Enlarge / Crater water ice on Mars at Vastitas Borealis, seen by the European Space Agency's Mars Express. (credit: ESA)
This week we all had a good laugh at the expense of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who asked NASA scientists during a committee hearing whether it was possible that a civilization existed on Mars thousands of years ago. "Would you rule that out?" he asked. "See, there's some people... Well, anyway."
Rohrabacher is an interesting figure in Washington, whose once-idiosyncratic views seem largely in vogue with those of the new administration. Politicocalled Rohrabacher "Putin's favorite Congressman" in a mini-profile last year. Like Trump, the Congressman has also called climate change a hoax. In a 2014 letter to President Obama, Rohrabacher wrote, "Mr. President, we both know I have referred to the theory of man-made global warming as a 'hoax,' and, yes, I once used the phrase 'dinosaur flatulence' as a soft jab at what I considered to be climate alarmism."
So after Rohrabacher's question—which seemed driven by some arcane conspiracy theory given his use of "some people"—it was curious that one of his few defenders was a well-known climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt. "To be fair, NASA astrobiology is very interested in this (and similar) questions. Not sure why it's out-of-bounds to ask," the NASA climate modeler wrote on Twitter.
OBITUARY—Legendary filmmaker George A Romero, creator of the genre-defining horror Night of the Living Dead, has died at the age of 77.
Romero passed away in his sleep on Sunday after a "brief but aggressive battle" with lung cancer, according to producing partner Peter Grunwald.
Filmed on a meagre budget of $120,000, Romero's Night of the Living Dead is widely hailed as a masterpiece of the horror genre. Its tale of a zombie uprising caused by a contaminant from space gave birth to the undead, flesh-eating "ghoul," which would later be called a "zombie." The film not only spawned a series from Romero—which includes Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005)—but also a swathe of imitators across films and video games.
After arresting Curtis Green, a former Silk Road admin pictured above, DEA agent Carl Force faked Green's death and tried to extort Silk Road boss Dread Pirate Roberts. (credit: Curtis Green via Joshua Davis)
SAN FRANCISCO—Corrupt Silk Road DEA agent Carl Force was sentenced to 78 months in prison today by a judge who said his difficult upbringing didn't warrant any exception to the sentencing guidelines.
"The extent and the scope of Mr. Force's betrayal of public trust is quite simply breathtaking," said US District Judge Richard Seeborg. "It is compounded by the fact that it appears to have been motivated by greed and thrill seeking, including the pursuit of a book and movie deal."
Force investigated the Silk Road drug-trafficking as part of a Baltimore-based task force. Force took on additional personalities that weren't authorized by his bosses. Using one called "Death From Above," he tried unsuccessfully to extort Ross Ulbricht, who earlier this year was convicted of being Silk Road boss Dread Pirate Roberts and sentenced to life in prison. In another online persona, "French Maid," Force convinced Ulbricht to pay him for "law enforcement counter-intel."
For a more detailed analysis of this catastrophic bug, see this update, which went live about 18 hours after Ars published this initial post.
Researchers have discovered an extremely critical defect in the cryptographic software library an estimated two-thirds of Web servers use to identify themselves to end users and prevent the eavesdropping of passwords, banking credentials, and other sensitive data.
The warning about the bug in OpenSSL coincided with the release of version 1.0.1g of the open-source program, which is the default cryptographic library used in the Apache and nginx Web server applications, as well as a wide variety of operating systems and e-mail and instant-messaging clients. The bug, which has resided in production versions of OpenSSL for more than two years, could make it possible for people to recover the private encryption key at the heart of the digital certificates used to authenticate Internet servers and to encrypt data traveling between them and end users. Attacks leave no traces in server logs, so there's no way of knowing if the bug has been actively exploited. Still, the risk is extraordinary, given the ability to disclose keys, passwords, and other credentials that could be used in future compromises.
