Month: March 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Data extortionists who stole up to 1 terabyte of data from Nvidia have delivered one of the most unusual ultimatums ever in the annals of cybercrime: allow Nvidia's graphics cards to mine cryptocurrencies faster or face the imminent release of the company's crown-jewel source code.

A ransomware group calling itself Lapsus$ first claimed last week that it had hacked into Nvidia's corporate network and stolen more than 1TB of data. Included in the theft, the group claims, are schematics and source code for drivers and firmware. A relative newcomer to the ransomware scene, Lapsus$ has already published one tranche of leaked files, which among other things included the usernames and cryptographic hashes for 71,335 of the chipmaker's employees.

The group then went on to make the highly unusual demand: remove a feature known as LHR, short for "Lite Hash Rate," or see the further leaking of stolen data.

Enlarge / Artist's representation of the merger of two neutron stars to form a black hole (hidden within bright bulge at center of image). The merger generates opposing, high-energy jets of material (blue) that heat up material around the stars, making it emit X-rays (reddish clouds). (credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

Back in 2017, astronomers detected a phenomenon known as a "kilonova": the merger of two neutron stars accompanied by powerful gamma-ray bursts. Three and a half years later, astrophysicists spotted mysterious X-rays they believe could be the very first detection of a kilonova "afterglow," according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Alternatively, what the astrophysicists saw could be the first observation of matter falling into the black hole that formed after the merger.

As we've reported previously, LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry. This method uses high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. (LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, known as Advanced VIRGO, came online in 2016.) Having three detectors means scientists can triangulate and better pinpoint where in the night sky any telltale chirps are coming from.

In addition to seven more binary black hole mergers, LIGO's second run, from November 30, 2016, to August 25, 2017, detected a binary neutron-star merger with a simultaneous gamma-ray burst and signals in the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. The event is now known as GW170817. These signals included the telltale signatures of heavy elements—notably gold, platinum and uranium—created by the collision. Most lighter elements are forged in the death-throe explosions of massive stars known as supernovas, but astronomers have long theorized that the heavier elements might originate in kilonovas produced when two neutron stars collide.

Enlarge / This chert bladelet still has a remnant of its bone haft attached. (credit: Wang et al. 2022)

We know the oldest human cultures only from their most durable parts: mostly stone tools, sometimes bone. Show an experienced Pleistocene archaeologist a chert blade, and they can probably tell you which hominin species made it, how long ago, and where. But the 40,000-year-old stones and bones archaeologist Fa-Gang Wang and his colleagues recently unearthed at a 40,000-year-old Chinese site called Xiamabei look like nothing archaeologists have seen before.

Unique stone tool technology

The people who lived at Xiamabei, in northern China's Niwehan Basin, used a toolkit that consisted mostly of tiny bladelets (small, sharp pieces of stone), often hafted onto bone handles. Based on microscopic traces of wear and tear on the tools, people at Xiamabei seemed to have used the same generic bladelets for everything from scraping hides and cutting meat to boring wood and whittling softer plant matter.

Nearly every one of the 382 stone tools unearthed at Xiamabei is less than four centimeters long; making and using these smaller blades would have allowed early humans to do more work with less material. Handles helped make the tools easier to grip and more versatile; Wang and his colleagues found one bladelet with part of a bone haft still attached to the stone. On several of the 17 other bladelets the researchers examined closely for microscopic signs of wear, they found tiny scratches left by bone handles, along with imprints from the plant fibers used to bind the bladelets in place.