Month: March 2022

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Infection by SARS-CoV-2 causes a dizzying array of symptoms beyond the respiratory distress that is its most notable feature. These range from intestinal distress to blood clots to the loss of smell, and symptoms vary wildly from person to person.

Figuring out exactly what the virus does inside the human body is likely to take years. But we got a bit of data this week from a detailed study of images of the brains of COVID patients. The images were taken before and after the patients were infected. The results suggest some regions of the brain connected to the olfaction system may shrink slightly in the wake of an infection, although the effect is minor and its consequences are unclear.

Hitting the biobank

This is yet another study that relies on the UK's Biobank. The Biobank lets users of the UK's National Health Service volunteer to link their medical records to their genetic profiles and provide medical researchers with a resource of large, population-level studies of risk. In this case, a research team largely based in the UK combed the Biobank for people who had had brain scans prior to a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

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While Elden Ring's recent launch has been a massive critical and commercial success, it continues developer From Software's streak of leaving players in a technical lurch. Even on the newest Xbox and PlayStation consoles or the highest-end PCs, Elden Ring still manages to turn in somewhat unsteady performance for various reasons.

In the case of one unoptimized aspect of the game's PC version, someone outside From Software has swooped in to save the day. Usually, this kind of PC gaming story comes thanks to enterprising modders from the gaming community at large. In Elden Ring's case, however, the fix comes courtesy of an unlikely source: Valve, the massive company who runs the Steam storefront.

And Valve's fix, so far, only works on Steam Deck.

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Cybercriminals who use giant floods of data to knock sites offline are leveraging a never-before-seen method that has the potential to increase the damaging effects of those floods by an unprecedented 4 billion times, researchers warned on Tuesday.

Like many other types of distributed denial-of-service attacks, the attacks send a modest amount of junk data to a misconfigured third-party service in a way that causes the service to redirect a much larger response at the intended target. So-called DDoS amplification attacks are popular because they lower the requirements needed to overwhelm their targets. Rather than having to marshal huge amounts of bandwidth and computing power, the DDoSer locates servers on the Internet that will do it for them.

It’s all about amplification

One of the oldest amplification vectors is misconfigured DNS servers, which increase DDoS volumes by about 54 times. New amplification routes have included the Network Time Protocol servers (about 556x), Plex media servers (about 5x), Microsoft RDP (86x), and the Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (at least 50x). Just last week, researchers described a new amplification vector that achieves a factor of at least 65.

Enlarge / That air compressor can output up to 150 psi. (credit: Rivian)

Rivian, the electric vehicle manufacturer, is being sued (PDF) by a shareholder who alleges that the company's surprise 20 percent price hike tarnished Rivian's reputation and violated US securities laws.

The company made "untrue statements" in its IPO about the pricing of its R1T truck and R1S SUV, the lawsuit says. "Unbeknownst to investors," the suit says, Rivian's filings for the IPO contained statements that were "materially inaccurate, misleading, and/or incomplete because they failed to disclose, among other things, that the R1T and R1S were underpriced to such a degree that Rivian would have to raise prices shortly after the IPO."

The lawsuit alleges that the surprise price increases would "tarnish Rivian's reputation as a trustworthy and transparent company" and risk the cancellation of a "significant number" of the nearly 56,000 preorders the company had accumulated.