Talynebear

Enlarge (credit: Christiaan Colen)

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) paid a $28,000 ransom in bitcoins to free up the Los Angeles Valley College campus’ network, e-mail, and voicemail systems, which were targeted during a winter break when the campus was closed.

According to a Wednesday statement from an LACCD spokesman, district officials concluded that it was worth it to pay the ransom—in part, because the district has an insurance policy that covers such incidents.

“It was the assessment of our outside cybersecurity experts that making a payment would offer an extremely high probability of restoring access to the affected systems, while failure to pay would virtually guarantee that data would be lost,” LACCD Chancellor Francisco C. Rodriguez said in the statement. “After payment was made, a ‘key’ was delivered to open access to our computer systems. The process to ‘unlock’ hundreds of thousands of files will be a lengthy one, but so far, the key has worked in every attempt that has been made.”

Enlarge / The Falcon 9 rocket for Saturday's Iridium NEXT launch is shown on the pad Friday morning. (credit: SpaceX)

Post-launch update: Despite some last minute concerns about strong winds and a wayward boat, SpaceX launched on Saturday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The Falcon 9 rocket made a picturesque ascent, delivering its payload of 10 large satellites into low-Earth orbit (they should reach their final 625km orbit about 90 minutes after launch). The first stage then descended back to Earth and, for the first time, an on board camera provided views all the way down.

The rocket then stuck its landing on Just Read the Instructions, marking the first time the company has landed a booster in the Pacific Ocean.

First stage has landed on Just Read the Instructions pic.twitter.com/W0EoLaO4YR

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 14, 2017

Original story: Today SpaceX will attempt to launch its Falcon 9 rocket for the first time since a fueling accident on Sept. 1, 2016, which destroyed the booster and its satellite payload on the launch pad. The instantaneous launch window for Saturday's attempt opens at 12:54pm ET (17:54pm UK), with liftoff occurring from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Enlarge (credit: Infinity Ward)

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare's multiplayer mode has an extensive range of weapons and skins to acquire through purchasing Supply Drops. As is typical for this kind of game, you can either grind out these items through playing the game—one rare Supply Drop costs 30 keys, which can typically be earned in about two hours of play time—or you can pony up some cash and buy the Supply Drops directly. A rare Drop costs about $2 when bought with the real money currency known as "COD Points."

A glitch over the holiday period allowed Infinite Warfare players to earn tens of thousands of keys in minutes. Developer Infinity Ward had an in-game event giving away free Supply Drops containing various goodies. One of those Supply Drops was a crate containing 30 keys. Players soon discovered that this crate could be opened repeatedly simply by, er, mashing the X button, for 30 keys a press. Players could accumulate another in-game currency, Salvage, in a similar way.

With these thousands or tens of thousands of keys, players could then buy items that would have required thousands of hours or grinding, or hundreds of real dollars, to buy. Widespread use of the flaw caused Infinity Ward's parent Activision to disable the game servers temporarily until something could be done.

(credit: Connie Ma)

In recent years, peanut allergies among kids have soared, creating life-long sensitivities that can be deadly and banishing beloved PB&Js from lunch boxes everywhere. While the cause is still unclear, health experts are confident they’ve found the solution to the plague of peanut allergies: peanuts.

Parents, pediatricians, and other healthcare providers are now firmly advised to start feeding infants peanut-laced foods to head off allergies before they develop. Based on mounting evidence, experts think there’s a “window of time in which the body is more likely to tolerate a food than react to it, and if you can educate the body during that window, you’re at much lower likelihood of developing an allergy to that food,” Matthew Greenhawt, a food allergy expert, told The New York Times.

As such, a National Institutes of Health panel of specialists, including Dr. Greenhawt, released today a new set of guidelines for tossing peanuts into that window.

Enlarge / AT&T will own a bunch of new media properties if it is allowed to buy Time Warner. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

AT&T and Time Warner say they have a plan to avoid a Federal Communications Commission review of their pending merger.

An FCC review would be necessary if Time Warner transfers any FCC licenses to AT&T, but Time Warner might get rid of any such licenses before the deal is finished. "Time Warner has conducted a review of all licenses that it holds that are granted by the FCC," AT&T said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday. "While subject to change, it is currently anticipated that Time Warner will not need to transfer any of its FCC licenses to AT&T in order to continue to conduct its business operations after the closing of the transaction."

AT&T did not elaborate on how the licenses would be disposed of.

Enlarge / Battletoads on the NES Classic Edition? If you're willing to take a risk via modding, you too could add this and other games to your own little system. (credit: ARCADERU)

If you managed to get your hands on an NES Classic Edition this holiday season, you may already be tired of the 30 classic games pre-installed on the system by now. Nintendo has made clear that the tiny replica NES will not officially receive new games, especially with no WiFi protocol to download them. But that hasn't stopped budding hackers from scoffing at Nintendo's claims and adding games their own way.

This week saw separate hackers in Japan and Russia figure out soft-mod solutions to adding new games to the NES Classic. This means you don't need to grab a screwdriver or a soldering iron to mod yours.

According to the whiz kids at Reddit's NESClassicMods community, the solution won't work until you've created a save file in Super Mario Bros' first slot. (Chances are, you've already done this just by playing the game, since creating game saves is so easy with this system.) Once you've done that, connect your NES Classic Edition to a computer via a micro-USB cable, then boot the NES in "FEL" mode. This is done by holding down the system's reset button while pushing down the power button from a powered-off state. While you're booting, you should also run a "sunxi-FEL" interface on your computer. (An open-source version of compatible "USBBoot" software can be found here.)

Enlarge / In 2002 the Hubble Space Telescope observed V838 Monocerotis, a suspected red nova. (credit: NASA)

Astronomers studying a binary star system about 1,800 light years from the Sun say they are increasingly confident that the two stars will merge into a luminous red nova in about five years. At its brightest, the spectacular explosion produced by this nova could reach an apparent magnitude of about 2.0, akin to a bright star in the night sky, making it visible even from most urban areas.

The team of astronomers, led by Calvin College's Lawrence Molnar, presented their findings late last week at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting in Grapevine, Texas. The researchers have been studying the binary star system, KIC 9832227, since the year 2013, after they noticed the stars getting closer and closer together.

Based upon earlier observations of another binary star system that merged, V1309 Scorpii, the astronomers made predictions about the timing and distance between the two stars in the KIC 9832227 system as they spiraled in toward one another. Then, in 2015, the astronomers made observations that matched their exponential plot of light curves and orbital velocities. "The merger hypothesis has had predictive power and we currently have no alternative explanation for its timing behavior," the authors state.

Comic by: TTTERocks

Comic by: ThatGuy506

Comic by: Unknown

Oreo cake. Nicholas Cage wants it, and so do you.

Comic by: wildclawcat

Comic by: Unknown

Enlarge / An artist's concept of what MU69 might look like. (credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI))

New Horizons continues to deliver the goods. Having sent back all of the data collected during its Pluto flyby in 2015, the spacecraft is still speeding along at a velocity of 14.32 kilometers per second relative to the Sun. That has allowed it to travel almost halfway between Pluto and its next target, a small Kuiper Belt object called 2014 MU69. By last Sunday, in fact, it had come to within two years of its flyby date—January 1, 2019.

At this point, mission managers are conducting operations on the fly (pun intended). That's because the Hubble Space Telescope only found the object in June, 2014, barely a year before New Horizons' flyby of Pluto. When NASA formally selected MU69 as the spacecraft's next target in late 2015, scientists were in the midst of downloading and analyzing data about the Pluto system.

But now the focus is shifting to the new object, and this has led to a flurry of planning as mission scientists must design, write, and test the spacecraft's command sequences for its second flyby. "For Pluto, that job took most of 2009 to 2013," New Horizon's principal investor, Alan Stern, recently explained. "But because the MU69 flyby is barely two years away, we have to compress all the planning into the next 18 months. Why? Because flyby operations for 2014 MU69 will begin in July 2018."

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

The Intel Core i7-7700K is what happens when a chip company stops trying. The i7-7700K is the first desktop Intel chip in brave new post-"tick-tock" world—which means that instead of major improvements to architecture, process, and instructions per clock (IPC), we get slightly higher clock speeds and a way to decode DRM-laden 4K streaming video. Huzzah.

For the average consumer building or buying a new performance-focused PC, a desktop chip based on 14nm Kaby Lake remains the chip of choice—a total lack of competition at this level makes sure of that.

But for the enthusiast—where the latest and greatest should perform better than what came before—Kaby Lake desktop chips are a disappointment, a stopgap solution that does little more than give OEMs something new to stick on a label in a 2017 product stack.