Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
In 2018, researchers from security firm Kaspersky Lab began tracking “DeathStalker,” their name for a hacker-for-hire group that was employing simple but effective malware to do espionage on law firms and companies in the financial industry. Now, the researchers have linked the group to two other pieces of malware including one that dates back to at least 2012.
DeathStalker came to Kaspersky’s attention for its use of malware that a fellow researcher dubbed “Powersing”. The malware got its name for a 900-line PowerShell script that attackers went to great lengths to obfuscate from antivirus software.
Attacks started with spear-phishing emails with attachments that appeared to be documents but—through a sleight of hand involving LNK files—were actually malicious scripts. To keep targets from getting suspicious, Powersing displayed a decoy document as soon as targets clicked on the attachment.
]]>Robert Pattinson is the latest actor to don the iconic mask and cape in The Batman.
Capping off a long day of sneak peeks, panels, and teaser trailers at DC FanDome this past weekend, Warner Bros. dropped the first teaser for The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson (of High Life and the Twilight franchise) in the title role. It's directed by Matt Reeves (War for the Planet of the Apes), and—surprise, surprise—it's another dark, gritty take on the classic superhero—this time with more of a film noir/detective story vibe.
There is a long and tangled backstory to this latest incarnation of the classic comic book superhero. We all know that Ben Affleck was cast as Batman for a three-film trilogy in the DCEU: Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Suicide Squad (2016), and Justice League (2017), which had its own well-publicized production woes. Warner Bros. announced plans for a standalone Batman film in the fall of 2014, with Affleck set to reprise the role, as well as directing and co-writing the screenplay.
The original plan was to set the film within the DCEU, after the events of Justice League. But as Warner Bros. was rethinking the shared-universe model for its superhero films in favor of standalone films and franchises, Affleck announced he was stepping down as director, and the studio replaced him with Reeves. Affleck would eventually withdraw from the project altogether, following his divorce from Jennifer Garner and a stint in rehab for alcohol abuse.
]]>Enlarge / T-cells attacking a cell recognized as foreign. (credit: NIH)
We're still struggling to understand whether infection with SARS-CoV-2, with or without COVID-19 symptoms, provides protection from further infections. Antibodies are an indicator of immunity and are the easiest aspect of the immune response to track. But data indicates that the generation of antibodies is highly variable, and their production may start fading within months. But there are many other aspects to the immune response, many of them centered on T cells. And here again, the response seems to be extremely complex.
Now, additional studies are coming out looking at other specialized aspects of the immune response. While these results provide some cause for optimism in terms of long-lasting immunity, there remain large numbers of unknowns.
The two studies we'll look at were enabled by a technique called "flow cytometry" that's proven very useful for studying the immune response. It basically helps researchers get past the biggest issue with these studies: there's an abundance of very similar-looking cells involved in an immune response. While a trained eye can tell a T cell from a macrophage using a microscope, knowing there are T cells doesn't tell us much. Not only would we like to know how many of them there are, we'd need to know what types of T cells are present. T cells may help the production of antibodies, they may kill infected cells, they might be used to remember exposure to pathogens, etc.
]]>Enlarge / Medical staff wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) as a precautionary measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus approach Lei Muk Shue care home in Hong Kong on August 23, 2020. (credit: Getty | May James)
A healthy, 33-year-old man in Hong Kong is now the first person in the world confirmed to have been reinfected by the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2—which has currently infected more than 23 million people worldwide.
The man’s first infection was in late March. He reported having a cough with sputum, fever, sore throat, and a headache for three days before testing positive for the virus on March 26. Though his symptoms subsided days later, he was hospitalized on March 29 and remained in the hospital until April 14, when he tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 in two tests taken 24-hours apart.
About 4.5 months later, the man tested positive for the virus again. This time, his infection was caught during entry screening at a Hong Kong airport, as he returned from a trip to Spain, via the United Kingdom, on August 15. Though he had no symptoms, he was again hospitalized. Clinical data showed he had signs of an acute infection, but he remained asymptomatic throughout his time in the hospital.
]]>Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images / GDC / DotEmu)
If you've read our gaming coverage over the past few years, you may have picked up on our love of speedrunning—the act of mastering and exploiting beloved games to finish them faster. While a ton of video and streaming channels focus on this hobby, we continue to look to the biannual Games Done Quick marathon series for the most entertaining (and even educational) speedruns every year.
This week, Summer Games Done Quick turned 10 years old and celebrated the milestone by raising $2.3 million for Doctors Without Borders—all without leaving the house. The series already has a few years of remote speedrunning tech experience under its belt, so the lack of a physical location had only a mild effect on the marathon's watchability. Thankfully, the whole event was captured for VOD enjoyment on YouTube, so if you'd like to catch up on the fun, we present to you the following embedded options and explanations as to why they're fun to watch.
TASBot breaks Super Mario 64.
Super Mario 64: Speedrun.com continues to list the N64's breakout classic as a fan favorite, so we were excited to see how a preprogrammed run, adjusted on a frame-by-frame basis, could break the game. As an added bit of challenge, the programmers in question focused on a later version of SM64, which meant they couldn't lean on its notorious "backwards long jump" bug for extra speed.
]]>Enlarge / TikTok's US operations may soon be part of every cool teen's favorite code conglomerate, Microsoft. (credit: SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)
TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, filed suit today in federal court arguing that President Donald Trump's efforts to ban the app or force a sale to a US firm are not grounded in facts but instead are part of an "anti-China political campaign."
An executive order curtailing TikTok's US operations "is not rooted in bona fide national security concerns," TikTok argues in its complaint (PDF). "Independent national security and information security experts have criticized the political nature of this executive order, and expressed doubt as to whether its stated national security objective is genuine," the company adds.
TikTok's complaint seeks to prevent the president and the Department of Commerce from "impermissively banning" the app, alleging that the authority under which the order was enacted (the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA) was a "gross misappropriation" and "a pretext for furthering the President's broader campaign of anti-China rhetoric in the run-up to the US election."
]]>My favorite video.
Today marks the release of a new trailer for HBO Max’s upcoming sci-fi series Raised by Wolves, produced and initially directed by Ridley Scott, who also directed Alien and The Martian.
Compared to the initial trailer that landed recently, this one fleshes the world out a bit more by introducing additional characters and more thoroughly explaining the central conflict in the series.
Here’s a quick recap of what we know about the series so far: it principally stars a female, possibly part-biological android named Mother, who has left behind some catastrophe on humanity’s home planet to travel to a new one. There, she raises a group of children who will be the seed for a new human civilization that avoids the mistakes that purportedly destroyed civilization as we know it. But in the course of raising them, it becomes clear that the young humans are susceptible to the same tendencies that Mother claims were humanity’s undoing.
]]>The first live image of the Pixel 5 (black) and Pixel 4a 5G (white). [credit: Anonymous Redditor ]
Hot on the heels of the first credible Pixel 5 render, we now have a live image and two reports on the specs for Google's next flagship.
First, we have a report from Android Central, which says the Pixel 5 will have a 6-inch, 90Hz OLED display, a Snapdragon 765G, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. The site couldn't nail down the battery size but says it will be "considerably larger" than the Pixel 4.
The second report is a bit sketchier since it comes from a random Redditor, but the post is backed up by some compelling evidence: the first live picture of the Pixel 5 and its cheaper companion, the Pixel 4a 5G. The Redditor has since deleted their post, but XDA Developers has the best backup of all the information. Besides aligning with Android Central's previous spec reports, Anonymous Redditor claims the phone has a 4000mAh battery. That would count as "considerably larger" than the Pixel 4's 2800mAh battery, but that's only on par with other midrange devices like the OnePlus Nord.
]]>Enlarge (credit: Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images)
WordPress for iOS is a free app that connects to the company's free open source content management system, which millions of sites around the Web use for some part of their structure. WordPress the company also sells domain names and an array of personal, business, and enterprise Web hosting packages. Apple, unfortunately, seems to have mixed the two up over the weekend and briefly forced WordPress to add in-app purchases that it otherwise wouldn't have, so it could take a cut.
"Heads up on why @WordPressiOS updates have been absent... we were locked by App Store," WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg explained in a series of Tweets on Friday. "To be able to ship updates and bug fixes again, we had to commit to support in-app purchases for .com plans. I know why this is problematic, open to suggestions."
WordPress opted for the path of least resistance, as The Verge reported, and agreed to add paths inside their iOS app for users to purchase premium offerings including domain names. Because of the agreements developers make with Apple to have their apps approved for the App Store, 30 percent of any purchases made through the WordPress app after that functionality was added would have gone to Apple.
]]>Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)
For years, iPhones (or their boxes) have said that they were "designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China." But thanks to an escalating trade war between the US and China, that might not be true in the coming years. Reuters reports that two of Apple's biggest manufacturing contractors, Foxconn and Pegatron, are working to expand their facilities in Mexico with an eye toward eventually building iPhones there.
Foxconn's plans aren't final, Reuters reports. Apple hasn't signed off on the idea and declined to comment to Reuters. But Foxconn is reportedly looking to make a final decision this year.
Foxconn already has a significant presence in Mexico. Five Foxconn factories in Mexico make televisions, servers, and other products. But building iPhones could represent a major expansion of Foxconn's activities in the Latin American country.
]]>Scientists report progress on a study of how acids and other flavor components evolve while sour beer ages.
Sour beer has been around for centuries and has become a favorite with craft brewers in recent years. But the brewing process can be unpredictable. To help brewers better understand how sour beers develop their distinctive complex flavors, chemists at the University of Redlands in California have been tracking various chemical compounds that contribute to those flavor profiles, monitoring how their concentrations change over time during the aging process. They presented their initial findings during the American Chemical Society's Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting & Expo last week.
Brewers of standard beer carefully control the strains of yeast they use, taking care to ensure other microbes don't sneak into the mix, lest they alter the flavor during fermentation. Sour beer brewers use wild yeasts, letting them grow freely in the wort, sometimes adding fruit for a little extra acidity. Then the wort is transferred to wooden barrels and allowed to mature for months or sometimes years, as the microbes produce various metabolic products that contribute to sour beer's unique flavor. But the brewers don't always know exactly which compounds end up in the final product or how it will impact the overall flavor profile. "That is the quandary of the sour beer brewer," said co-author David Soulsby during a virtual press conference.
"Sour beer tastes very different from regular beer, but it's a very complex and rich flavor experience. These different flavors come from the complex processes that are occurring during aging," said co-author Teresa Longin, who also happens to be married to Soulsby. "These processes are hard to control and can be hard to reproduce. Our research focuses on understanding what these processes are, what's happening over time, so that the brewer can ultimately understand them and make better beer."
]]>Enlarge / Fortnite seen in the App Store on an iPhone on May 10, 2018. (credit: Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images)
In court documents that surfaced this weekend, Microsoft offered its support for Epic Games in the Unreal Engine-maker's quickly unfolding legal battle with Apple over access to the iOS app marketplace.
The legal declaration from Microsoft Gaming Developer Experiences General Manager Kevin Gammill comes in response to Apple's threat to halt Epic's access to software development tools used to update its popular Unreal Engine for use on iOS. That threat itself came after Epic tried to use its own payment system in the iOS version of Fortnite to get around Apple's 30-percent platform fee. That move quickly got the game pulled from the Apple App Store and led Epic to file a lawsuit in response.
Gammill says that any move harming development of Epic's Unreal Engine on iOS would hurt Microsoft's business, because "in Microsoft’s view there are very few other options available for creators to license with as many features and as much functionality as Unreal Engine across multiple platforms, including iOS."
]]>Enlarge / Artist's impression of gaming with 5G. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)
There's been a lot of buzz about 5G over the last year—much of it, sadly, none too coherent. Today, we're going to take a detailed, realistic look at how we can expect 5G to improve cellular broadband, with a focus on the impact we might be able to expect on gaming. Surprise: the news is actually not bad!
Before we can talk about what to expect from 5G, we need to talk about what 5G actually is—and isn't. 5G, short for "fifth generation," is the next cellular communications protocol. 5G is not, specifically, any given frequency or band. There are two major bands 5G can operate on—millimeter wave, and sub-6GHz. Exactly which frequencies within those bands your devices will use varies from carrier to carrier, and country to country.
Up close with a cellular transmission tower. (credit: George Frey / AFP / Getty Images)
The sub-6GHz band isn't new territory; the frequencies in use there are the same ones carriers already use for 4G / LTE service. Sub-6Ghz can further be divided into low-band—under 1GHz—and mid-band, at 2.5GHz-3.5GHz. Low-band offers greater range from the tower, but at lower speeds; the mid-band offers greater speed, but lower range. It's worth noting that "lower range" isn't necessarily a curse—the greater the range from the tower, the more users you have sharing the same finite amount of airtime, and the lower the speeds and less predictable the latency you'll see.
]]>Enlarge / Demonstrations in Belarus over the reelection of Alexander Lukashenko are just one of the mass protests where Bridgefy is being promoted. (credit: SERGEI GAPON/AFP via Getty Images)
The rise of mass protests over the past year—in Hong Kong, India, Iran, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, and the US—has presented activists with a major challenge. How do you communicate with one another when Internet connections are severely congested or completely shut down and at the same time keep your identity and conversations private?
One heavily promoted solution has been Bridgefy, a messaging app that has the financial and marketing backing of Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and boasts having more than 1.7 million installations. By using Bluetooth and mesh network routing, Bridgefy lets users within a few hundred meters—and much further as long as there are intermediary nodes—to send and receive both direct and group texts with no reliance on the Internet at all.
Bridgefy cofounder and CEO Jorge Ríos has said he originally envisioned the app as a way for people to communicate in rural areas or other places where Internet connections were scarce. And with the past year’s upswell of large protests around the world—often in places with hostile or authoritarian governments—company representatives began telling journalists that the app’s use of end-to-end encryption (reiterated here, here, and here) protected activists against governments and counter protesters trying to intercept texts or shut down communications.
]]>Enlarge / What does this stream of binary digits have to do with DNS? Nothing, really—but good luck finding a pretty pic somewhere that does! (credit: Santo Heston)
If you want to be a sysadmin or network administrator of any kind, there's a fundamental technology you really need to understand—DNS, the Domain Name System. There was a time when a sysadmin with no aspirations to managing Internet-accessible services might have gotten by without understanding DNS, but that time is long, long gone.
You can't learn everything there is to know about DNS in a single article. But that's not what we're looking to do today; instead, we want to give you a clear, concise guide to the structure and meaning of the most important part of the Domain Name System: a zone file, as seen in BIND, the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon.
This sample zone file doesn't have every possible record type in it—but it's a good start. (credit: Jim Salter)
Above, we have a small but complete example of a typical zone file—in fact, it's an anonymized version of a production zone file on a domain I manage. Let's go through it line by line.
]]>Enlarge / Donald Trump gestures to Stephen Hahn, head of the FDA, at an earlier press conference. (credit: Drew Angerer)
Today, President Trump held a news conference to announce that the FDA has granted an Emergency Use Authorization for the treatment of COVID-19 cases using blood plasma from those formerly infected. The move comes despite significant uncertainty regarding just how effective this treatment is, and comes just days after Trump attacked the FDA for delaying its work as part of a plot to sabotage his re-election.
Plasma is the liquid portion of the blood, which (among other things) contains antibodies. It has been used to treat other infections, as some antibodies can be capable of neutralizing the infecting pathogen—binding to the bacteria or virus in a way that prevents it from entering cells. Early studies have indicated that it's relatively common for those who have had a SARS-CoV-2 infection to generate antibodies that can neutralize the virus in lab tests, although the antibody response to the virus is also highly variable.
In the absence of any effective treatments, people started testing this "convalescent plasma" as early as March, and testing has been expanded as the pool of post-infected individuals has continued to grow. But so far, the evidence has been mixed. One of the largest studies, led by researchers at the Mayo Clinic and including over 35,000 patients, did see an effect, but it was a very mild one: mortality dropped from 11.9 percent in people who received plasma four days or more after starting treatment, compared with 8.7 percent if treatment was started earlier than that. But, critically, the study lacked a control group, leaving its authors talking about "signatures of efficacy," rather than actual evidence of efficacy.
]]>Philadelphia 76ers guard Matisse Thybulle in his natural habitat: camera in hand. [credit: Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images ]
Even if you don't like sports, the NBA bubble in Orlando has been a fascinating epidemiological experiment: if you had seemingly infinite resources available and every participant willingly agreed to follow protocols based on our best understanding of a nascent viral pandemic, could you construct a truly safe environment? Take note, US government, as so far the answer has been, "Yes." As of August 19, the NBA has officially had zero new COVID-19 infections to report over the league's five-week restart. And that's with the league needing to utilize contingency quarantine protocols for players unexpectedly leaving and traveling (which they've done for everything from family emergencies to, um, lemon-pepper chicken wings?).
Traditional media has been invited inside to an extent in order to document this unprecedented playoff season, and the NBA has relied heavily on Zoom access to players for other reporters. Twitter, naturally, has also birthed an aggregator account that will bring you all the beer-chugging player social media you desire. But nearly all of these glimpses into bubble life remain limited—the league has shifted access areas for press on a dime, and player interviews have time restrictions (and often PR personnel on the line to step in if things get into unwanted territory).
All of this makes Philadelphia 76ers guard Matisse Thybulle's ongoing video diary remarkable and essential viewing. I've never been one to get into YouTube series or personalities, but his eight-episodes-and-counting of Welcome To The Bubble has been the can't-miss viewing experience of the summer.
]]>Enlarge / The Cassiopeia A supernova which left this remnant behind occurred about 11,000 light years away—much too far to pose a significant threat—and its wavefront likely reached Earth about 300 years ago. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
A paper released this week by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign astronomy and physics professor Brian Fields makes a case for distant supernovae as a cause of a past mass extinction event—specifically, the Hangenberg event, which marks the boundary between the Devonian and Carboniferous periods. Fields has proposed this sort of thing before, and both this and his earlier piece are fascinating exercises of "what-if." Each models the effects a supernova could have on Earth's biosphere, and how we might go looking for evidence that it happened.
It's important to understand, however, that neither of these papers should be taken as indications that there is evidence that the events referenced were caused by a supernova, or as representative of any general scientific consensus to that effect. They're simply intriguing proposals, and they indicate what sort of evidence we should look for.
If you say "mass extinction" and "space" in the same sentence, the first thing on most peoples' minds is an asteroid impact with the Earth—even if dinosaur fans think of the Chicxulub crater, and pop culture fans think instead of movies such as Deep Impact or Armageddon.
]]>Enlarge / Not a board game, a security tool. (credit: DiceKeys)
Modern cybersecurity, done with properly paranoid best practices, requires meeting some tough demands: Carry a physical two-factor key to plug in and authenticate yourself on a new computer, but if you lose or break that tiny piece of plastic you could be locked out of your accounts. Use different, totally unguessable passwords for every website, without repeating them or writing them down. And even if you opt for a password manager—as you should—you'll need to remember a long master password for years, or risk losing access to the rest of them.
Or you could reduce all of that complexity to a single roll of 25 dice into a plastic box. This week Stuart Schechter, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, is launching DiceKeys, a simple kit for physically generating a single super-secure key that can serve as the basis for creating all the most important passwords in your life for years or even decades to come. With little more than a plastic contraption that looks a bit like a Boggle set and an accompanying web app to scan the resulting dice roll, DiceKeys creates a highly random, mathematically unguessable key. You can then use that key to derive master passwords for password managers, as the seed to create a U2F key for two-factor authentication, or even as the secret key for cryptocurrency wallets. Perhaps most importantly, the box of dice is designed to serve as a permanent, offline key to regenerate that master password, crypto key, or U2F token if it gets lost, forgotten, or broken.
]]>The first teaser for Zack Snyder's Justice League is set to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."
Fans who have been clamoring to see Zack Snyder's director's cut of the disappointing 2017 film Justice League will finally get their wish, as HBO Max released a two-minute trailer for Zack Snyder's Justice League during the virtual DC Fandome event. The trailer actually leaked online before the panel but was quickly pulled until the official release.
(Some spoilers for the 2017 Justice League below.)
The original Justice League was the third film in a trilogy that included Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). It brought together Ben Affleck's Batman and Henry Cavill's Superman with Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), The Flash (Ezra Miller), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher). They are on a mission to save the world from arch-villain Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds), a New God in search of three "Mother Boxes" that will enable him to terraform the Earth into something more hospitable to him and his army of Parademons.
]]>