Month: August 2023

Enlarge / This processed image of Io was captured by Juno's JunoCam instrument July 30. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Thomas Thomopoulos)

The last time a spacecraft got this close to Jupiter's moon Io was more than 20 years ago, a blink of an eye on a typical geological timescale. Most planetary bodies in our Solar System wouldn't exhibit so much change in a couple of decades.

But Io is different, with volcanic eruptions regularly remaking parts of the moon's crust. That means there's a good chance something on Io has changed since NASA's Galileo orbiter last encountered it in 2002.

NASA's robotic Juno spacecraft is delivering the fresh data on Io with a series of flybys, each getting closer to Jupiter's volcanic moon until a pair of close-up encounters at a range of less than 1,000 miles (about 1,500 kilometers) in December and February.

Enlarge / Building with Microsoft logo. (credit: Getty Images)

It’s looking more and more likely that a critical zero-day vulnerability that went unfixed for more than a month in Microsoft Exchange was the cause of one of the UK’s biggest hacks ever—the breach of the country’s Electoral Commission, which exposed data for as many as 40 million residents.

Electoral Commission officials disclosed the breach on Tuesday. They said that they discovered the intrusion last October when they found “suspicious activity” on their networks and that “hostile actors had first accessed the systems in August 2021.” That means the attackers were in the network for 14 months before finally being driven out. The Commission waited nine months after that to notify the public.

The compromise gave the attackers access to a host of personal information, including names and addresses of people registered to vote from 2014 to 2022. Spokespeople for the Commission said the number of affected voters could be as high as 40 million. The Commission has not yet said what the cause of the breach or the means of initial entry was.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Today, an unsealed court document revealed that, earlier this year, a federal judge held Twitter (now called X) in contempt of court. The judge imposed $350,000 in sanctions.

Sanctions were applied after the social media platform delayed compliance with a federal search warrant that required Twitter to hand over Donald Trump's Twitter data without telling the former president about the warrant for 180 days.

At first, Twitter resisted producing Trump's data and argued that the government's nondisclosure order violated the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act. However, US circuit judge Florence Pan wrote that the court was largely unpersuaded by Twitter's arguments, mostly because the government's interest in Trump's data as part of its ongoing January 6 investigation was "unquestionably compelling."

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Today, an unsealed court document revealed that, earlier this year, a federal judge held Twitter (now called X) in contempt of court. The judge imposed $350,000 in sanctions.

Sanctions were applied after the social media platform delayed compliance with a federal search warrant that required Twitter to hand over Donald Trump's Twitter data without telling the former president about the warrant for 180 days.

At first, Twitter resisted producing Trump's data and argued that the government's nondisclosure order violated the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act. However, US circuit judge Florence Pan wrote that the court was largely unpersuaded by Twitter's arguments, mostly because the government's interest in Trump's data as part of its ongoing January 6 investigation was "unquestionably compelling."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

The Supreme Court Wednesday ruled that a federal judge's injunction against Apple would not be allowed to take effect immediately, rather than waiting for Apple's own Supreme Court appeal. That means Fortnite-maker Epic Games and other developers in Apple's App Store will still be barred from pointing customers to outside purchase points to avoid Apple's commission.

Justice Elena Kagan, who handles emergency petitions for California and other states, turned down Epic's request, as seen on the case's Supreme Court page (and initially reported by Reuters, among others). Epic's application stems from a complex series of rulings related to Epic's initial 2020 lawsuit. Apple had largely won in decisions from a district court in 2022, and then the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in April. Those decisions found that Apple's policies that iOS apps only be available through its App Store, and those apps only use its own in-app payment systems, did not violate antitrust rules.

The 9th Circuit court did, however, affirm a lower-court decision that there was anti-steering language in Apple's developer agreement. Prohibiting developers from pointing to outside purchase methods violated California's Unfair Competition Law, the courts ruled. The 9th Circuit allowed an injunction prohibiting Apple from enforcing its anti-steering language to remain in place but put a stay on it until a potential Apple appeal to the Supreme Court had run its course.

Enlarge / The newly described deposits (left) have their shapes highlighted in red at right. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/IRAP)

The prodigious evidence for water on Mars has eliminated scientific debate about whether Mars had a watery past. It clearly did. But it has left us with an awkward question: What exactly did that past look like? Some results argue that there were long-lived oceans and lakes on Mars. Others argue that the water largely consisted of ice-covered bodies that only allowed water to burst out onto the surface on occasions.

The picture is further confused by the fact that some or all of these may have been true at different times or in different locations. Creating a clear picture would help shape our understanding of an environment that might have been far more conducive to life than anything that exists on present-day Mars.

A new paper describes evidence that at least one part of Mars went through many wet/dry cycles, which may be critical for the natural production of molecules essential to life on Earth—though they don't necessarily mean conditions in which life itself could thrive.

Enlarge / An 8th-generation Intel Core desktop CPU, one of several CPU generations affected by the Downfall bug. (credit: Mark Walton)

It's a big week for CPU security vulnerabilities. Yesterday, different security researchers published details on two different vulnerabilities, one affecting multiple generations of Intel processors and another affecting the newest AMD CPUs. "Downfall" and "Inception" (respectively) are different bugs, but both involve modern processors' extensive use of speculative execution (a la the original Meltdown and Spectre bugs), both are described as being of "medium" severity, and both can be patched either with OS-level microcode updates or firmware updates with fixes incorporated.

AMD and Intel have both already released OS-level microcode software updates to address both issues. Both companies have also said that they're not aware of any active in-the-wild exploits of either vulnerability. Consumer, workstation, and server CPUs are all affected, making patching particularly important for server administrators.

It will be up to your PC, server, or motherboard manufacturer to release firmware updates with the fixes after Intel and AMD make them available.

Enlarge / Airbus will be testing hydrogen power on a commercial airliner modified to carry an additional engine. (credit: Airbus)

A complete hydrogen fuel cell powertrain assembly occupied the pride of place in the pavilion of Beyond Aero at the recently concluded Paris Air Show. That a fuel cell system was the Toulouse-based startup’s centerpiece at the biennial aero event is an indication of the steps being taken by a range of companies, from startups to multinational corporations, toward realizing the goal of using hydrogen as fuel in the aviation sector.

“This 85 kilowatt subscale demonstrator was successfully tested a few months ago. Even though in its current form, it serves only ultralight aviation, the successful test of the powertrain is a crucial step in our technical development path for designing and building a business aircraft,” Beyond Aero co-founder Hugo Tarlé told Ars Technica.

Tarlé said that the business aircraft would have a range of 800 nautical miles and will be powered by a 1 MW powertrain. “For generating this power, there won’t be one big megawatt fuel cell. Instead, it will be multiple fuel cells. It will be based on the same technical choices that we made on the subscale demonstrator—i.e. gaseous hydrogen, fuel cell, hybridization of batteries and electric motors."