Month: August 2020

Enlarge (credit: Tesla)

Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory was the target of a concerted plot to cripple the company’s network with malware, CEO Elon Musk confirmed on Thursday afternoon.

The plan's outline was divulged on Tuesday in a criminal complaint that accused a Russian man of offering $1 million to the employee of a Nevada company, identified only as “Company A,” in exchange for the employee infecting the company’s network. The employee reported the offer to Tesla and later worked with the FBI in a sting that involved him covertly recording face-to-face meetings discussing the proposal.

“The purpose of the conspiracy was to recruit an employee of a company to surreptitiously transmit malware provided by the coconspirators into the company’s computer system, exfiltrate data from the company’s network, and threaten to disclose the data online unless the company paid the coconspirators’ ransom demand,” prosecutors wrote in the complaint.

Enlarge / Socially distanced voting may not be needed if vote by mail is adopted. (credit: Brett Carlsen / Getty Images)

With an uncontrolled pandemic raging, lots of states have been considering shifting to a vote-by-mail system. That's turned out to be politically controversial, as President Trump has lodged evidence-free claims that it will lead to massive fraud or provide some other unspecified advantage to Democrats. Meanwhile, the advocates of vote by mail sometimes present it as the solution to the generally low participation of US citizens in elections. Vote by mail, they contend, will boost turnout significantly.

Two researchers decided this was something they could answer. Michael Barber of BYU and John Holbein of the University of Virginia took advantage of states where vote by mail was rolled out on a county-by-county basis. Their results suggest that vote by mail doesn't provide either party with an advantage, but it also hasn't done much to boost participation.

A tale of two states

The work relies on voter records and census data from two states that have vote by mail, but didn't roll it out uniformly across the state. Instead, Utah and Washington both had different counties adopt the system at different times, providing a shifting set of experimental and control conditions. The two states nicely balance each other, as they can be viewed as something akin to mirror images. Eastern Washington is largely rural and conservative, but state politics are dominated by the urbanized coastal region. In Utah, while the Salt Lake City area is somewhat liberal, conservative politics dominate the state.

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  The world-warping content in today's Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart demo came in two forms. First is a sort of quick-lasso system that lets you warp within a given battling arena. Here's the "before"...

Ever since the hype campaigns began for the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, we've gotten apparent teases of real-time next-gen gameplay, enough to convince us that these systems are adequately powerful. But the full-blown execution of what "only on PlayStation 5" can look like finally crystallized for the first time on Thursday. It came in the form of six uninterrupted minutes of live gameplay from Insomniac Games' Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, which will debut on the PS5 during the console's "launch window," we learned today.

Sony couldn't have rolled out a better, more convincing sense of what top-to-bottom next-gen gaming architecture can deliver than this shiny, explosive, SSD-powered sequence—and so far, it's more stunning than anything we've seen from Xbox Series X-exclusive fare.

Portals far beyond Portal

The new Sony console's first sales point is illustrated in the top gallery, though merely looking at the images misses a key part of the equation: miniscule load times between insanely complicated sequences.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday issued a warning to consumers about hand sanitizers that are flavored and packaged as food and drink containers, which increases the risk of people accidentally drinking them, particularly children.

According to the warning, the agency has found hand sanitizers with flavorings such as chocolate and raspberry, and in packaging including beer cans, water bottles, juice bottles, vodka bottles, and children’s snack pouches—some of which were marketed with cartoons aimed at children.

“I am increasingly concerned about hand sanitizer being packaged to appear to be consumable products, such as baby food or beverages,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said in a statement. “These products could confuse consumers into accidentally ingesting a potentially deadly product. It’s dangerous to add scents with food flavors to hand sanitizers which children could think smells like food, eat and get alcohol poisoning.”