He was surprised to discover a fully unprotected server on Boeing's network, seemingly full of code designed to run on the company's giant 737 and 787 passenger jets, left publicly accessible and open to anyone who found it.

He suggests that for a hacker, exploiting those bugs could represent one step in a multistage attack that starts in the plane’s in-flight entertainment system and extends to highly protected, safety-critical systems like flight controls and sensors.

But he and other avionics cybersecurity researchers who have reviewed his findings argue that while a full-on cyberattack on a plane's most sensitive systems remains far from a material threat, the flaws uncovered in the 787's code nonetheless represent a troubling lack of attention to cybersecurity from Boeing.

An attacker could potentially pivot, Santamarta says, from the in-flight entertainment system to the CIS/MS to send commands to far more sensitive components that control the plane's safety-critical systems, including its engine, brakes, and sensors.

But he says his research nonetheless represents a significant step toward showing the possibility of an actual plane-hacking technique.

"IOActive’s scenarios cannot affect any critical or essential airplane system and do not describe a way for remote attackers to access important 787 systems like the avionics system," the company's statement reads.

That's Sean Murray himself, the man whose name kept getting attached to stories about disappointed fans—and who thus went into media-blackout mode for some time.

Since launch, NMS has benefited from a series of patches, and I looked forward to hearing about even more new content coming to the game, like a VR update (which I'd briefly tested at a Valve Index reveal event in April) and an emphasis on online play.

Murray had just hopped onto Twitter and announced that NMS' upcoming "Beyond" patch encompassed "three pillars," and then posted the fuzzy-math equation of "30-40%" of the patch being about VR, and 30-40% being about online play.

With latest update, No Man’s Sky is an amazing photography tool

Some smaller-scale quality-of-life patches followed, each propelling the game back into Steam's top-25 "concurrent player" rankings.

Then the team began toying with ideas for three separate patches to round out the next few months of development: a VR mode, an expansion of the game's 2018 multiplayer options, and a "2.0"-worthy slate of under-the-hood fixes.

Research papers trigger it, too, as scientists are so inundated with the volume of new results that just barely keeping up is a struggle.

According to University of Oxford psychiatrist Michael Sharpe, "Everyone is deluged with information."

Research papers give a brief summary of their contents in an information-rich "abstract" of the article—it's often the only text that's publicly available from a paywalled journal.

Time-pressed researchers may rely on the abstract rather than investing in reading the lengthy paper, but those abstracts are not always reliable.

A paper published this week in the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine found that half of the 116 psychiatry and psychology articles they analyzed included some sort of spin that made the results look better than they were.

"These findings raise a major concern," Sharpe told the Science Media Centre, "especially as readers may draw conclusions on the basis of the abstract alone, without critically appraising the full paper."

A security consultant who took to Twitter to call out inappropriate comments made by a Southwest Airline flight attendant received a surprising response when the airline’s official Twitter account included her flight number in its reply while the flight had yet to take off.

The consultant, peeved that the airline tracked down her real-world identity and then broadcast her location, sent a follow-up saying the number amounted to personally identifiable information that the airline was obligated to keep private.

The conversation started out with a tweets like this one, reporting that an attendant on the flight she was boarding was making jokes some passengers found to be offensive:

A Southwest representative using the name Emilia responded with this:

In a follow-up that wasn’t deleted until after Ars asked Southwest for comment, Emilia went on to include the flight number of the plane the consultant was boarding.

Singh told Ars that she believes Emilia used that previous interaction to tie Singh’s Twitter account to her real-world identity.

Some of the biggest corporations in the United States are scaling back their display of violent games in the wake of recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.

As reported by Vice, employees at Walmart stores are reporting receipt of a notice to "remove signing and displays referencing violence."

These directions include turning off "any video game display consoles that show a demo of violent games" and "remov[ing] any [signs] referencing combat or third-person shooter video games."

Employees are also instructed to "cancel any events promoting combat style or third-person shooter games that may be scheduled in Electronics."

The memo also says "movies displaying violence" and "hunting season videos" should not be displayed in stores for the time being.

At ESPN, the taped broadcast of an Apex Legends tournament planned for this weekend has been postponed.

The Pixel 4 rumor season never stops, even if Samsung is having a major smartphone launch.

9to5Google, which had its earlier Pixel 4 rumors confirmed by Google before the phone has even launched, has a fresh set of Pixel 4 rumors for us.

First up: the Pixel 4 will supposedly have a 90Hz "smooth display" feature, just like the OnePlus 7 Pro.

This means the entire interface should refresh at 90 frames per second instead of the usual 60, which—on the OnePlus 7 Pro at least—proved to be an absolute revelation for UI smoothness and making the phone feel fast and responsive.

Until 90Hz displays came along, Google was the leader in Android UI "smoothness," so it'll be interesting to see what the company can do with a faster display.

Quicker display refresh rates are rapidly becoming the next big upgrade for Android phones—as evidenced by the aforementioned 90Hz OnePlus phone and even a 120Hz OLED screen from Asus with the ROG Phone 2.

SEATTLE—In the decades since 1990's Nintendo World Championship tournament, its unique prize for participants—a competition-class cartridge with timed versions of classic games Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, and Tetris—has become a sought-after collector's item.

It represents a golden era when Nintendo could host a tournament that captivated a nation (and followed the two-hour commercial of a film that was The Wizard).

Hence, the discovery of any Nintendo World Championship cartridge is a newsworthy event for a certain class of retro-gaming enthusiast.

"You wouldn't believe this," Pink Gorilla co-owner Cody Spencer told Ars Technica in his shop's storage room on Wednesday, after a whirlwind 24 hours concluded with the game's sale to a collector.

“Bored out of my mind”... but not for long

The seller, a man in his mid-30s, wasn't recognized as a regular customer when he walked into the chain's south-Seattle location on Tuesday with "a Safeway bag full of the most boring NES games you can imagine."