Month: November 2020

Enlarge (credit: Marc Evans / Flickr)

It's still not clear what species carried the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that made its way into humans. But it has become increasingly clear that we can spread it to a large number of species, and a subset of those species are then able to pass it on to others. If those species are able to pass it back to humans, it adds to the risk posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. That's because it provides a route for new infections that avoids all of the means we're using to try to control the virus's spread between humans. And there's also the chance that the virus's reproduction within an animal species would select for a mutation that would make the virus more dangerous to humans.

While we've already found the virus in cats and dogs, the big risk so far has turned out to be an unexpected source: mink. As early as August, it was clear that the virus was killing lots of the animals on US mink farms. Earlier this month, the discovery that the virus had spread back from mink to humans caused Denmark to decide to cull its entire population of mink. Now, with some people on edge because of that drastic action, we have a report that provides detailed tracing of the virus' spread between mink and humans, providing us a better sense of the risks involved.

There and back again

The work was done in the Netherlands, which also hosts a substantial number of mink farms. The new paper, written by public health and veterinary officials, is essentially the equivalent of a contact-tracing report done for mink. It uses a combination of diagnostics to identify people and animals that have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2, whole genome sequencing to understand the source of those infections, and interviews (limited to the humans) to help determine any actions that might influence the virus's spread.

(credit: Pixabay)

Ubuntu developers have fixed a series of vulnerabilities that made it easy for standard users to gain coveted root privileges.

“This blog post is about an astonishingly straightforward way to escalate privileges on Ubuntu,” Kevin Backhouse, a researcher at GitHub, wrote in a post published on Tuesday. “With a few simple commands in the terminal, and a few mouse clicks, a standard user can create an administrator account for themselves.”

The first series of commands triggered a denial-of-service bug in a daemon called accountsservice, which as its name suggests, is used to manage user accounts on the computer. To do this, Backhouse created a Symlink that linked a file named .pam_environment to /dev/zero, changed the regional language setting, and sent accountsservice a SIGSTOP. With the help of a few extra commands, Backhouse was able to set a timer that gave him just enough time to log out of the account before accountsservice crashed.

Let's face it: this is going to a dismal holiday season for film lovers, with most movie theaters shuttered for the foreseeable future and just one major release—Wonder Woman 1984—left standing after studios shifted all their blockbusters to next year. And even Wonder Woman 1984 is likely to end up getting bumped to next year from its currently planned Christmas Day release date unless we can get this raging pandemic in check quickly.

On the bright side, streaming platforms and VOD are doing their best to fill in the gap, and the dearth of major new releases is giving a lot of smaller indie films a better chance to find an audience. Plus, HBO Max just dropped the official trailer for Superintelligence, an action comedy starring Melissa McCarthy—and directed by her husband, Ben Falcone—that will drop Thanksgiving Weekend.

But the decision to skip the usual broad theatrical release in favor of the streaming platform was made last year—before the pandemic hit. That makes this film an intriguing potential harbinger of what the media ecosystem for films might look like in the future, especially for midbudget films. It was a big marquee acquisition for the fledgling HBO Max, which officially launched in May.

(credit: Robert Scoble)

A former Microsoft software engineer from Ukraine has been sentenced to nine years in prison for stealing more than $10 million in store credit from Microsoft's online store. From 2016 to 2018, Volodymyr Kvashuk worked for Microsoft as a tester, placing mock online orders to make sure everything was working smoothly.

The software automatically prevented shipment of physical products to testers like Kvashuk. But in a crucial oversight, it didn't block the purchase of virtual gift cards. So the 26-year-old Kvashuk discovered that he could use his test account to buy real store credit and then use the credit to buy real products.

At first, Kvashuk bought an Office subscription and a couple of graphics cards. But when no one objected to those small purchases, he grew much bolder. In late 2017 and early 2018, he stole millions of dollars worth of Microsoft store credit and resold it online for bitcoin, which he then cashed out using Coinbase.

Enlarge / This electric train carried coal from the mines to the Navajo Generating Station, which has now shut down. (credit: Bill Morrow / Flickr)

The physics of climate change dictate that we must move on from fossil fuels to avoid expensive and deadly consequences, but that shift obviously comes with pain for communities and businesses tied to the fossil fuel industry. This may bring to mind coal-mining communities in places like Kentucky and West Virginia, but it’s also playing out across the Navajo and Hopi lands in Arizona and New Mexico.

There are several coal plants located in or near the Navajo Nation, fed by associated coal mines, and staffed by Navajo and Hopi workers—a major source of jobs. Of these, the Navajo Generating Station and Kayenta mine has already shuttered, while the Cholla Power Plant is shutting down over the next few years. The Four Corners plant in New Mexico has seen its planned 2031 retirement date accelerated.

There are several reasons for this. Older coal plants have been retiring across the US as the economics favor cheaper natural gas and renewables. Additionally, the electric utility Arizona Public Service (APS), which owns part of each of these three plants, had a change in leadership at the beginning of the year. New CEO Jeff Guldner announced a plan for the utility to reach zero emissions by 2050, with 45 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2030. That was a shocking reversal considering that APS spent nearly $40 million to fight a 2018 ballot proposition that would have required 50 percent renewables by 2030.