Author name: Shannon Garcia

dell-responds-to-return-to-office-resistance-with-vpn,-badge-tracking

Dell responds to return-to-office resistance with VPN, badge tracking

Biz & IT, dell, return-to-office, work from home / /

Office optics —

Report claims new tracking starts May 13 with unclear consequences.

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Signage outside Dell Technologies headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, US, on Monday, Feb. 6, 2023.

After reversing its position on remote work, Dell is reportedly implementing new tracking techniques on May 13 to ensure its workers are following the company’s return-to-office (RTO) policy, The Register reported today, citing anonymous sources.

Dell has allowed people to work remotely for over 10 years. But in February, it issued an RTO mandate, and come May 13, most workers will be classified as either totally remote or hybrid. Starting this month, hybrid workers have to go into a Dell office at least 39 days per quarter. Fully remote workers, meanwhile, are ineligible for promotion, Business Insider reported in March.

Now The Register reports that Dell will track employees’ badge swipes and VPN connections to confirm that workers are in the office for a significant amount of time.

An unnamed source told the publication: “This is likely in response to the official numbers about how many of our staff members chose to remain remote after the RTO mandate.”

Dell’s methods for tracking hybrid workers will also reportedly include a color-coding system. The Register reported that Dell “plans to make weekly site visit data from its badge tracking available to employees through the corporation’s human capital management software and to give them color-coded ratings that summarize their status.” From “consistent” to “limited” presence, the colors are blue, green, yellow, and red.

A different person who reportedly works at Dell said that managers hadn’t shown consistency regarding how many red flags they would consider acceptable. The confusion led the source to tell The Register, “It’s a shit show here.”

An unnamed person reportedly “familiar with Dell” claimed that those failing to show up to a Dell office frequently enough will be referred to Dell COO Jeff Clarke.

Dell’s about-face

Ironically, Clarke used to support the idea of fully remote work post-pandemic. In 2020, he said:

After all of this investment to enable remote everything, we will never go back to the way things were before. Here at Dell, we expect, on an ongoing basis, that 60 percent of our workforce will stay remote or have a hybrid schedule where they work from home mostly and come into the office one or two days a week.”

It’s unclear exactly how many of Dell’s workers are remote. The Register reported today that approximately 50 percent of Dell’s US workers are remote, compared to 66 percent of international workers. In March, an anonymous source told Business Insider that 10–15 percent of every team at Dell was remote.

Michael Dell, Dell’s CEO and founder, also used to support remote work and penned a blog in 2022 saying that Dell “found no meaningful differences for team members working remotely or office-based even before the pandemic forced everyone home.”

Some suspect Dell’s suddenly stringent office policy is an attempt to force people to quit so that the company can avoid layoffs. In 2023, Dell laid off 13,000 people, per regulatory filings [PDF].

Dell didn’t respond to Ars’ request for comment. In a statement to The Register, a representative said that Dell believes “in-person connections paired with a flexible approach are critical to drive innovation and value differentiation.”

Questionable policies

News of Dell’s upcoming tracking methods comes amid growing concern about the potentially invasive and aggressive tactics companies have implemented as workers resist RTO policies. Meta, Amazon, Google, and JPMorgan Chase have all reportedly tracked in-office badge swipes. TikTok reportedly launched an app to track badge swipes and to ask workers why they weren’t in the office on days that they were expected to be.

However, the efficacy of RTO mandates is questionable. An examination of 457 companies on the S&P 500 list released in February concluded that RTO mandates don’t drive company value but instead negatively affect worker morale. Analysis of survey data from more than 18,000 working Americans released in March found that flexible workplace policies, including the ability to work remotely completely or part-time and flexible schedules, can help employees’ mental health.

Dell responds to return-to-office resistance with VPN, badge tracking Read More »

40-years-later,-kontrabant-2-for-zx-spectrum-is-rebroadcast-on-fm-in-slovenia

40 years later, Kontrabant 2 for ZX Spectrum is rebroadcast on FM in Slovenia

adventure games, cassette, cassette tapes, gaming, Text Adventures, text games, vintage computers, zx spectrum / /

Cassettes are back, baby —

Celebrating radio waves, magnetic tape heads, and smuggled 8-bit computers.

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Kontrabant 2 title image on ZX Spectrum

Enlarge / In 1984, the year 2000 was so promising, students made entire games promising to take you there.

Radio Student

Software is almost impossibly easy to download, distribute, and access compared to 40 years ago. Everything is bigger, faster, and more flexible, but there’s a certain charm to the ways of diskettes and cassettes that is hard to recapture. That doesn’t mean we can’t try.

By the time you read this, it’s likely that Kontrabant 2 will have already hit the airwaves on Radio Študent in Slovenia. At 9: 30 pm Slovenia time (UTC+2 in Daylight Savings Time), if you are tuned to 89.3 FM, hitting record on a cassette tape will capture a buzzing sound that will run until just over 50KB have been transmitted. If all went well, you can load the tape into your working ZX Spectrum or bring it to the Computer History Museum in Slovenia and use theirs to try it out.

<em>Kontrabant 2</em> box art.” height=”388″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/kontrabant3.jpg” width=”324″></img><figcaption> <p><em>Kontrabant 2</em> box art.</p> <p>Radio Student</p> </figcaption></figure> <p>It’s the 40th anniversary of <em>Kontrabant 2</em>, which was originally published by Radio Študent, both in physical copies and in similar over-the-air fashion. The game is in Serbian, as it was originally made for what was then Yugoslavia, for ZX Spectrums mostly smuggled in from Western Europe. Smuggling was something that lots of Yugoslavs did, in somewhat casual fashion, and it inspired <em>Kontrabant</em> and its sequel, text adventure games with some graphics.</p> <p>That I understand any of this is thanks to Vlado Vince, a Croatian/Yugoslavia native who wrote about Yugoslavian adventure games for a Spanish magazine, Club de Aventuras AD, and <a href=reposted it on his personal site. Kontrabant, which is text-only, has the player travel about the country (“and beyond!”) to collect all the parts of a ZX Spectrum. You meet famous smugglers from Slovene history, get a picture of yourself so you can leave the country for certain parts, and at one point obtain an Austrian porn magazine, which, in typical adventure game style, is later traded for something else.

A Kontrabant 2.” height=”720″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/kontrabant1.png” width=”960″>

A “Yugosaurus” in Kontrabant 2.

Radio Student/Vlado Vince

Kontrabant 2, from 1984, added the kinds of garish colors and flashing graphics that ZX Spectrum enthusiasts can recognize from a hundred yards away. This time you’re trying “to make your way to the year 2000 and to the amazing computers of the future,” Vince writes, and the game layers in political and social subtext and critiques throughout the journey. Also, the original Radio Študent cassette tape version had punk rock songs by “the Kontra Band” on it, which is neat as heck.

Kontrabant and its sequel were written by Žiga Turk and Matevž Kmet, students at the time, who are talking about the games and the times at the Computer History Museum Slovenia today. If you have a chance to visit that place, I think you should do so, given the impressive number of working vintage computers listed. Turk would go on to found Moj mikro magazine, a monthly computer magazine running from 1984 to 2015. He started the Virtual Shareware Library, which later became shareware.com (now a Digital Trends site I don’t quite recognize), and WODA, the Web Oriented Database. He’s now a professor of construction informatics in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

You can play Kontrabant 2 on the Internet Archive’s emulator if you can read or translate Serbian and understand the text prompts. YouTube lacks a playthrough of the game with graphics, though a later port to a native platform, the Iskra Delta Partner, is available in Apple-II-ish green-on-black.

40 years later, Kontrabant 2 for ZX Spectrum is rebroadcast on FM in Slovenia Read More »

robot-dogs-armed-with-ai-aimed-rifles-undergo-us-marines-special-ops-evaluation

Robot dogs armed with AI-aimed rifles undergo US Marines Special Ops evaluation

AI, autonomous weapons, Biz & IT, Boston Robotics, Ghost Robotics, machine learning, Marines, MARSOC, Military, Onyx Industries, police, Robots, Tech, US Marines, US Military, Weapons, weapons systems / /

The future of warfare —

Quadrupeds being reviewed have automatic targeting systems but require human oversight to fire.

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A still image of a robotic quadruped armed with a remote weapons system, captured from a video provided by Onyx Industries.

Enlarge / A still image of a robotic quadruped armed with a remote weapons system, captured from a video provided by Onyx Industries.

The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is currently evaluating a new generation of robotic “dogs” developed by Ghost Robotics, with the potential to be equipped with gun systems from defense tech company Onyx Industries, reports The War Zone.

While MARSOC is testing Ghost Robotics’ quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicles (called “Q-UGVs” for short) for various applications, including reconnaissance and surveillance, it’s the possibility of arming them with weapons for remote engagement that may draw the most attention. But it’s not unprecedented: The US Marine Corps has also tested robotic dogs armed with rocket launchers in the past.

MARSOC is currently in possession of two armed Q-UGVs undergoing testing, as confirmed by Onyx Industries staff, and their gun systems are based on Onyx’s SENTRY remote weapon system (RWS), which features an AI-enabled digital imaging system and can automatically detect and track people, drones, or vehicles, reporting potential targets to a remote human operator that could be located anywhere in the world. The system maintains a human-in-the-loop control for fire decisions, and it cannot decide to fire autonomously.

On LinkedIn, Onyx Industries shared a video of a similar system in action.

In a statement to The War Zone, MARSOC states that weaponized payloads are just one of many use cases being evaluated. MARSOC also clarifies that comments made by Onyx Industries to The War Zone regarding the capabilities and deployment of these armed robot dogs “should not be construed as a capability or a singular interest in one of many use cases during an evaluation.” The command further stresses that it is aware of and adheres to all Department of Defense policies concerning autonomous weapons.

The rise of robotic unmanned ground vehicles

An unauthorized video of a gun bolted onto a $3,000 Unitree robodog spread quickly on social media in July 2022 and prompted a response from several robotics companies.

Enlarge / An unauthorized video of a gun bolted onto a $3,000 Unitree robodog spread quickly on social media in July 2022 and prompted a response from several robotics companies.

Alexander Atamanov

The evaluation of armed robotic dogs reflects a growing interest in small robotic unmanned ground vehicles for military use. While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been remotely delivering lethal force under human command for at least two decades, the rise of inexpensive robotic quadrupeds—some available for as little as $1,600—has led to a new round of experimentation with strapping weapons to their backs.

In July 2022, a video of a rifle bolted to the back of a Unitree robodog went viral on social media, eventually leading Boston Robotics and other robot vendors to issue a pledge that October to not weaponize their robots (with notable exceptions for military uses). In April, we covered a Unitree Go2 robot dog, with a flame thrower strapped on its back, on sale to the general public.

The prospect of deploying armed robotic dogs, even with human oversight, raises significant questions about the future of warfare and the potential risks and ethical implications of increasingly autonomous weapons systems. There’s also the potential for backlash if similar remote weapons systems eventually end up used domestically by police. Such a concern would not be unfounded: In November 2022, we covered a decision by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to allow the San Francisco Police Department to use lethal robots against suspects.

There’s also concern that the systems will become more autonomous over time. As The War Zone’s Howard Altman and Oliver Parken describe in their article, “While further details on MARSOC’s use of the gun-armed robot dogs remain limited, the fielding of this type of capability is likely inevitable at this point. As AI-enabled drone autonomy becomes increasingly weaponized, just how long a human will stay in the loop, even for kinetic acts, is increasingly debatable, regardless of assurances from some in the military and industry.”

While the technology is still in the early stages of testing and evaluation, Q-UGVs do have the potential to provide reconnaissance and security capabilities that reduce risks to human personnel in hazardous environments. But as armed robotic systems continue to evolve, it will be crucial to address ethical concerns and ensure that their use aligns with established policies and international law.

Robot dogs armed with AI-aimed rifles undergo US Marines Special Ops evaluation Read More »

deepmind-adds-a-diffusion-engine-to-latest-protein-folding-software

DeepMind adds a diffusion engine to latest protein-folding software

AI, biochemistry, Biology, deepmind, Google, protein folding, Science / /

Added complexity —

Major under-the-hood changes let AlphaFold handle protein-DNA complexes and more.

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image of a complicated mix of lines and ribbons arranged in a complicated 3D structure.

Enlarge / Prediction of the structure of a coronavirus Spike protein from a virus that causes the common cold.

Google DeepMind

Most of the activities that go on inside cells—the activities that keep us living, breathing, thinking animals—are handled by proteins. They allow cells to communicate with each other, run a cell’s basic metabolism, and help convert the information stored in DNA into even more proteins. And all of that depends on the ability of the protein’s string of amino acids to fold up into a complicated yet specific three-dimensional shape that enables it to function.

Up until this decade, understanding that 3D shape meant purifying the protein and subjecting it to a time- and labor-intensive process to determine its structure. But that changed with the work of DeepMind, one of Google’s AI divisions, which released Alpha Fold in 2021, and a similar academic effort shortly afterward. The software wasn’t perfect; it struggled with larger proteins and didn’t offer high-confidence solutions for every protein. But many of its predictions turned out to be remarkably accurate.

Even so, these structures only told half of the story. To function, almost every protein has to interact with something else—other proteins, DNA, chemicals, membranes, and more. And, while the initial version of AlphaFold could handle some protein-protein interactions, the rest remained black boxes. Today, DeepMind is announcing the availability of version 3 of AlphaFold, which has seen parts of its underlying engine either heavily modified or replaced entirely. Thanks to these changes, the software now handles various additional protein interactions and modifications.

Changing parts

The original AlphaFold relied on two underlying software functions. One of those took evolutionary limits on a protein into account. By looking at the same protein in multiple species, you can get a sense for which parts are always the same, and therefore likely to be central to its function. That centrality implies that they’re always likely to be in the same location and orientation in the protein’s structure. To do this, the original AlphaFold found as many versions of a protein as it could and lined up their sequences to look for the portions that showed little variation.

Doing so, however, is computationally expensive since the more proteins you line up, the more constraints you have to resolve. In the new version, the AlphaFold team still identified multiple related proteins but switched to largely performing alignments using pairs of protein sequences from within the set of related ones. This probably isn’t as information-rich as a multi-alignment, but it’s far more computationally efficient, and the lost information doesn’t appear to be critical to figuring out protein structures.

Using these alignments, a separate software module figured out the spatial relationships among pairs of amino acids within the target protein. Those relationships were then translated into spatial coordinates for each atom by code that took into account some of the physical properties of amino acids, like which portions of an amino acid could rotate relative to others, etc.

In AlphaFold 3, the prediction of atomic positions is handled by a diffusion module, which is trained by being given both a known structure and versions of that structure where noise (in the form of shifting the positions of some atoms) has been added. This allows the diffusion module to take the inexact locations described by relative positions and convert them into exact predictions of the location of every atom in the protein. It doesn’t need to be told the physical properties of amino acids, because it can figure out what they normally do by looking at enough structures.

(DeepMind had to train on two different levels of noise to get the diffusion module to work: one in which the locations of atoms were shifted while the general structure was left intact and a second where the noise involved shifting the large-scale structure of the protein, thus affecting the location of lots of atoms.)

During training, the team found that it took about 20,000 instances of protein structures for AlphaFold 3 to get about 97 percent of a set of test structures right. By 60,000 instances, it started getting protein-protein interfaces correct at that frequency, too. And, critically, it started getting proteins complexed with other molecules right, as well.

DeepMind adds a diffusion engine to latest protein-folding software Read More »

intel’s-and-qualcomm’s-huawei-export-licenses-get-revoked

Intel’s and Qualcomm’s Huawei export licenses get revoked

Huawei, qualcomm, Tech / /

More Arm laptops? —

Huawei’s phone division has moved on, but laptops will suffer without Intel.

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Huawei's Intel-powered Matebook X Pro has drawn criticism from US China hawks.

Enlarge / Huawei’s Intel-powered Matebook X Pro has drawn criticism from US China hawks.

Huawei

The US crackdown on exports to Huawei now includes even stronger restrictions than the company has already faced. The Financial Times reports that Intel and Qualcomm have had their Huawei export licenses revoked, so Huawei will no longer be able to buy chips from either company.

The export ban has been around since 2020 and means that any company wishing to ship parts to Huawei must get approval from the government on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes these come with restrictions, like Qualcomm’s license, which allowed it to ship smartphone chips to Huawei, but not “5G” chips. That led to Qualcomm creating special 4G-only versions of its 5G chips for Huawei, and the company ended up with 4G-only Snapdragon 888 phones in 2021.

Since then, Huawei has been working on its own Arm chips from its chip design division, HiSilicon. In April, the Huawei Pura 70 smartphone launched with an in-house HiSilicon Kirin 9010 SoC made at SMIC, a Chinese chip fab that is also facing export restrictions. With what is probably still a 7 nm manufacturing process, it’s more of a 2020 chip than a 2024 chip, but that’s still fast enough for many use cases.

Assuming HiSilicon can make enough smartphone chips, the loss of Qualcomm chips isn’t a huge deal right now. Qualcomm seemed to know Huawei has moved beyond it, too, saying in a recent SEC filing, “We do not expect to receive product revenues from Huawei beyond the current calendar year.” Huawei is roaring back to life in the Chinese smartphone market, thanks to HiSilicon chips and preferences for locally made goods.

Huawei's new laptop looks thin, light, and premium.

Huawei’s new laptop looks thin, light, and premium.

Huawei

Intel is going to be a bigger problem and was probably the reason for this latest export change. Intel has controversially had a license to ship Huawei laptop chips since 2020, so Huawei’s laptop business hasn’t been hurting much. Just in April, the 2024 Huawei Matebook X Pro launched with Intel’s latest “Meteor Lake” Core Ultra 9 Processor. It looks like a top-tier laptop, with a 14-inch,120 Hz OLED display, fingerprint reader, all the latest Wi-Fi connectivity, Windows 11 (Microsoft also has approval), and an aluminum body. Thanks to the Intel chip, it also has much-hyped “on-board AI processing.”

Shortly after launch, Reuters reported that Republican lawmakers were unhappy about Intel’s involvement with Huawei’s premium laptop, particularly because of its ability to enable nebulous “AI” features. The US recently passed new restrictions on shipping AI chips to China, but that was around more serious Nvidia AI server chips like the H200, which powers most of the generative AI industry. The hype around AI also means most consumer gear comes with some kind of “AI” marketing angle nowadays, and apparently that was enough to send lawmakers back to the drawing board.

If it feels like you’ve heard of a thousand Huawei export ban expansions that don’t seem very effective, you’re not alone. That Reuters report quotes Congressman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) with the same feeling: “These approvals must stop. Two years ago, I was told licenses to Huawei would stop. Today, it doesn’t seem as though the policy has changed.” The policy has changed, like when new licenses stopped being issued in 2023, but that apparently didn’t involve revoking existing licenses. Profit-first US companies are fighting these bans every step of the way, since a Huawei contract can represent millions of dollars. Huawei can also see all of this coming and is doing its best to adjust.

Assuming this latest restriction finally does the trick, with no Intel chips, Huawei’s laptop business will surely suffer once it runs out of its current stockpile. With ARM laptops becoming more and more popular, though, maybe the next step for Huawei’s laptop division is a HiSilicon laptop. Such a laptop would probably be very slow, but it would be better than nothing.

Intel’s and Qualcomm’s Huawei export licenses get revoked Read More »

these-dangerous-scammers-don’t-even-bother-to-hide-their-crimes

These dangerous scammers don’t even bother to hide their crimes

Biz & IT, Security, syndication / /

brazenly out in the open —

Cybercriminals openly run dozens of scams across social media and messaging apps.

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One hundred dollar bill Benjamin Franklin portrait looks behind brown craft ripped paper

Most scammers and cybercriminals operate in the digital shadows and don’t want you to know how they make money. But that’s not the case for the Yahoo Boys, a loose collective of young men in West Africa who are some of the web’s most prolific—and increasingly dangerous—scammers.

Thousands of people are members of dozens of Yahoo Boy groups operating across Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram, a WIRED analysis has found. The scammers, who deal in types of fraud that total hundreds of millions of dollars each year, also have dozens of accounts on TikTok, YouTube, and the document-sharing service Scribd that are getting thousands of views.

Inside the groups, there’s a hive of fraudulent activity with the cybercriminals often showing their faces and sharing ways to scam people with other members. They openly distribute scripts detailing how to blackmail people and how to run sextortion scams—that have driven people to take their own lives—sell albums with hundreds of photographs, and advertise fake social media accounts. Among the scams, they’re also using AI to create fake “nude” images of people and real-time deepfake video calls.

The Yahoo Boys don’t disguise their activity. Many groups use “Yahoo Boys” in their name as well as other related terms. WIRED’s analysis found 16 Yahoo Boys Facebook groups with almost 200,000 total members, a dozen WhatsApp channels, around 10 Telegram channels, 20 TikTok accounts, a dozen YouTube accounts, and more than 80 scripts on Scribd. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Broadly, the companies do not allow content on their platforms that encourages or promotes criminal behavior. The majority of the Yahoo Boys accounts and groups WIRED identified were removed after we contacted the companies about the groups’ overt existence. Despite these removals, dozens more Yahoo Boys groups and accounts remain online.

“They’re not hiding under different names,” says Kathy Waters, the co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Advocating Against Romance Scammers, which has tracked the Yahoo Boys for years. Waters says the social media companies are essentially providing the Yahoo Boys with “free office space” to organize and conduct their activities. “They’re selling scripts, selling photos, identifications of people, all online, all on the social media platforms,” she says. “Why these accounts still remain is beyond me.”

The Yahoo Boys aren’t a single, organized group. Instead, they’re a collection of thousands of scammers who work individually or in clusters. Often based in Nigeria, their name comes from formerly targeting users of Yahoo services, with links back to the Nigerian Prince email scams of old. Groups in West Africa can be often organized in various confraternities, which are cultish gangs.

“Yahoo is a set of knowledge that allows you to conduct scams,” says Gary Warner, the director of intelligence at DarkTower and director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Computer Forensics Research Laboratory. While there are different levels of sophistication of Yahoo Boys, Warner says, many simply operate from their phones. “Most of these threat actors are only using one device,” he says.

The Yahoo Boys run dozens of scams—from romance fraud to business email compromise. When making contact with potential victims, they’ll often “bomb” people by sending hundreds of messages to dating app accounts or Facebook profiles. “They will say anything they can in order to get the next dime in their pocket,” Waters says.

Searching for the Yahoo Boys on Facebook brings up two warnings: Both say the results may be linked to fraudulent activity, which isn’t allowed on the website. Clicking through the warnings reveals Yahoo Boy groups with thousands of members—one had more than 70,000.

Within the groups—alongside posts selling SIM cards and albums with hundreds of pictures—many of the scammers push people toward other messaging platforms such as Meta’s WhatsApp or Telegram. Here, the Yahoo Boys are at their most bold. Some groups and channels on the two platforms receive hundreds of posts per day and are part of their wider web of operations.

After WIRED asked Facebook about the 16 groups we identified, the company removed them, and some WhatsApp groups were deactivated. “Scammers use every platform available to them to defraud people and constantly adapt to avoid getting caught,” says Al Tolan, a Meta spokesperson. They did not directly address the accounts that were removed or that they were easy to find. “Purposefully exploiting others for money is against our policies, and we take action when we become aware of it,” Tolan says. “We continue to invest in technology and cooperate with law enforcement so they can prosecute scammers. We also actively share tips on how people can protect themselves, their accounts, and avoid scams.”

Groups on Telegram were removed after WIRED messaged the company’s press office; however, the platform did not respond about why it had removed them.

Across all types of social media, Yahoo Boys scammers share “scripts” that they use to socially manipulate people—these can run to thousands of words long and can be copied and pasted to different victims. Many have been online for years. “I’ve seen some scripts that are 30 and 60 layers deep, before the scammer actually would have to go and think of something else to say,” says Ronnie Tokazowski, the chief fraud fighter at Intelligence for Good, which works with cybercrime victims. “It’s 100 percent how they’ll manipulate the people,” Tokazowski says.

Among the many scams, they pretend to be military officers, people offering “hookups,” the FBI, doctors, and people looking for love. One “good morning” script includes around a dozen messages the scammers can send to their targets. “In a world full of deceit and lies, I feel lucky when see the love in your eyes. Good morning,” one says. But things get much darker.

These dangerous scammers don’t even bother to hide their crimes Read More »

glow-of-an-exoplanet-may-be-from-starlight-reflecting-off-liquid-iron

Glow of an exoplanet may be from starlight reflecting off liquid iron

astronomy, atmospheres, exoplanets, Science / /

For all the glory —

A phenomenon called a “glory” may be happening on a hellishly hot giant planet.

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Image of a planet on a dark background, with an iridescent circle on the right side of the planet.

Enlarge / Artist impression of a glory on exoplanet WASP-76b.

Do rainbows exist on distant worlds? Many phenomena that happen on Earth—such as rain, hurricanes, and auroras—also occur on other planets in our Solar System if the conditions are right. Now we have evidence from outside our Solar System that one particularly strange exoplanet might even be displaying something close to a rainbow.

Appearing in the sky as a halo of colors, a phenomenon called a “glory” occurs when light hits clouds made up of a homogeneous substance in the form of spherical droplets. It might be the explanation for a mystery regarding observations of exoplanet WASP-76B. This planet, a scorching gas giant that experiences molten iron rain, has also been observed to have more light on its eastern terminator (a line used to separate the day side from the night side) than its western terminator. Why was there more light on one side of the planet?

After observing it with the CHEOPS space telescope, then combining that with previous observations from Hubble, Spitzer, and TESS, a team of researchers from ESA and the University of Bern in Switzerland now think that the most likely reason for the extra light is a glory.

Seeing the light

Over three years, CHEOPS made 23 observations of WASP-76B in both visible and infrared light. These included phase curves, transits, and secondary eclipses. Phase curves are continuous observations that track a planet’s complete revolution and show changes in its phase or the part of its illuminated side that is facing the telescope. The telescope may see more or less of that side as the planet orbits its star. Phase curves can determine the change in the total brightness of the planet and star as the planet orbits.

Secondary eclipses happen when a planet passes behind its host star and is eclipsed by it. The light seen during such an eclipse can later be compared with the total light both before and after the occultation to give us a sense of the light that’s reflected off the planet. Hot Jupiters like WASP-76B are commonly observed through secondary eclipses.

Phase-curve observations can continue while the planet is eclipsing its star. While it was observing the phase curve of WASP-76B, CHEOPS saw a pre-eclipse excess of light on its night side. This had also been seen in TESS phase-curve and secondary-eclipse observations that had been made earlier.

End of the rainbow?

An advantage of WASP-76b is that it is an ultra-hot Jupiter, so at least its day side does not have the clouds and hazes that often obscure the atmospheres of cooler hot Jupiters. This makes atmospheric emissions much easier to detect. That we had already observed an asymmetry in iron content between the day-side and night-side terminators, discovered in a previous study, made the planet especially intriguing. There was not much gaseous iron in the upper atmosphere of the day-side limb compared to that of the night-side limb. This is probably because it rains iron on the day side of WASP-76b, which then condenses into clouds of iron on the night side.

Observations from Hubble suggested that thermal inversion—when the air near the surface of a planet begins cooling—was occurring on the night side. Cooling on that side would cause iron that had previously condensed into clouds, rained down onto the day side, and then evaporated from the intense heat to condense again. Drops of liquid iron can then form clouds.

These clouds are critical since light from the host star, reflecting off these drops in those clouds, can create the effect of a glory.

“Explaining the observation with the glory effect would require spherical droplets of highly reflective, spherically shaped aerosols and clouds on the planet’s eastern hemisphere,” the researchers said in a paper recently published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Glories have been seen off Earth before. They are also known to form in the clouds of Venus. Just like WASP-76b, more pre-eclipse light was observed on Venus, so while a glory is all but definite for the exoplanet, future observations with a more powerful telescope could help determine how similar the phenomenon on WASP-76 is to that on Venus. If they match, this will be the first glory ever observed on an exoplanet.

If future research figures out a definite way to tell whether this is really a glory, these phenomena could tell us more about the atmospheric makeup of exoplanets, depending on the kinds of elements or molecules light is reflecting off of. They might even give away the presence of water, which could mean habitability. While the hypothesized glory on WASP-76b has not been definitively demonstrated, it is anything but a rainbow in the dark.

Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2024. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202348270

Glow of an exoplanet may be from starlight reflecting off liquid iron Read More »

microsoft-plans-to-lock-down-windows-dns-like-never-before-here’s-how.

Microsoft plans to lock down Windows DNS like never before. Here’s how.

Biz & IT, domain name system, microsoft, Security, Windows, ztdns / /
Microsoft plans to lock down Windows DNS like never before. Here’s how.

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Translating human-readable domain names into numerical IP addresses has long been fraught with gaping security risks. After all, lookups are rarely end-to-end encrypted. The servers providing domain name lookups provide translations for virtually any IP address—even when they’re known to be malicious. And many end-user devices can easily be configured to stop using authorized lookup servers and instead use malicious ones.

Microsoft on Friday provided a peek at a comprehensive framework that aims to sort out the Domain Name System (DNS) mess so that it’s better locked down inside Windows networks. It’s called ZTDNS (zero trust DNS). Its two main features are (1) encrypted and cryptographically authenticated connections between end-user clients and DNS servers and (2) the ability for administrators to tightly restrict the domains these servers will resolve.

Clearing the minefield

One of the reasons DNS has been such a security minefield is that these two features can be mutually exclusive. Adding cryptographic authentication and encryption to DNS often obscures the visibility admins need to prevent user devices from connecting to malicious domains or detect anomalous behavior inside a network. As a result, DNS traffic is either sent in clear text or it’s encrypted in a way that allows admins to decrypt it in transit through what is essentially an adversary-in-the-middle attack.

Admins are left to choose between equally unappealing options: (1) route DNS traffic in clear text with no means for the server and client device to authenticate each other so malicious domains can be blocked and network monitoring is possible, or (2) encrypt and authenticate DNS traffic and do away with the domain control and network visibility.

ZTDNS aims to solve this decades-old problem by integrating the Windows DNS engine with the Windows Filtering Platform—the core component of the Windows Firewall—directly into client devices.

Jake Williams, VP of research and development at consultancy Hunter Strategies, said the union of these previously disparate engines would allow updates to be made to the Windows firewall on a per-domain name basis. The result, he said, is a mechanism that allows organizations to, in essence, tell clients “only use our DNS server, that uses TLS, and will only resolve certain domains.” Microsoft calls this DNS server or servers the “protective DNS server.”

By default, the firewall will deny resolutions to all domains except those enumerated in allow lists. A separate allow list will contain IP address subnets that clients need to run authorized software. Key to making this work at scale inside an organization with rapidly changing needs. Networking security expert Royce Williams (no relation to Jake Williams) called this a “sort of a bidirectional API for the firewall layer, so you can both trigger firewall actions (by input *tothe firewall), and trigger external actions based on firewall state (output *fromthe firewall). So instead of having to reinvent the firewall wheel if you are an AV vendor or whatever, you just hook into WFP.”

Microsoft plans to lock down Windows DNS like never before. Here’s how. Read More »

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Judge mulls sanctions over Google’s “shocking” destruction of internal chats

Antitrust law, department of justice, Google, google monopoly trial, google search ads, Policy, search engines, us v google / /
Kenneth Dintzer, litigator for the US Department of Justice, exits federal court in Washington, DC, on September 20, 2023, during the antitrust trial to determine if Alphabet Inc.'s Google maintains a monopoly in the online search business.

Enlarge / Kenneth Dintzer, litigator for the US Department of Justice, exits federal court in Washington, DC, on September 20, 2023, during the antitrust trial to determine if Alphabet Inc.’s Google maintains a monopoly in the online search business.

Near the end of the second day of closing arguments in the Google monopoly trial, US district judge Amit Mehta weighed whether sanctions were warranted over what the US Department of Justice described as Google’s “routine, regular, and normal destruction” of evidence.

Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google’s revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements. These agreements, the DOJ and state attorneys general argued, work to maintain Google’s monopoly over search.

According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ’s attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should “conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law.”

Mehta at least agreed that “Google’s document retention policy leaves a lot to be desired,” expressing shock and surprise that a large company like Google would ever enact such a policy as best practice.

Google’s attorney Colette Connor told Mehta that the DOJ should have been aware of Google’s policy long before the DOJ challenged the conduct. Google had explicitly disclosed the policy to Texas’ attorney general, who was involved in DOJ’s antitrust suit over both Google’s search and adtech businesses, Connor said.

Connor also argued that Google’s conduct wasn’t sanctionable because there is no evidence that any of the missing chats would’ve shed any new light on the case. Mehta challenged this somewhat, telling Connor, “We just want to know what we don’t know. We don’t know if there was a treasure trove of material that was destroyed.”

During rebuttal, Dintzer told Mehta that Google’s decision to tell Texas about the policy but not the federal government did not satisfy their disclosure obligation under federal rules of civil procedure in the case. That rule says that “only upon finding that the party acted with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation may” the court “presume that the lost information was unfavorable to the party.”

The DOJ has asked the court to make that ruling and issue four orders sanctioning Google. They want the court to order the “presumption that deleted chats were unfavorable,” the “presumption that Google’s proffered justification” for deleting chats “is pretextual” (concealing Google’s true rationale), and the “presumption that Google intended” to delete chats to “maintain its monopoly.” The government also wants a “prohibition on argument by Google that the absence of evidence is evidence of adverse inference,” which would stop Google from arguing that the DOJ is just assuming the deleted chats are unfavorable to Google.

Mehta asked Connor if she would agree that, at “minimum,” it was “negligent” of Google to leave it to employees to preserve chats on sensitive discussions, but Connor disagreed. She argued that “given the typical use of chat,” Google’s history-off policy was “reasonable.”

Connor told Mehta that the DOJ must prove that Google intended to hide evidence for the court to order sanctions.

That intent could be demonstrated another way, Mehta suggested, recalling that “Google has been very deliberate in advising employees about what to say and what not to say” in discussions that could indicate monopolistic behaviors. That included telling employees, “Don’t use the term markets,” Mehta told Connor, asking if that kind of conduct could be interpreted as Google’s intent to hide evidence.

But Connor disagreed again.

“No, we don’t think you can use it as evidence,” Connor said. “It’s not relevant to the claims in this case.”

But during rebuttal, Dintzer argued that there was evidence of its relevance. He said that testimony from Google employees showed that Google’s chat policy “was uniformly used as a way of communicating without creating discoverable information” intentionally to hide the alleged antitrust violations.

Judge mulls sanctions over Google’s “shocking” destruction of internal chats Read More »

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Sony demands PSN accounts for Helldivers 2 PC players, and it’s not going well

gaming, helldivers 2, PlayStation, PlayStation Network, psn hack, Sony, sony playstation, sony playstation network, steam / /

What fresh Helldivers is this —

A surprise hit, a network with brutal baggage, and the Steam profit paradox.

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Helldivers 2 player posing in winter armor

Enlarge / This gear is from the upcoming “Polar Patriots” Premium Warbond in Helldivers 2. It’s an upcoming change the developer and publisher likely wish was getting more attention of late.

Sony Interactive Entertainment

There’s a lot of stories about the modern PC gaming industry balled up inside one recent “update” to Helldivers 2.

Sony Interactive Entertainment announced Thursday night that current players of the runaway hit co-op shooter will have to connect their Steam accounts to a PlayStation Network (PSN) account starting on May 30, with a hard deadline of June 4. New players will be required to connect the two starting Monday, May 6.

Officially, this is happening because of the “safety and security provided on PlayStation and PlayStation Studios games.” Account linking allows Sony to ban abusive players, and also gives banned players the right to appeal. Sony writes that it would have done this at launch, but “Due to technical issues … we allowed the linking requirements for Steam accounts to a PlayStation Network account to be temporarily optional. That grace period will now expire.”

“We understand that while this may be an inconvenience to some of you, this step will help us to continue to build a community that you are all proud to be a part of,” Sony writes in the update. The Helldivers community on Reddit is flush with dissenting posts today, and Steam reviews of the game have taken a marked turn since the announcement.

Sony Interactive Entertainment

Oh, right, that PlayStation Network

It’s the combination of “safety and security” and “Sony” that make this more than just the typical grousing about game launchers, cross-play, or other user/password demands. The PlayStation Network was fully and famously hacked in April 2011, with 77 million users’ names, addresses, emails, birthdays, passwords, and logins compromised. Sony Online Entertainment also suffered a separate attack while PSN was down, exposing millions more accounts and thousands of credit card numbers. PSN came partially back online 26 days later, then fully online two weeks later, with a complimentary year of identity protection and Welcome Back packages for subscribers. Less than a month later, other aspects of Sony were hacked by LulzSec.

Sony was fined nearly $400,000 in the UK for the hack in 2013, which regulators said could have been prevented by updating software and taking precautions. Sony agreed to pay up to $17.5 million in a US class-action settlement in 2014, along with some providing free games and other benefits in 2015.

Those with a long enough memory of computers, security, and Sony might also recall the Sony rootkit debacle, which, while nearly 20 years old now, was such a notably bad and bizarre thing that it stuck around.

Sony Interactive Entertainment

An online game people want less online

Helldivers 2 was not supposed to be this big a game. Sony was still cautiously trodding into PC games after years of treating its exclusive and first-party games as console leverage. Helldivers 2 was a sequel to a game that, while well-regarded, didn’t land as a smash hit.

Within one day of its launch, Helldivers 2 was Sony’s most successful PC launch, and it wasn’t even close. Within two weeks, it passed the all-time concurrent player counts of Starfield, Destiny 2, landing at 18 on the SteamDB charts. It helped that it launched on the same day as the PS5 version, was cheaper than most AAA titles, and arrived with no (uncommonly) egregious performance or crash issues. There were, as noted by Sony, early server issues, largely due to demand. Whatever the case, it was Sony’s seventh highest-grossing game as of May 1.

That success hurts the optics of Sony’s demand, months after it had an unexpected hit, that players must now register with its far-from-trusted network to keep playing. A non-mega-budgeted game, a trial-balloon sequel, hits big, and Sony, finding its footing in this new realm, doesn’t want to leave said opportunity as a one-time Steam purchase.

Sony Interactive Entertainment

Two blimps jousting overhead

Helldivers 2 is explicitly multiplayer, and the action takes place on Sony’s servers. But Steam is the means by which Helldivers 2 reaches its players, fosters engagement, and, of course, tries to entice them into DLC, further sequels, and perhaps other Sony PC games—so long as they’re on also on Steam.

There are no rock-solid numbers on Steam’s PC gaming market share, but we know that the biggest competitor, Epic Games, is losing hundreds of millions of dollars each year giving away games just to get some kind of foothold. Steam’s market position, recommendation whims, and broad 30 percent revenue cut have left many companies searching for ways to disentangle their futures from a single platform. Sony just happens to be the one making the hard ask, for reasons that don’t entirely sound obvious months later, and with a network that has some tough Google search results.

It’s worth noting that PSN is not necessarily available in all countries where Steam sells games. We’ve reached out to Sony to ask about this and for further comment on their PSN requirement, and will update this post if we hear back.

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Counterfeit Cisco gear ended up in US military bases, used in combat operations

Biz & IT, china, Cisco, Hong Kong, Networking / /

Cisno —

“One of the largest counterfeit-trafficking operations ever.”

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Cisco Systems headquarters in San Jose, California, US, on Monday, Aug. 14, 2023.

Enlarge / Cisco Systems headquarters in San Jose, California.

A Florida resident was sentenced to 78 months for running a counterfeit scam that generated $100 million in revenue from fake networking gear and put the US military’s security at risk, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Thursday.

Onur Aksoy, aka Ron Aksoy and Dave Durden, pleaded guilty on June 5, 2023, to two counts of an indictment charging him with conspiring with others to traffic in counterfeit goods, to commit mail fraud, and to commit wire fraud. His sentence, handed down on May 1, also includes an order to pay $100 million in restitution to Cisco, a $40,000 fine, and three years of supervised release. Aksoy will also have to pay his victims a sum that a court will determine at an unspecified future date, the DOJ said.

According to the indictment [PDF], Aksoy began plotting the scam around August 2013, and the operation ran until at least April 2022. Aksoy used at least 19 companies and about 15 Amazon storefronts, 10 eBay ones, and direct sales—known collectively as Pro Network Entities—to sell tens of thousands of computer networking devices. He imported the products from China and Hong Kong and used fake Cisco packaging, labels, and documents to sell them as new and real. Legitimate versions of the products would’ve sold for over $1 billion, per the indictment.

The DOJ’s announcement this week said the devices had an estimated retail value of “hundreds of millions of dollars” and that Aksoy personally received millions of dollars.

Fake Cisco tech used in Air Force, Army, and Navy applications

The US military used gear purchased from Aksoy’s scheme, which jeopardized sensitive applications, including support platforms for US fighter jets and other types of military aircraft, per government officials.

In a statement this week, Bryan Denny, special agent in charge of the US Department of Defense (DoD) Office of Inspector General, Defense Criminal Investigative Service in the Western Field Office, said that Aksoy “knowingly defrauded the Department of Defense by introducing counterfeit products into its supply chain that routinely failed or did not work at all.” He added:

In doing so, he sold counterfeit Cisco products to the DoD that were found on numerous military bases and in various systems, including but not limited to US Air Force F-15 and US Navy P-8 aircraft flight simulators.

The DOJ’s announcement said that Aksoy’s counterfeit devices ended up “used in highly sensitive military and governmental applications—including classified information systems—some involving combat and non-combat operations of the US Navy, US Air Force, and US Army, including platforms supporting the F-15, F-18, and F-22 fighter jets, AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, and B-52 Stratofortress bomber aircraft.”

Devices purchased through the scam also wound up in hospitals and schools, the announcement said.

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We still don’t understand how one human apparently got bird flu from a cow

bird flu, cattle, CDC, cows, genetic surveillance, H5N1, human case, Infectious disease, mutations, outbreak, pandemic, Science, USDA, viral sequences, viruses / /
Holstein dairy cows in a freestall barn.

Enlarge / Holstein dairy cows in a freestall barn.

The US Department of Agriculture this week posted an unpublished version of its genetic analysis into the spillover and spread of bird flu into US dairy cattle, offering the most complete look yet at the data state and federal investigators have amassed in the unexpected and worrisome outbreak—and what it might mean.

The preprint analysis provides several significant insights into the outbreak—from when it may have actually started, just how much transmission we’re missing, stunning unknowns about the only human infection linked to the outbreak, and how much the virus continues to evolve in cows. The information is critical as flu experts fear the outbreak is heightening the ever-present risk that this wily flu virus will evolve to spread among humans and spark a pandemic.

But, the information hasn’t been easy to come by. Since March 25—when the USDA confirmed for the first time that a herd of US dairy cows had contracted the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus—the agency has garnered international criticism for not sharing data quickly or completely. On April 21, the agency dumped over 200 genetic sequences into public databases amid pressure from outside experts. However, many of those sequences lack descriptive metadata, which normally contains basic and key bits of information, like when and where the viral sample was taken. Outside experts don’t have that crucial information, making independent analyses frustratingly limited. Thus, the new USDA analysis—which presumably includes that data—offers the best yet glimpse of the complete information on the outbreak.

Undetected spread

One of the big takeaways is that USDA researchers think the spillover of bird flu from wild birds to cattle began late last year, likely in December. Thus, the virus likely circulated undetected in dairy cows for around four months before the USDA’s March 25 confirmation of an infection in a Texas herd.

This timeline conclusion largely aligns with what outside experts previously gleaned from the limited publicly available data. So, it may not surprise those following the outbreak, but it is worrisome. Months of undetected spread raise significant concerns about the country’s ability to identify and swiftly respond to emerging infectious disease outbreaks—and whether public health responses have moved past the missteps seen in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But another big finding from the preprint is how many gaps still exist in our current understanding of the outbreak. To date, the USDA has identified 36 herds in nine states that have been infected with H5N1. The good news from the genetic analysis is that the USDA can draw lines connecting most of them. USDA researchers reported that “direct movement of cattle based upon production practices” seems to explain how H5N1 hopped from the Texas panhandle region—where the initial spillover is thought to have occurred—to nine other states, some as far-flung as North Carolina, Michigan, and Idaho.

Bayes factors for inferred movement between different discrete traits of H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b viruses demonstrating the frequency of movement.

Enlarge / Bayes factors for inferred movement between different discrete traits of H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b viruses demonstrating the frequency of movement.

Putative transmission pathways of HPAI H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b genotype B3.13 supported by epidemiological links, animal movements, and genomic analysis.

Enlarge / Putative transmission pathways of HPAI H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b genotype B3.13 supported by epidemiological links, animal movements, and genomic analysis.

Putative transmission pathways of HPAI H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b genotype B3.13 supported by epidemiological links, animal movements, and genomic analysis. [/ars_img]The bad news is that those lines connecting the herds aren’t solid. There are gaps in which the genetic data suggests unidentified transmission occurred, maybe in unsampled cows, maybe in other animals entirely. The genetic data is clear that once this strain of bird flu—H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4 genotype B3.13 —hopped into cattle, it could readily spread to other mammals. The genetic data links viruses from cattle moving many times into other animals: There were five cattle-to-poultry jumps, one cattle-to-raccoon transmission, two events where the virus moved from cattle to domestic cats, and three times when the virus from cattle spilled back into wild birds.

“We cannot exclude the possibility that this genotype is circulating in unsampled locations and hosts as the existing analysis suggests that data are missing and undersurveillance may obscure transmission inferred using phylogenetic methods,” the USDA researchers wrote in their preprint.

We still don’t understand how one human apparently got bird flu from a cow Read More »