Category: Technica Aquarius

Enlarge (credit: Jeremy Brooks / Flickr)

A US federal agency has been hosting a backdoor that can provide total visibility into and complete control over the agency network, and the researchers who discovered it have been unable to engage with the administrators responsible, security firm Avast said on Thursday.

The US Commission on International Freedom, associated with international rights, regularly communicates with other US agencies and international governmental and nongovernmental organizations. The security firm published a blog post after multiple attempts failed to report the findings directly and through channels the US government has in place. The post didn’t name the agency, but a spokeswoman did in an email.

Members of Avast’s threat intelligence team wrote:

Enlarge / Comcast’s xFi Advanced Gateway. (credit: Getty Images | Jeff Fusco )

Comcast says it won’t deploy data caps in the Northeast US in 2022, giving another year’s reprieve to 12 states and a few other areas where Comcast customers don’t face overage fees. “We don’t have plans to implement our data usage plan in our Northeast markets in 2022 at this time,” Comcast said, according to a Light Reading article.

Comcast confirmed that quote to Ars today but declined to provide any further statement when asked about plans for 2023 and beyond. Comcast’s statement came after Massachusetts state Rep. Andy Vargas, a Democrat, told WHAV that “the latest we have is that they have no intention of reintroducing the data caps at all, which is a huge win.”

Vargas and 70 other Massachusetts lawmakers slammed Comcast a year ago when it announced a plan to start enforcing the data cap in the Northeast starting in January 2021.

Enlarge / Legacy investors earn the ability to make more money in-game by crafting and selling unique items. (credit: 22cans)

On Saturday, Peter Molyneux’s 22cans studio and blockchain gaming company Gala Games announced the first limited land sale in Legacy, an NFT-powered game being sold as “a creative entrepreneur’s dream come true.” Less than a week later, early player-investors have already poured over $54 million into the virtual-land non-fungible tokens that make up the game, which isn’t expected to launch until sometime next year.

How it works

Described as “the first ever Blockchain Business Sim,” Legacy lets players design in-game products and buildings that are then manufactured by virtual workers in in-game factories. Players can trade those items with other players in an “open market” and compete in in-game competitions for “leaderboard positions and big prizes” (denominated in the game’s own LegacyCoin cryptocurrency).

To participate in that in-game economy, though, you’ll have to be a Legacy landowner. Currently, that means purchasing one of 4,661 available plots of land in a virtual recreation of London using the Gala Games marketplace (it’s unclear how many more plots of Legacy land will eventually be made, if any).

Enlarge / Brian Anderson’s experiments with Lego minifigs led to the development of an interactive museum exhibit in Switzerland. (credit: Brian Anderson)

Legos are a beloved staple of educational science activities and have even proved useful in particle physics experiments at CERN to explore the properties of hadrons. For Brian Anderson, a physicist at Brigham Young University, Legos are an essential component of his acoustics research. At a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Seattle earlier this month, Anderson described how he figured out how to focus sound-wave energy precisely enough to knock over a single Lego minifig without disturbing other minifigs clustered around it.

The key is a signal-processing technique called “time reversal,” originally used by submarines in the 1960s to help focus signal transmission in the ocean. The name is a bit misleading, since it’s sound waves that are being reversed, not time. The technique involves playing a sound (impulse) from a sound source—Anderson uses speakers for playing music through a computer or laptop—and using a sensor (like a microphone or a laser) at a targeted location on a metal plate to record the response to the impulse there.

That recording essentially maps the acoustic wave as it bounces around. One can then use software to reverse that signal and play it back so the waves retrace their steps and constructively interfere with each other, enabling Anderson to precisely focus that acoustic energy on the targeted location. The spatial extent of the focusing depends on the frequencies being used. Higher frequencies typically have smaller wavelengths, enabling Anderson to focus the acoustic energy to a more narrow point in space.