Month: June 2022

Enlarge (credit: Drew Angerer | Getty Images)

Blame is mounting on Microsoft for what critics say is a lack of transparency and adequate speed when responding to reports of vulnerabilities threatening its customers, security professionals said.

Microsoft's latest failing came to light on Tuesday in a post that showed Microsoft taking five months and three patches before successfully fixing a critical vulnerability in Azure. Orca Security first informed Microsoft in early January of the flaw, which resided in the Synapse Analytics component of the cloud service and also affected the Azure Data Factory. It gave anyone with an Azure account the ability to access the resources of other customers.

From there, Orca Security researcher Tzah Pahima said, an attacker could:

Enlarge / The pigments used to create the yellow rose in Abraham Mignon's Still Life with Flowers and a Watch have degraded, giving the rose a flatter appearance—the opposite of the 3D illusory effect intended by the artist.

The 17th century still-life painter Abraham Mignon was known for his depictions of flowers, fruit, forests, and grottoes, among other objects. But over time, certain pigments have degraded to such an extent as to alter the artist's intent. Most notably, a yellow rose prominently featured in Mignon's Still Life with Flowers and a Watch has become flattened and monochrome, particularly compared to the other blooms featured in the painting.

A team of Dutch and Belgian scientists used chemical and optical imaging techniques to examine the elemental distribution of the various pigments, according to a recent paper published in the journal Science Advances. In this way, they could infer Mignon's original painting technique—specifically how the artist built up layers to create what would have been a 3D appearance for the original rose.

According to the authors, over time, artist pigments and binders in oil paintings inevitably deteriorate when exposed to external factors such as light, relative humidity, temperature, and/or exposure to solvents, as well as incompatible pigment mixtures. The result was discoloration and color changes that can affect the paint's structural integrity, causing such defects as loss of transparency, brittleness, or micro-cracks.

Enlarge / You might think this looks like any other McLaren. But the Artura is a clean-sheet design with a new plug-in hybrid EV powertrain. And a total output of 671 hp. (credit: McLaren)

Since the launch of the McLaren MP4-12C in 2011, all the company's road cars have fundamentally used different variants of the same V8 engine and similar versions of the same carbon fiber monocoque chassis. But 11 years is a long time in the life cycle of an automotive platform, and now the British supercar maker has a shiny new toy called the Artura.

It's a clean-sheet design, powered by a plug-in hybrid EV powertrain with an all-new V6 engine augmented by a hybrid electric motor, with perhaps the best-looking interior of any McLaren to date and a raft of technology upgrades that should improve the experience without compromising driver engagement. And unlike McLaren's last PHEV, the multimillion-dollar P1, the Artura replaces the brand's previous entry-level supercar, the 570, so it starts at a (reasonable for a McLaren) $233,000.

New monocoque

Perhaps surprisingly for a company that pioneered the use of carbon fiber chassis in Formula 1 and then again with the F1 road car of 1993, McLaren Automotive has historically contracted the production of its carbon fiber monocoque tubs to an Austrian company called CarboTech. But with the advent of this new platform, called the McLaren Carbon Lightweight Architecture (MCLA), that work is being done in-house at a new facility in Sheffield in northern England.