Jihadi John’s trainer killed in drone attack
Hackers force Jeep to crash into ditch
The present El Nino event, on the cusp of attaining “strong” intensity, has a chance to become the most powerful on record.
The event — defined by the expanding, deepening pool of warmer-than-normal ocean water in the tropical Pacific — has grown stronger since the northern spring.
The presence of a strong El Nino almost ensures 2015 will become the warmest on record and will have ripple effects on weather patterns all over the world.
In the Northern Hemisphere a strong El Nino would likely lead to enhanced rainfall in California, a quieter than normal Atlantic hurricane season, a warmer than normal winter over large parts of the US, and a very active hurricane and typhoon season in the Pacific.
Some of these effects have already manifested and will become particularly apparent in the second half of the year. Hackers took control of a car and crashed it into a ditch by remotely breaking into its dashboard computer from 16km away.
In the first such breach of its kind, security experts cut out the engine and applied the brakes on the Jeep Cherokee, sending it into a spin — all while sitting on their sofa.
The US hackers said they used just a laptop and mobile phone to access the Jeep’s on-board systems via a wireless internet connection.
They claim that more than 470,000 cars made by Fiat Chrysler could be at risk of being attacked by similar means.
The breach was revealed by security researchers Charlie Miller, an exstaffer at the NSA, and Chris Valasek.
They worked with Andy Greenberg, a writer with tech website Wired, who drove the Jeep Cherokee on public roads in St Louis, Missouri.
Greenberg described how the air vents started blasting out cold air and the radio came on full blast when the hack began.
The windscreen wipers turned on
Frequent and persistent bursts of wind from the west, counter to the prevailing easterly direction, have helped this year’s El Nino sustain itself and grow. Warm water from the western Pacific has sloshed eastward, piling up in the central and eastern basin.
The sprawling area of warm waters has proven a boon for Pacific tropical cyclone activity, causing near-record levels through the mid-northern summer. Through a positive feedback mechanism, these cyclones have likely helped reinforce the westerly push of warm waters, Slate’s Eric Holthaus reported.
The 2015 El Nino event is now neck-and-neck with the recordsetting event of 1997-1998 in terms of its mid-summer intensity.
That 1997-1998 event was notorious for its winter flash floods and mudslides in California.
Michael Ventrice, a Weather Company meteorologist, said the atmospheric footprint of this year’s with wiper fluid, blurring the glass, and a picture of the two hackers appeared on the car’s digital display to signify they had gained access.
Greenberg said the hackers then slowed the car to a halt just as he was getting on the highway, causing a tailback behind him — though it got a lot worse after that. He wrote: “The most disturbing manoeuvre came when they cut the Jeep’s brakes, leaving me frantically pumping the pedal as the 2-tonne SUV slid uncontrollably into a ditch.
“The researchers say they’re working on perfecting their steering control — for now they can only hijack the wheel when the Jeep is in reverse.
“Their hack enables surveillance too: They can track a targeted Jeep’s GPS co-ordinates, measure its speed, and even drop pins on a map to trace its route.”
The hack was possible thanks to Uconnect, the software that has been built into the dashboard computers of hundreds of thousands of cars made by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles since late 2013.
The feature controls the entertainment system, deals with navigation event — given the time of year — is statistically rare, with a less than one in 1000 chance of occurring.
Although the El Nino is still officially a “moderate” strength event, Tony Barnston, one of the world’s leading El Nino experts, explained it could well become a “strong” event by the month’s end.
“The strength of the departure from normal sea surface temperatures was enough to call it a strong event for just last week,” Barnston, of Columbia’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), said. “But to call it an officially strong event, we need for it to stay at that level or higher for a full month. And the average for July could make it.”
The large group of El Nino models, both dynamic (based on physical processes) and statistical (based on historical data), mostly forecast at least a strong event — likely to peak in the northern autumn. Collectively, the IRI described the model simulations as “off-the-charts”. “[El Nino] is growing and the prediction models say it’s going to get stronger,” Barnston said. “And that’s our prediction, that it will become a strong event, most likely.”
A few models, notably the European model and the National Weather Service CFS model, point to the possibility of a near-record event in which a very strong or “super” El Nino develops.
The only two super (or very strong) El Ninos occurred in 1982-83 and 1997-98.
However, NOAA climate analyst Michelle L’Heureux expressed some scepticism to Mashable’s Andrew Freedman.
“L’Heureux noted that none of the major forecasting centres responsible for monitoring El Nino are predicting a record event at this time,” Freedman reported. NOAA says the “forecaster consensus” is for a strong event but doesn’t specify how strong.
— Washington Post-Bloomberg and allows phone calls. It also allows owners to start the car remotely, flash the headlights using an app, and unlock doors.
But according to Miller and Valasek, the on-board internet connection is a “super nice vulnerability” for hackers. All they have to do is work out the car’s IP address and know how to break into its systems and they can take control.
Independent security expert Graham Cluley said: “Note that the researchers believe that, although they’ve only tested it out on Jeeps, the attacks could be tweaked to work on any Chrysler car with a vulnerable Uconnect head unit.”
The incident is the latest hacking episode which shows just how vulnerable we are to modern technology.
A US hacker also recently took control of a passenger jet he was on, in the first known such incident of its kind, according to the FBI. Chris Roberts is said to have plugged into the plane’s computer systems through the electronics box under his seat — and briefly moved the aircraft sideways. The head of the radical al-Qaeda offshoot who was credited with converting and radicalising the British extremist known as “Jihadi John” has been killed in a United States airstrike, the Pentagon announced.
Mohsin al-Fadhli, the leader of the Khorasan Group and a long-time high-value US terror target with a US$7 million bounty on his head, was killed on July 8 when a vehicle he was travelling in near Sarmada in northwestern Syria was struck by US missiles.
As a close former confidant of Osama bin Laden, al-Fadhli was “among the few trusted al-Qaeda leaders that received advanced notification of the September 11, 2001, attacks”, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
The Khorasan Group was formed out of a cadre of al-Qaeda operatives who were sent from Pakistan to Syria to plot attacks on the West. Officials say the Khorasan Group is part of the alNusra front, Syria's al-Qaeda affiliate.
It emerged earlier this year that al-Fadhli had been personally instrumental in turning Mohammed Emwazi — or “Jihadi John” — into the bloodthirsty executioner who appeared in several gruesome Isis (Islamic State) videos beheading Western hostages.
Reports said that Emwazi met alFadhli, a native of Kuwait, in 2007 and that the leader had a profound influence on him, convincing him to renounce his Shia faith and convert to the branch of Sunni Islam followed by Isis.
Meanwhile, three Spanish journalists have gone missing in Syria where they were reporting from the northwestern Aleppo region, the Spanish press federation said.