Month: February 2024

Enlarge / Elon Musk leaves court in San Francisco, California Jan. 24, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

A federal court ordered Elon Musk to comply with a subpoena issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission, rejecting Musk's claims that the SEC is "harassing" him and exceeding its authority to investigate.

In an order issued Saturday, US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler wrote that "the SEC has broad authority to issue subpoenas." The information it seeks from Musk is relevant to the agency's investigation into "possible violations of the federal securities laws in connection with the respondent's 2022 purchases of Twitter stock and his 2022 statements and SEC filings relating to Twitter," Beeler wrote.

Musk testified twice in July 2022, but the SEC said it has obtained thousands of new documents since then and wants him to testify a third time. Beeler's order granted the SEC's application to enforce the subpoena and ordered the SEC and Musk to "confer within one week and settle on a date and location for the testimony. If they cannot agree, then they may submit a joint letter brief with their respective positions, and the court will decide the dispute for them."

Enlarge / A $10 Raspberry Pi Pico-based TPM sniffing tool, designed to grab the Bitlocker disk encryption keys from some models of Lenovo laptop. (credit: StackSmashing)

Last week, a video by security researcher StackSmashing demonstrated an exploit that could break Microsoft's Bitlocker drive encryption in "less than 50 seconds" using a custom PCB and a Raspberry Pi Pico.

The exploit works by using the Pi to monitor communication between an external TPM chip and the rest of the laptop, a second-generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon from roughly 2014. The TPM stores the encryption key that unlocks your encrypted disk and makes it readable, and the TPM sends that key to unlock the disk once it has verified that the rest of the PC's hardware hasn't changed since the drive was encrypted. The issue is that the encryption key is sent in plaintext, allowing a sniffer like the one that StackSmashing developed to read the key and then use it to unlock the drive in another system, gaining access to all the data on it.

This is not a new exploit, and StackSmashing has repeatedly said as much. We reported on a similar TPM sniffing exploit back in 2021, and there's another from 2019 that similarly used low-cost commodity hardware to pick up a plaintext encryption key over the same low-pin count (LPC) communication bus StackSmashing used. This type of exploit is well-known enough that Microsoft even includes some extra mitigation steps in its own Bitlocker documentation; the main new innovation in StackSmashing's demo is the Raspberry Pi component, which is likely part of the reason why outlets like Hackaday and Tom's Hardware picked it up in the first place.

Enlarge (credit: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Shell has closed all seven of its retail hydrogen filling stations in California, according to Hydrogen Insight. Now, the energy company will just operate a trio of hydrogen stations for heavy-duty vehicles like class 8 drayage trucks or garbage trucks. It's further confirmation that while hydrogen has a role as a clean fuel for transportation, that will not involve passenger cars, at least not any time soon.

Shell piloted its first California retail hydrogen station in a 2008 pilot program in Los Angeles. In 2011, it built its first pipeline-fed hydrogen station in Torrance—conveniently near Toyota's then-HQ. Six years later, Shell revealed plans for more hydrogen stations in the state, funded in part by grants from the California Energy Commission.

Things started to look a bit more ambitious with "Project Neptune," which would see Shell build out 48 new hydrogen stations in California and upgrade a pair of existing sites. Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai all agreed to help fund the project, which also obtained a $40 million, five-year grant from the CEC.

Enlarge / It's tough to precisely determine cause of death in a corpse. Microbes found on decomposing flesh can help. (credit: Ralf Roletschek /FAL)

Establishing a precise time of death (the postmortem interval, or PMI) upon discovery of a corpse is notoriously challenging, however easy fictional medical examiners might make it seem. Some forensic scientists use the life cycle of blow flies, which seek out and lay eggs on corpses. But there’s a lot of variability between fly species and seasonal effects, so it would be helpful to develop new methods.

It turns out that studying the microbes that flourish in decomposing corpses can provide helpful clues. Forensic scientists have now identified some 20 microbes they believe constitute a kind of universal network driving the decomposition of dead animal flesh, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Microbiology.

“One of the principal questions of any death investigation is ‘when did this person die?’” said Nancy La Vigne, director of the National Institute of Justice, which funded the research. “This continuing line of NIJ-funded research is showing promising results for predicting time of death of human remains, aiding in identification of the decedent, determining potential suspects, and confirmation or refutation of alibis.”