Month: June 2020

Enlarge (credit: Jeremy Brooks / Flickr)

A large, multinational technology company got a nasty surprise recently as it was expanding its operations to China. The software a local bank required the company to install so it could pay local taxes contained an advanced backdoor.

The cautionary tale, detailed in a report published Thursday, said the software package, called Intelligent Tax and produced by Beijing-based Aisino Corporation, worked as advertised. Behind the scenes, it also installed a separate program that covertly allowed its creators to remotely execute commands or software of their choice on the infected computer. It was also digitally signed by a Windows trusted certificate.

Researchers from Trustwave, the security firm that made the discovery, have dubbed the backdoor GoldenSpy. With system-level privileges to a Windows computer, it connected to a control server located at ningzhidata[.]com, a domain Trustwave researchers said is known to host other variations of the malware. The backdoor included a variety of advanced features designed to gain deep, covert, and persistent access to infected computers.

Enlarge / Tesla's main US factory in Fremont, California. (credit: Andrei Stanescu / Getty)

Two workers, Carlos Gabriel and Jessica Naro, say that they received termination notices from Tesla last week after taking unpaid time off in an effort to avoid the coronavirus. The San Jose Mercury News first reported Gabriel's termination notice last week.

Both workers say that they were contacted this week by Tesla's HR department. Naro was given the opportunity to come back to work if she committed to a return date. She declined because her 6-year-old son has a health condition that puts him at heightened risk.

Gabriel ended his call after the Tesla rep refused to allow him to record it. He hasn't heard back since and believes he is no longer on Tesla's payroll.

Enlarge / Columnist and author Dan Savage spoke with Ars Technica about the first year that Hump!, his offline amateur-porn festival, has had an online component. (credit: The Stranger / Hump! / Aurich Lawson)

However cooped up you may feel after months of bingeing films and TV series in quarantine, it's not entirely likely that you'd look at this article's headline and say, "Yes, I need to kick my viewing habits up a notch with a curated selection of homemade porn." The people behind Hump!, the United States' best-known amateur-pornography festival, certainly didn't want things this way, either.

"One thing about Hump! is, if you couldn't get to a theater, you weren't going to see it," series curator and sex columnist Dan Savage tells me over the phone from his Seattle home. "Ever since the first Hump!, people have asked, 'Are you going to sell DVDs?' Which turned into, 'Can you watch it online?' But you can't. There are no DVDs, and you can't see it online."

Hump! was always supposed to be offline. But just like pretty much everything else this year, Savage's creation had to concede to the realities of coronavirus. And after launching a test run earlier in 2020, Hump! Greatest Hits, Volume 1 is following as a streamed-video exclusive (not VOD) over the next three weekends. And while the festival was never designed for online distribution, the silver lining is a very weird, and surprisingly eye-opening, perspective on what porn on the Internet can look like in 2020.

Enlarge / Space Perspective aims to launch humans in balloons by 2024. (credit: Space Perspective)

Welcome to Edition 3.05 of the Rocket Report! This week, much of the focus is on small rockets, and we have plenty of new deals to discuss. So let's jump right into it!

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

NASA ready to buy suborbital rides for its people. This week, NASA formally asked the US space industry to dish the details on its plans for brief spaceflights. In essence, the space agency said it wants to buy brief hops into space for its Astronaut Corps and scientists, but it needs more information, Ars reports. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the program seeks mostly to increase the time NASA spends in microgravity.