumer SLA printers. It is very fast, though, and the technique is just getting started.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Video game enthusiasts worldwide are looking forward to Sony’s PlayStation 5 launch this fall, but a new report says challenges in sourcing affordable parts may mean that the console comes with a higher price tag than players want to pay.

Sony so far is unable to get the manufacturing cost for a PlayStation 5 below $450, Bloomberg reports, which may result in difficulty for the company.

The consoles are slated to hit shelves within the next ten months, but apparently a few parts for it are not yet finalized. "We must keep PlayStation 5’s bill of materials under our control, and we need to make the correct number of units in the initial production," Sony Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki said in a recent earnings call.

Enlarge / A red dune racing around an underwater track. (credit: Karol A. Bacik)

Sand dunes are amazing. They sing, they move, they organize into regular structures—and then those structures can fall apart. Dunes can collide and combine into a single dune, and a single dune can break into multiple dunes. We are all familiar with pictures of dune fields in the desert, but you may not realize that the ripples of sand that are on the ocean floor are also dunes—just on a different scale. To test our understanding of sand dune models, physicists have been playing with underwater sandcastles. The result is that the models are OK but need work.

Building dunes

Dunes are not just a creation of sand; they are the result of a combined effort between free-flowing sand and a fluid (water or air) that moves it about. Understanding these dynamics involves a combination of modeling and measurement.

Yet the modeling is… challenging. A single dune involves too many particles to create a particle model, so researchers have come up with a short cut: they model dunes as autonomous blobs that can careen about the desert. As the dunes move and collide with each other, they exchange mass. Eventually, all the dunes end up with the same mass and move at the same speed, which results in regular structures, like we observe in dune fields and stream beds.

Enlarge (credit: ESO/M. Montargès et al.)

From Earth's perspective, one of the brightest stars in the sky is the red supergiant Betelgeuse. Found in the constellation of Orion, it's large enough and close enough that when it's destroyed in an inevitable supernova, it will put on a spectacular light show for anyone who happens to be on Earth to see it. So when the star started dimming late last year, speculation rose that the show was about to start.

Because Betelgeuse is so large and so close, it's actually possible to resolve some details of its surface rather than simply seeing it as a point source of light. Some astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory to do just that, and they've found something extremely weird: Betelgeuse's dimming isn't even.

As you can see in the before-and-after images above, Betelgeuse was more or less spherical about a year ago. By December, it was most decidedly not. While the upper hemisphere of the star looked much as it had a year earlier, the lower portion looked diffuse and distorted, with at least two regions of distinct brightnesses.

Netflix just dropped a short teaser for the upcoming fourth season of Stranger Things, and it reveals a doozy of a spoiler. Police Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) is alive and working on a Russian chain gang somewhere in the desolate frozen expanse of the Soviet Union.

(Spoilers for first three seasons below.)

When we last left our plucky teenaged sleuths and their allies, they had successfully beaten back a third attempt by the so-called Mind-Flayer to escape the Upside Down and take over the town of Hawkins, Indiana, where the series has thus far been set. But that victory did not come without a cost: Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) lost her telekinetic powers after being bitten by the Flay-Monster. And her adoptive father, Hopper, sacrificed himself to save the town in the season three finale. Eleven is taken in by Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), and the entire Byers clan moves away from Hawkins.

Enlarge / Judges Consuelo Callahan, Johnnie Rawlinson, and Stephen Murphy. (credit: 9th Circuit Court of Appeals)

An attorney for the Federal Trade Commission faced a skeptical reception from three appellate judges Thursday as he fought to defend a landmark ruling that Qualcomm's aggressive modem chip licensing tactics violated antitrust law.

"Isn't that maybe being overly capitalistic but not necessarily anticompetitive?" Judge Consuelo Callahan asked at one point during the argument before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California. Callahan, a George W. Bush appointee, was hearing the case alongside another Bush appointee, Stephen Murphy, and Clinton pick Johnnie Rawlinson.

Last May, a federal trial court judge ruled that Qualcomm had violated antitrust law with its "no license, no chips" policy. Under this policy, no one was allowed to buy chips from Qualcomm unless they first agreed to pay royalties for Qualcomm's patents.