The story was triggered because an anonymous source told the Washington Post miscreants had infiltrated the grid, when in fact – as the story was later amended to read – one Burlington Electric Department laptop was infected with Russian-attributed malware.Burlington Electric flat-out denied that its control systems were compromised. Rather, the company says in a home page statement, a single laptop was infected with malware “used in Grizzly Steppe”, and that machine was not connected to its grid systems.The infection was discovered in a scan after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) distributed the signatures it associates with Grizzly Steppe, the operation that caused the late-December sensation in the outgoing Obama administration and led to 35 Russian spies getting their marching orders from the USA.Burlington Electric Department says someone in the company gave the Washington Post the incorrect information which led to the sensational but withdrawn claim that Russians hacked the Vermont grid.+Comment: Schadenfreude is all too easy at times like this, but the Washington Post's dilemma is faced by any journalist offered an infosec scoop.Last week, when the Obama administration expelled the Russian spies over interfering with the 2016 election process, it provided much more supporting documentation than is usually the case.
Even so, there were plenty of infosec people and national security experts critical that more information should have been provided. Take this, for example, from respected King's College London professor of war studies Thomas Rid:Updated Geeks at Consumer Reports have, for the first time, declined to award a recommended status to an Apple laptop – after the latest MacBook Pro proved unreliable during testing.The testers tried out the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBooks with the Touch Bar, and the 13-inch without Ive's new big idea in laptop design. The results were frankly bizarre.In a series of three consecutive tests, the 13-inch model with the Touch Bar ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third, said Jerry Beilinson, Consumer Reports electronics editor..The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next. And the numbers for the 15-inch laptop ranged from 18.5 down to 8 hours.The testing methodology is to power up each laptop, download a series of 10 web pages sequentially in Safari until the device shuts down, and then repeat. Display brightness is set at 100 nits and the automatic brightness adjuster is turned off.
It's not the best testing methodology in the world, but it's not fatally flawed either and shouldn't account for such a wide variation in results. Beilinson said they had submitted the test logs to Apple but hadn't heard back on a cause.Curiously, when a couple of the same tests were performed using Chrome instead of Safari then battery life improved considerably. Beilinson said the Chrome tests were insufficient to quantify the difference but that it might be something to consider for owners looking to escape the power cord.The testers used store-bought laptops for the testing, rather than those provided by Cook & Co themselves. There have been a number of reports from Reg readers about dodgy battery times and Apple's response has been to turn off the estimated battery life monitor in the latest build of macOS Sierra.We've asked Apple for comment and a laptop to try our own tests on. Unsurprisingly there has been no response. A spokesperson for Apple has been in touch to say Consumer Reports' benchmarks uncovered a web browser bug that drains the MacBook Pro's battery charge. That programming flaw has now been fixed and released via the Safari beta program. Apple also claims the magazine ran its tests in Safari's developer mode which produces unfair results due to it disabling the web cache.
Consumer Reports counters that it performs the same tests across all laptops to get consistent results and give batteries a thorough workout.We appreciate the opportunity to work with Consumer Reports over the holidays to understand their battery test results. We learned that when testing battery life on Mac notebooks, Consumer Reports uses a hidden Safari setting for developing web sites which turns off the browser cache. This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage. Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab. After we asked Consumer Reports to run the same test using normal user settings, they told us their MacBook Pro systems consistently delivered the expected battery life.We have also fixed the bug uncovered in this test. This is the best pro notebook we’ve ever made, we respect Consumer Reports and we’re glad they decided to revisit their findings on the MacBook Pro.Modern laptops have a variety of sophisticated battery management techniques and settings built into both their hardware and operating system software ... Many of these settings are set by default to extend battery life. That’s generally a good thing. But because these settings are so variable and situation-dependent, we turn several of them off during testing.
We also turn off the local caching of web pages. In our tests, we want the computer to load each web page as if it were new content from the internet, rather than resurrecting the data from its local drive. This allows us to collect consistent results across the testing of many laptops, and it also puts batteries through a tougher workout.Updated A Virgin America flight from San Francisco to Boston was nearly diverted after someone onboard named their phone's Wi-Fi hotspot 'Samsung Galaxy Note 7'.A passenger on Flight 358, Mapboix software developer Lucas Wojciechowski, was scanning the plane for in-flight Wi-Fi when he noticed a hotspot active that appeared to be coming from a Samsung Galaxy Note 7, which have been banned from US flights because of their tendency to catch fire.About an hour into the flight the intercom clicked on and one of the cabin crew asked that if anyone had a Note 7, they should they identify themselves. After 15 minutes and no answer, the cabin crew threatened to turn on the lights – it was 11pm by this stage – and search all passengers until they found the device.
Another 15 minutes and no phone, so now the captain came on the intercom and threatened to divert the flight to an airport in Wyoming if the owner of the banned Sammy handset didn’t confess. He pointed out that as this was a nighttime flight then landing and searching everyone would be a massive pain in the backside for everyone.I don't know if you've ever been diverted at 3am, Wojciechowski recounts the captain saying. Let me tell you, it is terrible. There is nothing open in the terminal. Nothing.Thankfully, this seemed to do the trick and shortly afterwards the captain reassured passengers that the device had been found. It wasn't one of the flammable phones, but instead another model belonging to a moron who thought it would be a good wheeze to rename their mobile hotspot and pretend to be carrying a banned handset.The US Department of Transportation has banned the transport of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 on board all US aircraft, and Virgin America actively informs guests that they should not bring these devices onboard, a Virgin spokesman told The Reg.As such, when our InFlight Teammates see potential evidence of this device on board, they take it seriously. In this case, there was no such device - the safety of the passengers and crew was never in question, and no flights were cancelled or delayed as a result.
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