Month: May 2021

Enlarge / Icicles hang off the State Highway 195 sign on February 18, 2021, in Killeen, Texas. A winter storm brought historic cold weather and power outages to Texas as storms swept across 26 states with a mix of freezing temperatures and precipitation. (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office knew of looming natural gas shortages on February 10, days before a deep freeze plunged much of the state into blackouts, according to a new report from E&E News.

Abbott’s office first learned of the likely shortfall in a phone call from the then-chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, DeAnne Walker. In the days leading up to the power outages that began on February 15, Walker and the governor’s office spoke 31 more times.

Walker also spoke with regulators, politicians, and utilities dozens of times about the gas curtailments that threatened the state’s electrical grid. The PUC chair’s diary for the days before the outage shows her schedule dominated by concerns over gas curtailments and the impact they would have on electricity generation. Before and during the disaster, she was on more than 100 phone calls with various agencies and utilities regarding gas shortages.

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  Joker appears to have jumped halfway across the galaxy and hit a target the size of a pinhead. That target happens to be an entirely different video game: No Man's Sky! [credit: Hello Games ]

We at Ars Technica love crossover events in every pop-culture format, but they're arguably the best in video games, since they let fans settle playground arguments regarding which superhero or mascot could win in a fight. Still, that affection doesn't mean Ars must keep up with every single "dream" announcement about third-party characters in games like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Soulcalibur VI, Tekken 7, Mortal Kombat 11, Samurai Shodown, Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, and so on. We love them! Bring them on! But most IP crossovers don't warrant a headline. (Sorry, John "two games in one year" Rambo.)

In today's case, I've made an exception.

The latest update to No Man's Sky, which goes live sometime today, unlocks a very familiar spaceship inside NMS's nearly infinite universe: the SSV Normandy SR-1, lifted from the first Mass Effect game. Yes, that's the SR-1, not the eventual SR-2. (Tali would approve.) While Normandy doesn't come with a handy Mako for players to drop onto Hello Games' 18 quintillion planets, it does include an incredible S rating (seen in the above gallery). As far as No Man's Sky frigates go, the SR-1 is SR-number-one.

Enlarge (credit: Mathy Vanhoef)

One of the things that makes Wi-Fi work is its ability to break big chunks of data into smaller chunks, and vice versa, depending on the needs of the network at a given moment. These mundane network plumbing features, it turns out, have been harboring vulnerabilities that can be exploited to send users to malicious websites or exploit or tamper with network-connected devices, newly published research shows.

In all, researcher Mathy Vanhoef found a dozen vulnerabilities, either in the Wi-Fi specification or in the way the specification has been implemented in huge numbers of devices. Vanhoef has dubbed the vulnerabilities FragAttacks, short for fragmentation and aggregation attacks, because they all involve frame fragmentation or frame aggregation. Broadly speaking, they allow people within radio range to inject frames of their choice into networks protected by WPA-based encryption.

Bad news

Assessing the impact of the vulnerabilities isn’t straightforward. FragAttacks allow data to be injected into Wi-Fi traffic, but they don’t make it possible to exfiltrate anything out. That means FragAttacks can’t be used to read passwords or other sensitive information the way a previous Wi-Fi attack of Vanhoef, called Krack, did. But it turns out that the vulnerabilities—some that have been part of Wi-Fi since its release in 1997—can be exploited to inflict other kinds of damage, particularly if paired with other types of hacks.