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Enlarge (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX said Friday evening that its number one priority after Thursday's accident at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station "is to safely and reliably return to flight for our customers, as well as to take all the necessary steps to ensure the highest possible levels of safety for future crewed missions with the Falcon 9."

The company said it has begun a full investigation of Thursday morning's explosion, which involved the loss of its Falcon 9 rocket and AMOS-6 satellite payload during preparations for a static fire test. SpaceX's "Accident Investigation Team," along with oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration and assistance from NASA and the US Air Force, is in the "early" stages of reviewing 3,000 channels of telemetry and video data covering a brief time period of 35 to 55 milliseconds.

The statement from SpaceX provided no additional information about the cause of the accident. It only repeated that the incident occurred during fueling of the launch vehicle before a static fire test, rather than during the test itself, and that the "anomaly" originated around the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Whether the issue was related to a ground systems problem or occurred because of a defect with rocket itself remains unclear.

Enlarge / The updated Razer Blade Stealth. (credit: Razer)

Razer has given its gamer laptops a bit of a bump to boost both battery life and performance.

When we reviewed the sleek 12.5 inch Razer Blade Stealth Ultrabook earlier this year we liked the looks, the Thunderbolt 3, and the price. But we weren't so keen on the battery life of the 4K system we tested. The updated version should make good progress in that department. Razer is updating the Blade Stealth Ultrabook to use one of Intel's new Kaby Lake processors. Kaby Lake is, all things considered, a pretty minor update over Skylake, but the new i7-7500U chip (2.7GHz base, 3.5GHz turbo) should offer a bit more performance and a bit more power efficiency than the i6-6500U (2.6GHz/3.1GHz) in the old version.

The update's bigger win comes from a bigger battery: the 45Whr unit in the old system has been replaced with a 53.6Whr one. Even without any savings from the new processor, that almost 20 percent increase in battery should translate directly into a 20 percent increase in battery life. That's enough to get the 4K laptop snapping at the heels of its 1080p competitors. Prices start at $999 for a 2560×1440 system with a 128GB SSD, with shipping due to start on September 14 and preorders available now.

Enlarge (credit: Ildar Sagdejev)

In August 2011, multiple servers used to maintain and distribute the Linux operating system kernel were infected with malware that gave an unknown intruder almost unfettered access. Earlier this week, the five-year-old breach investigation got its first big break when federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment accusing a South Florida computer programmer of carrying out the attack.

Donald Ryan Austin, 27, of El Portal, Florida, used login credentials belonging to a Linux Kernel Organization system administrator to install a hard-to-detect backdoor on servers belonging to the organization, according to the document that was unsealed on Monday. The breach was significant because the group manages the network and the website that maintain and distribute the open source OS that's used by millions of corporate and government networks around the world. One of Austin's motives for the intrusion, prosecutors allege, was to "gain access to the software distributed through the www.kernel.org website."

The indictment refers to kernel.org officials P.A. and J.H., who are presumed to be Linux kernel developer H. Peter Anvin and kernel.org Chief System Administrator John "'Warthog9" Hawley, respectively. It went on to say that Austin used the credentials to install a class of extremely hard-to-detect malware known as a rootkit and a Trojan that logs the credentials of authorized users who use the secure shell protocol to access an infected computer.