Kingofthesofas

They're not quite the Mars rover, but these Earth-based robots provide a service of a different sort: delivery. London-based Starship Technologies, already piloting robot delivery services in the District of Columbia and Redwood City, California, and elsewhere across the globe, has now won that right in Virginia. Come this summer, the Old Dominion state will be the nation's first to codify the rights of the so-called "electric personal delivery device." Idaho, Florida, and other states are also mulling legislation similar to the robot package Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliff just signed.

These wheeled robots—or call them land-based drones if you want—have a clear leg up on aerial-drone delivery services envisioned by Google, Amazon, and others. Air delivery brings with it a more scrutinized regulatory process and heightened safety standards. Research firm Gartner said in a report last month that drone delivery "will not be a major factor for several years."

But the sidewalk-based drone delivery market, however, appears to be shifting into gear, or at least into first gear. Take a look at Virginia's definitions and rules for personal delivery robots, which apply to all companies, not just Starship Technologies:

Enlarge (credit: Abraxas3d)

Researchers at Cisco's Talos threat research group are publishing research today on a targeted attack delivered by a malicious Microsoft Word document that goes to great lengths to conceal its operations. Based entirely on Windows PowerShell scripts, the remote access tool communicates with the attacker behind it through a service that is nearly never blocked: the Domain Name Service.

The malware was first discovered by a security researcher (@simpo13) who alerted Talos because of one peculiar feature of the code that he discovered: it called out Cisco's SourceFire security appliances in particular with the encoded text, "SourceFireSux."

Welp, someone doesn't like SourceFire pic.twitter.com/NzuGXZ0WgC

— simpo (@Simpo13) February 24, 2017

Delivered as an e-mail attachment, the malicious Word document was crafted "to appear as if it were associated with a secure e-mail service that is secured by McAfee," wrote Talos researchers Edmund Brumaghin and Colin Grady in a blog post to be published later today.

(credit: Mike Mozart)

AT&T overcharged two Florida school districts for phone service and should have to pay about $170,000 to the US government to settle the allegations, the Federal Communications Commission said yesterday. AT&T disputes the charges and will contest the decision.

The FCC issued a Notice of Apparent Liability (NAL) to AT&T, an initial step toward enforcing the proposed punishment. The alleged overcharges relate to the FCC's E-Rate program, which funds telecommunications for schools and libraries and is paid for by Americans through surcharges on phone bills. The FCC said AT&T should have to repay $63,760 it improperly received from the FCC in subsidies for phone service provided to Orange and Dixie Counties and pay an additional fine of $106,425. AT&T prices charged to the districts were almost 400 percent higher than they should have been, according to the FCC.

AT&T violated the FCC's "lowest corresponding price rule" designed to ensure that schools and libraries "get the best rates available by prohibiting E-Rate service providers from charging them more than the lowest price paid by other similarly situated customers for similar telecommunications services," the FCC said. Instead of charging the lowest available price, "AT&T charged the school districts prices for telephone service that were magnitudes higher than many other customers in Florida," the FCC said. Between 2012 and 2015, the school districts paid "some of the highest prices in the state... for basic telephone services."

The Donald. (credit: Gage Skidmore)

A hack on the Democratic National Committee has given attackers access to a massive trove of data, including all opposition research into presidential candidate Donald Trump and almost a year's worth of private e-mail and chat messages, according to a published report.

In an article published Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that researchers with CrowdStrike, the security firm DNC officials hired to investigate and contain the breach, determined the intrusions were carried out by two separate hacker groups that both worked for the Russian government. One, dubbed Cozy Bear, gained access last summer and has been monitoring committee members' e-mail and chat communications. The other is known as Fancy Bear and is believed to have broken into the network in late April. It was the latter intrusion that obtained the entire database of Trump opposition and later tipped off IT team members the network may have been breached.

The DNC intrusion is just one of several targeting US political organizations, the WaPo said, with the networks of Trump, rival presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and some republican political action committees also being targeted by Russian spies. Details about those campaigns weren't available. The hackers who penetrated the DNC network were expelled last weekend. No financial and donor information appears to have been taken, leaving analysts to suspect the attack was a case of traditional espionage and not the work of criminal hackers. According to Wednesday's report:

Publicity shot from Craig Wright's now-deleted website. (credit: Craig Wright)

Craig Wright, the Australian investor who claimed just three days ago to be the inventor of Bitcoin, said he's backing away from the world stage.

Wright's claims were debunked by experts within hours, who noted that his Satoshi signature was actually a 2009 signature he copied from the blockchain.

Just yesterday, Wright said he knew his claims would need "extraordinary proof," and he said such proof was on the way. A day later, he has decided not to prove his claims after all. Wright says that he "broke" as he was about to publish proof of access to the earliest keys. "I do not have the courage," he wrote in a note on his website. "I cannot."

That's a lot of hard disks. (credit: Backblaze)

For the last few years, we've looked at the hard disk reliability numbers from cloud backup and storage company Backblaze, but we've not looked at the systems it builds to hold its tens of thousands of hard disks. In common with some other cloud companies, Backblaze publishes the specs and designs of its Storage Pods, 4U systems packed with hard disks, and today it announced its sixth generation design, which bumps up the number of disks (from 45 to 60) while driving costs down even further.

The first design, in 2009, packed 45 1.5TB disks into a 4U rackable box for a cost of about 12¢ per gigabyte. In the different iterations that have followed, Backblaze has used a number of different internal designs—sometimes using port multipliers to get all the SATA ports necessary, other times using PCIe cards packed with SATA controllers—but it has stuck with the same 45 disk-per-box formula.

The new system marks the first break from that setup. It uses the same Ivy Bridge Xeon processor and 32GB RAM of the version 5, adding extra controllers and port multipliers to handle another 15 disks for 60 in total. The result is a little long—it overhangs the back of the rack by about four inches—but it's packed full of storage.