Month: January 2024

Enlarge / Cybercriminals or anonymous hackers use malware on mobile phones to hack personal and business passwords online. (credit: Getty Images)

Hackers suspected of working for the Chinese government are mass exploiting a pair of critical vulnerabilities that give them complete control of virtual private network appliances sold by Ivanti, researchers said.

As of Tuesday morning, security company Censys detected 492 Ivanti VPNs that remained infected out of 26,000 devices exposed to the Internet. More than a quarter of the compromised VPNs—121—resided in the US. The three countries with the next biggest concentrations were Germany, with 26, South Korea, with 24, and China, with 21.

(credit: Censys)

Microsoft’s customer cloud service hosted the most infected devices with 13, followed by cloud environments from Amazon with 12, and Comcast at 10.

Enlarge / Sierra Space's 300 cubic meter inflatable habitat burst at 77 psi, five times the pressure it would need to handle in space. (credit: Sierra Space)

Sierra Space says it has demonstrated in a ground test that a full-scale inflatable habitat for a future space station can meet NASA's recommended safety standards, clearing a technical gate on the road toward building a commercial outpost in low-Earth orbit.

During a December test at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, Sierra Space's 300 cubic meter inflatable structure withstood five times the pressure it would need to handle in space. The so-called ultimate burst pressure test was designed to measure the limits of the soft goods technology Sierra Space is developing alongside ILC Dover, which also built spacesuits for NASA.

The 27-foot-diameter (8.2-meter) inflatable structure burst at 77 psi, exceeding NASA's recommended safety standard of 60.8 psi, which is four times the module's real-life operating pressure at 15.2 psi.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Erik Pronske Photography)

The White House has its own pharmacy that, until recently, could perhaps best be described as a hot mess, according to a recent investigation report from the Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General.

For years, the White House Medical Unit, run by the White House Military Office, provided the full scope of pharmaceutical services to senior officials and staff—it stored, inventoried, prescribed, dispensed, and disposed of prescription medications, including opioids and sleep medications. However, it was not staffed by a licensed pharmacist or pharmacy support staff, nor was it credentialed by any outside agency.

The operations of this pseudo-pharmacy went as well as one might expect, according to the DoD OIG's alarming investigation report. The investigation was prompted by complaints in May 2018 alleging that an unnamed "senior military medical officer" was engaged in "improper medical practices." This resulted in the OIG's investigation, which included 70 interviews of military office officials who worked in the White House between 2009 and 2018 and covers the office's activity until early 2020. However, the investigation heavily focused on prescription drug records and care between 2017 and 2019 during the Trump administration.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

In 1921, Czech playwright Karel Čapek and his brother Josef invented the word "robot" in a sci-fi play called R.U.R. (short for Rossum's Universal Robots). As Even Ackerman in IEEE Spectrum points out, Čapek wasn't happy about how the term's meaning evolved to denote mechanical entities, straying from his original concept of artificial human-like beings based on chemistry.

In a newly translated column called "The Author of the Robots Defends Himself," published in Lidové Noviny on June 9, 1935, Čapek expresses his frustration about how his original vision for robots was being subverted. His arguments still apply to both modern robotics and AI. In this column, he referred to himself in the third-person:

For his robots were not mechanisms. They were not made of sheet metal and cogwheels. They were not a celebration of mechanical engineering. If the author was thinking of any of the marvels of the human spirit during their creation, it was not of technology, but of science. With outright horror, he refuses any responsibility for the thought that machines could take the place of people, or that anything like life, love, or rebellion could ever awaken in their cogwheels. He would regard this somber vision as an unforgivable overvaluation of mechanics or as a severe insult to life.

This recently resurfaced article comes courtesy of a new English translation of Čapek's play called R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life accompanied by 20 essays on robotics, philosophy, politics, and AI. The editor, Jitka Čejková, a professor at the Chemical Robotics Laboratory in Prague, aligns her research with Čapek's original vision. She explores "chemical robots"—microparticles resembling living cells—which she calls "liquid robots."

Enlarge (credit: shaunl | E+)

Patreon, a monetization platform for content creators, has asked a federal judge to deem unconstitutional a rarely invoked law that some privacy advocates consider one of the nation's "strongest protections of consumer privacy against a specific form of data collection." Such a ruling would end decades that the US spent carefully shielding the privacy of millions of Americans' personal video viewing habits.

The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) blocks businesses from sharing data with third parties on customers' video purchases and rentals. At a minimum, the VPPA requires written consent each time a business wants to share this sensitive video data—including the title, description, and, in most cases, the subject matter.

The VPPA was passed in 1988 in response to backlash over a reporter sharing the video store rental history of a judge, Robert Bork, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. The report revealed that Bork apparently liked spy thrillers and British costume dramas and suggested that maybe the judge had a family member who dug John Hughes movies.

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  The OnePlus 12. [credit: OnePlus ]

OnePlus previously announced the OnePlus 12 flagship smartphone in December, but now it's getting a US release and pricing. The phone ships on February 6 in the US and Canada with a $800 price tag. OnePlus is also bringing the rather interesting OnePlus 12R to the US, a 6.8-inch device running last year's flagship Qualcomm chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, for $500.

$800 is a pretty good price for a flagship phone. Samsung's 6.8-inch flagship is the $1,300 Galaxy S24. The Pixel 8 Pro is a $1,000, so OnePlus is undercutting the competition quite a bit. As we said, this device was already announced in December, but the highlights are an impressive 5400 mAh battery and super fast charging. The phone has 80 W proprietary wired charging in the US and 100 W internationally, while wireless charging is 50 W. OnePlus says 80 W is still fast enough to go from 1 percent to 100 percent in 30 minutes. OnePlus only promises an IP65 dust and water resistance rating, so it's not submergible, which is worse than most flagships. Other than that, it's a lot of normal flagship things: a 6.82-inch, 3168×1440 120 Hz OLED that—unlike Samsung and Google—is still curved, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and too many cameras.

The 24GB of RAM/1TB of storage spec apparently isn't coming to the US—the $800 model is 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and there's a single higher tier of 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage for $900. The white color is also not arriving here. You get black for $800, with the $900 model arriving in black or green.