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Diebold Nixdorf, which had sales of $3.3 billion from ATM sales and service last year, is warning stores, banks, and other customers of a new hardware-based form of “jackpotting,” the industry term for attacks that thieves use to quickly empty ATMs.

The new variation uses a device that runs parts of the company’s proprietary software stack. Attackers then connect the device to the ATM internals and issue commands. Successful attacks can result in a stream of cash, sometimes dispensed as fast as 40 bills every 23 seconds. The devices are attached either by gaining access to a key that unlocks the ATM chassis or by drilling holes or otherwise breaking the physical locks to gain access to the machine internals.

In previous jackpotting attacks, the attached devices, known in the industry as black boxes, usually invoked programming interfaces contained in the ATM operating system to funnel commands that ultimately reached the hardware component that dispenses cash. More recently, Diebold Nixdorf has observed a spate of black box attacks that incorporated parts of the company’s proprietary software.

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  The low-rez official image. [credit: Ice universe ]

Samsung is cooking up a sequel to its nearly $2,000 foldable tablet/phone hybrid, the Samsung Galaxy Fold. Well-known Samsung leaker Ice universe posted the first official render, albeit in a blurry, low-resolution form, but it's good enough to get some information out of.

The photo shows two Fold2's stacked on top of each other, with the top one showing the inner screen while the bottom one shows the front display and the rear camera. The first detail we can make out in the picture is the new branding for Samsung's foldable smartphones. The Fold2 is actually the "Galaxy Z Fold2," a name that reflects "Galaxy Z" as the new catch-all sub-brand for foldable smartphones, just as "Galaxy S" denotes the non-folding flagships. This change is already sort-of live on Samsung's site, where you'll see the old Galaxy Fold one listed under the unified "Galaxy Z" page, along with Samsung's second, smaller foldable, the Galaxy Z Flip.

The best news from this image is the bigger front screen, which looks to nearly fill the front of the device, just like a normal smartphone. The original Galaxy Fold had an abundance of problems that will hopefully be corrected with the sequel, and one of them was the tiny front display, which only covered about 50 percent of the front. By Samsung's own admission, the device was supposed to be a smartphone when closed and a tablet when open, but the tiny front display wasn't big enough for normal smartphone duties. Typing on the tiny keyboard was difficult, and the screen wasn't even big enough to fit a normal home screen with a 4-wide grid of icons. The bigger front screen will make the front of the device a lot more useable, which is crucial in a foldable for any on-the-go usage, quickly replying to a text message, or checking notifications.

Enlarge / Facebook's election "War Room" on Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018. (credit: David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Facebook has touted its fact-checking process as one of the ways it intends to fight rampant disinformation heading into the 2020 US presidential election. New reports about the way the site handles the fact-checking of climate science stories, though, make clear that fact-checking can only work as well as Facebook allows it to—and that the months from now to November are going to be a slog.

Facebook does not employ fact-checkers directly but rather works with a range of third-party organizations to rate how true or false content shared in categories is. The efforts are not universal, however. While Facebook has heavily invested in efforts to stem the overwhelming tide of false and misleading COVID-19 information, for example, it does not heavily fact-check information related to climate change.

The New York Times recently explained the platform's reasoning behind how it handles climate change. Facebook considers opinion content largely exempt from review—and climate change can, as far as Facebook's rules are concerned, be a matter of opinion.

There's a pivotal scene in the 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey when Gandalf, Bilbo Baggins, and a company of dwarves are chased by orcs through a classic New Zealand landscape. For Northwestern University neuroscientist and engineer Malcolm MacIver, the scene is an excellent example of the kind of patchy landscape—dotted with trees, bushes, boxers, and rolling knolls—that may have shaped the evolution of higher intelligence in humans, compared to their aquatic ancestors. Specifically, it falls within a "Goldilocks zone"—not too sparse, and not too dense—that favors strategic thinking and planning ahead, leading to the development of "planning" circuitry in the human brain, according to MacIver's most recent paper, published in Nature Communications.

This latest paper builds on earlier research. Back in 2017, MacIver and several colleagues published a paper advancing an unusual hypothesis: those ancient creatures who first crawled out of the water onto land may have done so because they figured out there was an "informational benefit" from seeing through air, as opposed to water. Eyes can see much farther in air, and that increased visual range could lead them to food sources near the shore. MacIver and his primary co-author, paleontologist Lars Schmitz of the Claremont Colleges, argued that this in turn drove the evolutionary selection of rudimentary limbs, enabling the first animals to move from the water onto land.

That hypothesis grew out of his research on the black ghost knifefish of South America, which is a nocturnal hunter that generates electrical currents in the water to sense its environment. After building a robotic version of the knifefish, with its own electrosensory system, he found that the volume of space in which it could detect prey (in this case, water fleas) was about the same as for a fish that relies on vision to hunt water fleas. The critical factor turned out to be that water absorbs and scatters light, limiting how far that light can travel: typically 10 centimeters to 2 meters, compared to the 25 to 100 kilometers light can travel in air.