Month: March 2022

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For months, members of Conti—among the most ruthless of the dozens of ransomware gangs in existence—gloated about publicly sharing the data they stole from the victims they hacked. Now, members are learning what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a major breach that spills all their dirty laundry—not just once, but repeatedly.

The unfolding series of leaks started on Sunday when @ContiLeaks, a newly created Twitter account, began posting links to logs of internal chat messages that Conti members had sent among themselves.

Two days later, ContiLeaks published a new tranche of messages.

Enlarge (credit: Monty Rakusen | Getty Images)

Ten major car and motorcycle groups announced factory closures or froze sales to Russia as the industrial fallout from the country’s invasion of Ukraine spread on Wednesday.

Porsche and BMW became the latest carmakers to shut European plants because of a lack of parts from Ukraine, while Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai, which is one of the largest brands in Russia, said they would cease manufacturing in the country. Ford, Renault and BMW have already closed Russian plants.

In addition, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Honda, Bentley, Aston Martin, Harley-Davidson, and Rolls-Royce all froze sales to Russia, joining a growing list that encompasses brands from Volvo and Jaguar Land Rover to Volkswagen.

Enlarge (credit: ESO/L. Calçada)

Back in 2020, astronomers discovered an unusual star system just 1,000 light years from Earth. However, two different teams disagreed on the nature of the system, which was dubbed HR 6819. One team argued that it was looking at a trinary grouping with two stars orbiting a black hole. The other team thought HR 6819's properties could just as easily be explained by a two-star system without a black hole.

To resolve the issue, the two groups collaborated on collecting additional observational data. The result: HR 6819 is indeed a binary system with no black hole, according to a new paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. But HR 6819 is nonetheless a rarity: astronomers captured the binary system just after one star had stripped its partner of its atmosphere in a process known as "stellar vampirism."

As we previously reported, scientists think there are far more black holes in the Universe than we have discovered to date—probably hundreds of millions of them, given the age of our Universe. We have discovered so few black holes because, instead of being able to observe them directly, we can only infer their presence by their effect on surrounding matter. A black hole's gravitational effects can influence the orbits of nearby stars, for example, or infalling matter can form an accretion disk of hot gas rapidly orbiting the black hole, emitting powerful X-rays. Or an unfortunate star will get too close to a black hole and be torn apart for its trouble, with the infalling remnants also accelerating and heating up to emit X-rays into space.

Enlarge / Ford Mustang Mach-E GT. (credit: Ford)

Ford announced today that it will be splitting its electric and fossil fuel vehicle business into two separate divisions. The announcement has investors rallying to the stock but leaves plenty of questions unanswered about the future of the 118-year-old company.

The reorganization caps weeks of speculation that the automaker might split into two separate companies. Ford has said that its future lies in electric vehicles, but for now, the vast majority of its profits come from fossil fuel cars and trucks.

“We are going all in, creating separate but complementary businesses that give us start-up speed and unbridled innovation in Ford Model e together with Ford Blue’s industrial know-how, volume and iconic brands like Bronco, that start-ups can only dream about,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a statement.

Enlarge / A sample chiplet design, with the CPU dies made with a more advanced manufacturing process and the chipset and some other functions made on older, cheaper processes. (credit: Universal Chipset Interconnect Express)

Some of the CPU industry's heaviest hitters—including Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Arm, TSMC, and Samsung—are banding together to define a new standard for chiplet-based processor designs. Dubbed Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe for short), the new standard seeks to define an open, interoperable standard for combining multiple silicon dies (or chiplets) into a single package.

Intel, AMD, and others are already designing or selling chiplet-based processors in some form—most of AMD's Ryzen CPUs use chiplets, and Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors will, too. But these chips all use different interconnects to enable communication between chiplets. The UCIe standard, if it succeeds, will replace those with a single standard, in theory making it much easier for smaller companies to take advantage of chiplet-based designs or for one company to include another company's silicon in its own products.

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  The UCIe (which is the name of the specification and the organization) lays out its goals in defining the UCIe standard. [credit: Universal Chipset Interconnect Express ]

Chiplet-based designs are advantageous when making large chips on cutting-edge manufacturing nodes partly because they cut down on the amount of silicon manufacturers need to throw out. If a manufacturing defect affects one CPU core, tossing (or binning) a single 8-core chiplet is a whole lot cheaper than having to toss a huge 16- or 32-core processor die. Chiplet designs also let you mix-and-match chips and manufacturing processes. You could, for example, use an older, cheaper process for your chipset and a newer, cutting-edge process for your processor cores and cache. Or you could put an AMD GPU on the same package as an Intel CPU.

Enlarge / Well, we didn't see this one coming. But based on rumors that Ars Technica is familiar with, maybe we should have. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Epic + Bandcamp)

At some point, Epic Games might need to drop the word "Games" from its moniker and admit what kind of company it wants to be.

Today the game maker moved to acquire Bandcamp, an online music-streaming service that revolves around DRM-free purchases of MP3s, FLACs, and other audio files. The news emerged via press releases from both Bandcamp and Epic on Wednesday. As of press time, neither side of the deal has clarified its financial terms.

The move follows increasingly aggressive steps by Epic to become an entirely new kind of digital media company in the near future.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

A Ukraine government official on Monday asked the nonprofit group that oversees the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) to shut down DNS root servers in Russia and revoke Russian domains such as .ru, .рф, and .su. The letter to ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was posted here, and ICANN has confirmed that it received the letter.

Several Internet experts say that granting Ukraine's request would be a bad idea. Executive Director Bill Woodcock of Packet Clearing House, an international nonprofit that provides operational support and security to Internet exchange points and the core of the domain name system, wrote a Twitter thread calling it "a heck of an ask on the part of Ukraine. As a critical infrastructure operator, my inclination is to say 'heck no' regardless of my sympathies."

Sent days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, the letter said that Russia's "atrocious crimes have been made possible mainly due to the Russian propaganda machinery using websites continuously spreading disinformation, hate speech, promoting violence and hiding the truth regarding the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian IT infrastructure has undergone numerous attacks from the Russian side impeding citizens' and government's ability to communicate."