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Enlarge / A close-up view of the Starliner capsule with its service module immediately beneath it. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann )

On Friday, officials from NASA and Boeing held a teleconference with reporters to discuss issues related to the Starliner spacecraft's performance during an orbital test flight in December.

Although an independent review team remains in the midst of an investigation that will not conclude until the end of February, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he convened the call in the "interest of transparency."

The call followed an explosive revelation on Thursday, at a meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, that the Starliner spacecraft encountered a second major software issue that could have resulted in a total loss of the vehicle. At the outset of the media call, Bridenstine acknowledged that Starliner's flight had "a lot of anomalies." The agency published a summary here. At this point, it seems that NASA and Boeing do not yet know what they don't know about the problems, and it will take some time to sort all of this out.

Enlarge / WUHAN, Feb. 5, 2020 -- Patients infected with the novel coronavirus are seen at a makeshift hospital converted from an exhibition center in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 5, 2020. The first makeshift hospital converted from an exhibition center in China's epidemic-hit Wuhan city began accepting patients Wednesday. The hospital can provide about 1,600 beds to infected patients. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency)

Chinese authorities in Wuhan Thursday said that they will conduct door-to-door home searches for people potentially infected with the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) and corral the sick into massive, makeshift quarantine camps around the city, according to a report in the New York Times.

These latest, extreme outbreak control measures are on top of already draconian travel restrictions and shutdowns of public transit, which have effectively isolated Wuhan—a city of 11 million where the explosive outbreak began—as well as other highly-populated cities in the Hubei province. Overall, the lockdown has made it difficult to get food and supplies to Hubei’s 50 million residents, contributing to a humanitarian crisis that is now swelling from Wuhan in the wake of the virus.

The desperate situation in Wuhan is clear from the latest outbreak figures.  Of the 31,530 reported cases of 2019-nCoV in over two dozen countries, 22,112 are confirmed in the Hubei province alone. And of the 638 deaths logged so far in the outbreak, 618 have occurred in the province.

Enlarge / A video surveillance camera hangs from the side of a building on May 14, 2019, in San Francisco, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

A secretive startup that promotes a massive international universal facial recognition database seeded from more than three billion images is facing pushback from tech firms as it tries to woo more law enforcement agencies.

The company, called Clearview AI, went from near-complete obscurity to national headlines following a report published by the New York Times in January. The Times described Clearview as a "groundbreaking" facial recognition service. A user imports a photo of a person, and then the app shows "public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared," the NYT explains.

Clearview claims to have agreements with 600 law enforcement agencies for use of its services, and the company says it has a set of three billion public photos to match new images against. Those photos come from a wide array of sources, and the sources are ticked off.

Enlarge (credit: Alan Schein Photography / Getty)

A 19-year-old man named Tyler Wallace is in police custody after he entered a Walmart last Sunday in the Chicago suburb of Joliet. He walked through the store wearing a mask and sign that said "I have the coronavirus." He sprayed Lysol on produce, clothing, and other products. According to the Chicago Tribune, he faces charges of disorderly conduct, retail theft, and criminal trespass to property.

A 17-year-old friend who accompanied Wallace in the store is also facing charges of disorderly conduct and criminal trespass. His case will be handled by juvenile courts.

Police don't believe that either teen is actually infected with the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).

Enlarge / Surviving these dark caves is about to get a whole lot easier, if you want it to be.

The Capy Games' survival-focused dungeon-crawler Below has earned a well-deserved reputation for punishing difficulty—Rock Paper Shotgun used it as a prototypical example of the necessary industry niche for "ultra-hard games." But the coming console release of the game will be introducing a new "Explore" mode that completely does away with this game-defining difficulty.

While the original game will still be available as "Survival" mode, the new Explore mode is "tuned to be accessible for players who seek more of an action-adventure style of play," as Capy put it in an announcement. In-game mechanics like survival, death, and damage will be toned down to be more forgiving, so players can "lose themselves on The Isle without suffering the exquisite pain of Below's original design."

"EXPLORE mode is our way of answering everyone who played BELOW at launch and found the challenge a bit too steep," Capy's Kris Piotrowski said in a statement. "It was clear that many players were intrigued by the game's haunting underworld and rich atmosphere, but its difficulty made the game inaccessible to some. We hope to see new players to get into Below, and for seasoned players to revisit The Isle and enjoy the game in a whole new way."

Enlarge / A note left behind by the RobbinHood malware. (credit: Sophos)

Attackers behind one of the world’s more destructive pieces of ransomware have found a new way to defeat defenses that might otherwise prevent it from encrypting data: install a buggy driver first and then hack it to burrow deeper into the targeted computer.

The ransomware in this case is RobbinHood, known for taking down the city of Baltimore city networks and systems in Greenville, North Carolina. When networks aren’t protected by robust end-point defenses, RobbinHood can easily encrypt sensitive files once a vulnerability has allowed the malware to gain a toehold. For networks that are better fortified, the ransomware has a harder time.

Now, RobbinHood has found a way to defeat those defenses. In two recent attacks, researchers from security firm Sophos said, the ransomware has used its access to a targeted machine to install a driver, from Taiwan-based motherboard manufacturer Gigabyte, that has a known vulnerability in it. Despite the vulnerability led to the driver being deprecated, it retains the cryptographic signature required to run in the highly sensitive Windows region known as the Kernel.