Month: March 2023

Enlarge (credit: Newegg)

Newegg has a quick and dirty way to pick a new NAS device and the drives that'll go in it. Announced today, the NAS Builder provides a unique, clean interface for perusing the retailer's available NAS enclosures and picking compatible HDDs or SSDs within the selected NAS device's capabilities. You're limited to Newegg's selection, and not all NAS, HDD, or SSD specs and features are disclosed through the shopping tool. But used with its limits in mind, the builder looks like a helpful starting point for NAS newcomers or even advanced users seeking a basic comparison tool.

Anyone who has shopped for tech components, be it for NAS, PC building, or a maker's project, knows how tedious, unorganized, and unreliable relevant commerce sites can be. That's why Newegg's NAS Builder initially piqued my interest.

Opening the website prompts you to pick your total capacity requirements, up to "144TB & Above," and from there, it shows you the relevant NAS devices that Newegg carries. All the expected sorting tools are there, so you can sort by price or for products with the most reviews (on Newegg), for example. Like Newegg's regular site, you can add filters like bay count and RJ-45 specs, but the NAS Builder's appearance is much cleaner with a more stripped-down set of filters than the rest of Newegg, as well as other sites NAS shoppers might frequent. Unlike NAS configurators from NAS vendors, Newegg's is more brand agnostic.

Enlarge / A BATM sold by General Bytes. (credit: General Bytes)

Hackers drained millions of dollars in digital coins from cryptocurrency ATMs by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability, leaving customers on the hook for losses that can’t be reversed, the kiosk manufacturer has revealed.

The heist targeted ATMs sold by General Bytes, a company with multiple locations throughout the world. These BATMs, short for bitcoin ATMs, can be set up in convenience stores and other businesses to allow people to exchange bitcoin for other currencies and vice versa. Customers connect the BATMs to a crypto application server (CAS) that they can manage or, until now, that General Bytes could manage for them. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the BATMs offer an option that allows customers to upload videos from the terminal to the CAS using a mechanism known as the master server interface.

Going, going, gone

Over the weekend, General Bytes revealed that more than $1.5 million worth of bitcoin had been drained from CASes operated by the company and by customers. To pull off the heist, an unknown threat actor exploited a previously unknown vulnerability that allowed it to use this interface to upload and execute a malicious Java application. The actor then drained various hot wallets of about 56 BTC, worth roughly $1.5 million. General Bytes patched the vulnerability 15 hours after learning of it, but due to the way cryptocurrencies work, the losses were unrecoverable.

Enlarge (credit: INA FASSBENDER / Contributor | AFP)

Last December, Call of Duty gamers sued Microsoft, seeking to block its merger with Activision, partly because they alleged that the merger would set up Microsoft to dominate industry rivals, drive up prices, and reduce consumer choice. Yesterday, a California judge, Jacqueline Corley, granted Microsoft’s motion to dismiss the suit, saying that the gamers didn’t “plausibly allege” that the merger “creates a reasonable probability of anticompetitive effects in any relevant market.”

Gamers suing don’t plan to give up this fight that easily, though. They have 20 days to amend their complaint to include more evidence that demonstrates those anticompetitive effects are likely to harm them personally.

The gamers' lawyer, Joseph Alioto, told Ars that he believes they have ample evidence to satisfy the judge in this case. He confirmed that gamers intend to file their amended complaint as soon as possible. Rather than being discouraged by the judge’s dismissal, Alioto told Ars that the gamers were pleased by Corley’s order.

Enlarge / Artist’s illustration shows the ejection of a cloud of debris after NASA’s DART spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos. (credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

Last September, the Double Asteroid Redirect Test, or DART, smashed a spacecraft into a small binary asteroid called Dimorphos, successfully altering its orbit around a larger companion. We're now learning more about the aftermath of that collision, thanks to two new papers reporting on data collected by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The first, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, examined the debris from the collision to learn more about the asteroid's composition. The second, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, reported on how the impact changed the asteroid's surface.

As we've reported previously, Dimorphos is less than 200 meters across and cannot be resolved from Earth. Instead, the binary asteroid looks like a single object from here, with most of the light reflecting off the far larger Didymos. What we can see, however, is that the Didymos system sporadically darkens. Most of the time, the two asteroids are arranged so that Earth receives light reflected off both. But Dimorphos' orbit sporadically takes it behind Didymos from Earth's perspective, meaning that we only receive light reflected off one of the two bodies—this causes the darkening. By measuring the darkening's time periods, we can work out how long it takes Dimorphos to orbit and thus how far apart the two asteroids are.

Before DART, Dimorphos' orbit took 11 hours and 55 minutes; post-impact, it's down to 11 hours and 23 minutes. For those averse to math, that's 32 minutes shorter (about 4 percent). NASA estimates that the orbit is now "tens of meters" closer to Didymos. This orbital shift was confirmed by radar imaging. Earlier this month, Nature published five papers that collectively reconstructed the impact and its aftermath to explain how DART's collision had an outsize effect. Those results indicated that impactors like DART could be a viable means of protecting the planet from small asteroids.

Enlarge / Artist’s illustration shows the ejection of a cloud of debris after NASA’s DART spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos. (credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

Last September, the Double Asteroid Redirect Test, or DART, smashed a spacecraft into a small binary asteroid called Dimorphos, successfully altering its orbit around a larger companion. We're now learning more about the aftermath of that collision, thanks to two new papers reporting on data collected by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The first, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, examined the debris from the collision to learn more about the asteroid's composition. The second, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, reported on how the impact changed the asteroid's surface.

As we've reported previously, Dimorphos is less than 200 meters across and cannot be resolved from Earth. Instead, the binary asteroid looks like a single object from here, with most of the light reflecting off the far larger Didymos. What we can see, however, is that the Didymos system sporadically darkens. Most of the time, the two asteroids are arranged so that Earth receives light reflected off both. But Dimorphos' orbit sporadically takes it behind Didymos from Earth's perspective, meaning that we only receive light reflected off one of the two bodies—this causes the darkening. By measuring the darkening's time periods, we can work out how long it takes Dimorphos to orbit and thus how far apart the two asteroids are.

Before DART, Dimorphos' orbit took 11 hours and 55 minutes; post-impact, it's down to 11 hours and 23 minutes. For those averse to math, that's 32 minutes shorter (about 4 percent). NASA estimates that the orbit is now "tens of meters" closer to Didymos. This orbital shift was confirmed by radar imaging. Earlier this month, Nature published five papers that collectively reconstructed the impact and its aftermath to explain how DART's collision had an outsize effect. Those results indicated that impactors like DART could be a viable means of protecting the planet from small asteroids.

Enlarge (credit: Nikon)

Amazon has plans to lay off at least 27,000 workers this year, including 9,000 that were announced in an internal email yesterday morning. One unexpected casualty: Digital Photography Review, also known as DPReview, is losing its entire editorial staff, and the site will stop publishing on April 10.

The announcement post, written by DPReview General Manager Scott Everett, says that new pieces will continue to be posted through April 10, and "the site will be locked" afterward. It's unclear what will happen to the site's content afterward—the post promises only that the site's articles "will be available in read-only mode for a limited period afterwards." Any photos and text that readers have uploaded to their accounts can be requested and downloaded until April 6, "after which we will not be able to complete the request."

Former site editor Gannon Burgett said on Twitter that the decision to lay off the staff was announced in January and that "Amazon hasn't yet come up with an archival plan" for the site. Cameras, even digital ones, tend to have a pretty long shelf life, and there's an active used market for lenses and camera bodies—if DPReview.com goes offline entirely, that would be a huge blow to anyone trying to research older products.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | picture alliance )

Google defended its use of "history-off chats" for many internal communications, denying the US government's allegation that it intentionally destroyed evidence needed in an antitrust case. The history-off setting causes messages to be automatically deleted within 24 hours.

The US government and 21 states last month asked a court to sanction Google for allegedly using the auto-delete function on chats to destroy evidence and accused Google of falsely telling the government that it suspended its auto-deletion practices on chats subject to a legal hold. Google opposed the motion for sanctions on Friday in a filing in US District Court for the District of Columbia.

Google said it uses a "tiered approach" for preserving chats. "When there is litigation, Google instructs employees on legal hold not to use messaging apps like Google Chat to discuss the subjects at issue in the litigation and, if they must, to switch their settings to 'history on' for chats regarding the subjects at issue in the litigation, so that any such messages are preserved," the Google filing said.