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Tuesday, June 30
Building the Bricasso Lego Mosaic Printer
Researchers expose Dino, espionage malware with a French connection
Security researchers at ESET in Bratislava have published an analysis of another apparently state-sponsored cyber-espionage tool used to target computers in Iran—and potentially elsewhere. The malware, also recently mentioned by Kaspersky researchers, was named "Dino" by its developers and has been described as a "full featured espionage platform." And this advanced persistent threat malware, according to researchers, might as well come with a "fabriqué en France" stamp on it.
Based on analysis of Dino's code from a sample that infected systems in Iran in 2013, "We believe this malicious software has been developed by the Animal Farm espionage group, who also created the infamous Casper, Bunny and Babar malware," ESET's Joan Calvet wrote in a blog post today. The Casper malware was part of a large-scale attack on Syrian computers last fall. "Dino contains interesting technical features, and also a few hints that the developers are French speaking," Calvet noted.
Other members of the "Animal Farm" malware family have been attributed to French intelligence agencies by researchers—including a 2011 analysis by Canada's Communications Security Establishment revealed by documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Dino shares attributes with the other members of the "Animal Farm" malware family and improves on many of the techniques of "Babar," the previous generation intelligence-gathering software implant.
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California governor signs bill eliminating personal vaccine exemptions
On Tuesday, California Governor Jerry Brown (D) signed into law one of the most stringent vaccination laws in the United States, eliminating the state's previous personal and religious belief exemption for vaccines.
Under the new law, which takes effect January 1, 2016, all California schoolchildren must prove that they have been vaccinated in order to attend school. They can only be exempted when that child’s physician explicitly approves it.
"The science is clear that vaccines dramatically protect children against a number of infectious and dangerous diseases," Brown wrote in a signing statement. "While it’s true that no medical intervention is without risk, the evidence shows that immunization powerfully benefits and protects the community."
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Latest OS X update allows you to enable TRIM for third-party SSDs
Pretty much every operating system in use these days supports TRIM—a special ATA command that the OS sends along to an SSD when deleting files on that SSD. The lone exception to that list has been Apple’s OS X, which—at least until today—only supported TRIM on its OEM SSDs. If you took a Mac that originally came with a spinning disk and installed an aftermarket SSD in it yourself, the operating system wouldn’t use TRIM on the disk—at least, not unless you resorted to third-party tools.
With today’s OS X 10.10.4 update, however, Apple has added a command line utility that can be used to enable TRIM on third-party SSDs without having to download and install anything. Called trimforce, the utility can be executed from the OS X terminal, and it requires a reboot to start working.
We’ve enabled it on a pair of older Macs in the Orbiting HQ with aftermarket SSDs in them, and so far we’ve had no issues—giant scary warning notwithstanding.
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Increased brain connectivity eases teenage impatience
As many adults can attest, teenage behavior is often characterized by impulsivity and impatience. From a psychological perspective, this behavior can result either from disregard for future outcomes or from an over-emphasis on immediate rewards. Prior to the publication of a new study in PNAS, it wasn’t entirely clear which of these two components underlies developmental changes. This new paper examines impatience in teens and finds that it’s mostly a result of teens’ disregard for future outcomes. In their conclusions, the researchers state that increased control and increased integration of future-oriented thought are direct contributors to the changes in behavior that (hopefully) occur as we age.
For this study, 50 participants between the ages of eight and 25 were recruited from the paid participant pool of the Stanford University Psychology Department. Participants completed a task in which they were asked to repeatedly assess their preferences for either a smaller monetary reward that would come sooner or a larger monetary reward that would come later. This task was performed before and during brain scans with a functional MRI machine, which allows researchers to see which parts of the brain were most active.
Analysis of the decisions that participants made revealed that age had an effect on the way that they chose their rewards and revealed an expected decline in impatience for seeing a reward as teenagers grew older. But the researchers could actually separate the two effects. They found that propensity for future orientation increased significantly with age, whereas sensitivity to immediate rewards did not. In other words, our increase in self-control comes from an increased ability to focus on the future rather than a drop in the demand for immediate rewards.
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