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Jonathan Gitlin

The Genesis New York concept car.

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Hyundai unveiled a gorgeous new concept car at the New York International Auto Show this week, the Genesis “New York" Concept. It not only hints at future design direction; it will also result in a real car within the next 18 months, according to Hyundai insiders.

Sized in between typical D-segment and E-segment cars (3-series and 5-series BMW sedans, for example), the New York is decidedly not a moonshot that dares to redefine design. Rather, its proportions and form factor follow the well-understood "three-box" convention (a hood, a cabin, and a trunk). But, as with anything worthwhile, the devil’s in the details and we think Hyundai’s beaten the devil.

Hyundai is spinning off its Genesis cars into a new brand—think Nissan/Infiniti, Honda/Acura, or Toyota/Lexus. The Genesis brand currently has but one car production car, the G90, and is aiming for BMW’s M division with its own N division. Judging by the New York Concept, the competition should be on alert.

(credit: John Lester)

Researchers have discovered highly stealthy malware that can infect computers not connected to the Internet and leaves no evidence on the computers it compromises.

USB Thief gets its name because it spreads on USB thumb and hard drives and steals huge volumes of data once it has taken hold. Unlike previously discovered USB-born malware, it uses a series of novel techniques to bind itself to its host drive to ensure it can't easily be copied and analyzed. It uses a multi-staged encryption scheme that derives its key from the device ID of the USB drive. A chain of loader files also contains a list of file names that are unique to every instance of the malware. Some of the file names are based on the precise file content and the time the file was created. As a result, the malware won't execute if the files are moved to a drive other than the one chosen by the original developers.

"In addition to the interesting concept of self-protecting multi-stage malware, the (relatively simple) data-stealing payload is very powerful, especially since it does not leave any evidence on the affected computer," Tomáš Gardoň, a malware analyst with antivirus provider Eset, wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. "After the USB is removed, nobody can find out that data was stolen. Also, it would not be difficult to redesign the malware to change from a data-stealing payload to any other malicious payload."

A man in Croydon, England, was arrested for "incitement to racial hatred"—a crime under UK law—after tweeting about accosting a Muslim woman in the street. He demanded an explanation from her for the Brussels attacks, and her response didn't satisfy him. So he took to Twitter to rant about it.

According to The Guardian:

He is understood to be Matthew Doyle, a partner at a south London-based talent and PR agency, who tweeted earlier in the day: “I confronted a Muslim women [sic] yesterday in croydon. I asked her to explain Brussels. She said “Nothing to do with me” a mealy mouthed reply.”

Doyle is not the first Brit to be arrested for this kind of crime on social media. After people reacted negatively to his first tweet, Doyle continued his tirade by tweeting, "Who cares if I insulted some towelhead ?? Really." Before he was arrested, he tweeted, "Thanks all you tweeters for proving I can still do PR."

The bacteria that acted as the raw material for this experiment.

Life is a rather difficult thing to define, but there are a few aspects that most biologists would agree on: it has to maintain genetic material and be able to make copies of itself. Both of these require energy, so it also must host some sort of minimal metabolism.

In large complex cells, each of these requirements takes hundreds of genes. Even in the simplified genomes of some bacteria, the numbers are still over a hundred. But does this represent the minimum number of genes that life can get away with? About a decade ago, researchers started to develop the technology to synthesize a genome from scratch and then put it in charge of a living cell. Now, five years after their initial successes, researchers used this model to try to figure out the genetic minimum for life itself.

At first, the project seemed to be progressing well. In 2008, the team described the tools it had developed that could build the entire genome of a bacterium. (The team used a parasitic bacteria called Mycoplasma genitalium that started with only 525 genes.) Two years after that, they managed to get a genome synthesized using this method to boot up bacteria, taking the place of the normal genome.

Verizon Enterprise offers security services, but it is dealing with a breach of its own this week. (credit: Verizon)

After a data breach at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, a customer database and information about Verizon security flaws were reportedly put up for sale by criminals this week.

According to KrebsOnSecurity, "a prominent member of a closely guarded underground cybercrime forum posted a new thread advertising the sale of a database containing the contact information on some 1.5 million customers of Verizon Enterprise." The entire database was priced at $100,000, or $10,000 for each set of 100,000 customer records. "Buyers also were offered the option to purchase information about security vulnerabilities in Verizon’s Web site," security journalist Brian Krebs reported.

Verizon Enterprise is itself a seller of security products and services, often helping Fortune 500 businesses clean up after data breaches. Verizon Enterprise also sells Internet service to large businesses, along with a variety of other networking products.

The Amazon Echo. Imagine this with Google inside. (credit: Amazon)

The Information has just posted a massive info dump on Nest, painting a picture of a "stalled" company with sales that haven't lived up to expectations and a seemingly rough internal culture. The report says there has been an "exodus" of employees, with more than half of the 100 employees from the Nest-acquired Dropcam walking away from the company. Dropcam co-founder Greg Duffy was part of that exodus, reportedly calling Nest CEO Tony Fadell a “tyrant bureaucrat” on his way out.

Fadell spoke to The Information as part of the report, saying that “A lot of the [Dropcam] employees were not as good as we hoped.” One of the most interesting things Fadell mentioned is that Alphabet is entering a "fiscal discipline era" and asking its subsidiaries for business plans for the year. This comes on the heels of an earlier report that said Alphabet was looking to dump robotics company Boston Dynamics after it supposedly lacked a real product and didn't want to work with the rest of Alphabet.

Drama aside, the report also contains a list of upcoming Google and Nest products. The most interesting is a "Google Voice Recognition device" that "competes with Amazon Echo." The Echo is basically a Wi-Fi speaker with voice recognition technology—think "Siri in a box." Google has all of the voice tech nailed down from its efforts on Android and Google.com, so it's easy to imagine building the existing Google app capabilities into a standalone device. Nest originally wanted a hand in the project but was denied by Google. As for the timing of such a device, the report says it's "unclear when Google will release the device and there’s still a chance it won't be released at all." Previously, the well-sourced Artem Russakovskii of Android Police briefly mentioned an Amazon Echo competitor in development at Google, codenamed "Chirp."

(credit: Sandy/Chuck Harris)

In colder climes, signs of spring can lift a heavy weight from a tired, frozen spirit. Trees bud, flowers bloom, and migratory species trickle in to announce the approach of summer. In the US, one of those species is a floppy orange gem: the monarch butterfly. These insects winter in amazingly dense clusters in Mexican forests before making a staggeringly long journey (one that spans multiple generations, in fact) to summer homes to the north.

But in recent years, the population of monarchs that stay east of the Rockies has dropped like a rock. Precise population numbers are difficult to come by, but estimates kept by the US Fish and Wildlife Service show about an 80 percent decline over the last decade.

Unfortunately, it appears that humans are responsible. The life cycle of the monarch is tightly linked with the milkweed plant. Females lay almost all of their eggs on these plants, and the larvae happily munch on them when they hatch. Milkweed tends to pop up in areas where the soil has been disturbed, like farm fields.

(credit: Getty Images)

US District Judge Charles Breyer told Volkswagen and regulators that they have until April 21 to present a plan to bring over 600,000 Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche diesel vehicles into compliance with emissions regulations.

VW Group was supposed to have presented a detailed explanation of how it will fix its diesel vehicles to the San Francisco-based judge today, but Judge Breyer granted the company a month extension. VW’s diesel models made after 2009 were discovered to be equipped with illegal software that circumvented the cars’ emissions control system, allowing the cars to spew between up to 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) permits.

Judge Breyer will preside over the lawsuit that VW Group faces from the Department of Justice, as well as a consolidated class action suit that represents more than 500 separate lawsuits against Volkswagen. The judge said that he permitted the extension because former FBI director Robert Mueller, who Breyer appointed to oversee negotiations between air regulators and Volkswagen, assured Breyer that the two parties, "had made substantial progress toward a resolution that would get the polluting cars off the road,” according to the Los Angeles Times.