Month: December 2015

Infographic of winning names for nearly four dozen stars and exoplants. (credit: IAU)

Everyone who lived through the demotion of Pluto as a planet knows that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is the final arbiter when it comes to designating all things astronomical, including official names for celestial bodies. And now the IAU has turned its international eyes on exoplanets for the first time, with public input, to name 14 stars and 31 exoplanets orbiting them.

Members of the public from the United States ended up suggesting the winning name for one star (42 Draconis) and two planets (42 Draconis b, Fomalhaut b). The names chosen were Fafnir for the star, and Orbitar and Dagon for the planets. Fafnir is named for a Norse mythological dwarf who turned into a dragon. Orbitar is a "contrived word paying homage to the space launch and orbital operations of NASA." Dagon was a Semitic diety, half-man, half-fish.

Color us unimpressed with those names.

(credit: Jaguar Land Rover)

Jaguar has been on quite the roll recently. The company made its name in the 1950s and 1960s with cars like the C-Type (the first use of disc brakes in a car) and the E-Type. But by the mid-1980s, things weren't looking so good. Owned for a time by British Leyland, it suffered from industrial malaise and chronic underinvestment. Things looked better under Ford's ownership for a while, but a foray into Formula 1 proved disastrous, and a misguided reliance on focus groups led to underwhelmingly retro-styled cars like X-Type (built on a Ford platform) and XJ (X350, which under that boring skin was actually quite clever).

Ford sold Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors in 2008. And the Indian parent company has done what many Jaguar fans—your author included—had been crying out for: invested heavily in the brand. Lightweight aluminum chassis have been a focus, but so too has technology. The C-X75 supercar may never have made it to the showroom (although you can see it in Spectre), but the boffins at the company's Gaydon HQ have been working on some rather exciting stuff like remote-control via smartphones and full-windscreen heads-up displays. Today, the company announced that it will return to the racetrack with a full factory effort, competing in Formula E next season (Autumn 2016).

Jaguar will partner with Williams Advanced Engineering (a sister company to the Williams F1 team); the companies collaborated on the C-X75, and Williams currently provides the batteries used by every Formula E car. In a press release, Jaguar Land Rover's engineering director Nick Rogers said, "Electric vehicles will absolutely play a role in Jaguar Land Rover's future product portfolio, and Formula E will give us a unique opportunity to further our development of electrification technologies. The Championship will enable us to engineer and test our advanced technologies under extreme performance conditions."

An artist's impression of the Centaur upper stage detaching from the LCROSS spacecraft. (credit: NASA)

It was time for the spent rocket to die. So the 2,000kg Centaur upper stage, about the size of a yellow school bus, detached from its spacecraft and began falling toward the Moon six years ago. Soon lunar gravity took hold, tugging the Centaur ever faster toward the Moon’s inky black South Pole. An hour after separation, the rocket slammed into terra incognita at 9,000kph (or roughly 5,600mph).

Named for a mythical creature with the upper body of a human and lower body of a horse, the empty Centaur burrowed several meters into a crater that had not seen the Sun’s light for billions of years. The impact kicked a plume of Moon dust as high as 20 km into space. The detached spacecraft followed just minutes later, sampling the plume. “We knew within hours that we had measured something really interesting,” recalled Anthony Colaprete, the mission’s principal investigator.

Interesting indeed. After more than a decade of speculation and intriguing findings, the Centaur had blasted up grains of pure ice. It provided dazzling confirmation that a world once thought entirely barren and desiccated harbors the most valuable commodity for human exploration—water. Yet even as Colaprete and other scientists announced their findings in the fall of 2009, NASA’s lunar program was dying.

(credit: Yuri Samoilov/Flickr)

As politicians and counter-terrorism officials search for lessons from the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, senior officials have called for limits on technology that sends encrypted messages.

It's a debate that has repeatedly recurred for more than a decade.In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration directed technology companies to store copies of their encryption keys with the government. That would have given the government a "backdoor" to allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies easy access to encrypted communications. That idea was dropped after sharp criticism from technologists and civil liberties advocates.

More recently, intelligence officials in Europe and the United States have asserted that encryption hampers their ability to detect plots and trace perpetrators. But many have questioned whether it would be practical or wise to allow governments widespread power to read encrypted messages.

Security researcher Chris Vickery has found and reported a massive security issue on the Web servers of MacKeeper, a piece of software often regarded as scareware. According to Krebs on Security, the databases of Kromtech, the company behind MacKeeper, were open to external connections and required no authentication whatsoever. The names, passwords, and other information of around 13 million users may have been exposed.

Kromtech has admitted the breach and put a statement on its website saying that "analysis of our data storage system shows only one individual gained access performed by the security researcher himself." It also states that customers' credit card details have never been at risk as they're processed by a third-party merchant.

"The only customer information we retain are name, products ordered, license information, public ip address and their user credentials such as product specific usernames, password hashes for the customer's web admin account where they can manage subscriptions, support, and product licenses," Kromtech explained.

AMD's position in the graphics market continues to be a tricky one. Although the company has important design wins in the console space—both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are built around AMD CPUs with integrated AMD GPUs—its position in the PC space is a little more precarious. Nvidia currently has the outright performance lead, and perhaps more problematically, many games are to a greater or lesser extent optimized for Nvidia GPUs. One of the chief culprits here is Nvidia's GameWorks software, a proprietary library of useful tools for game development—things like realistic hair and shadows, and physics processing for destructible environments—that is optimized for Nvidia's cards. When GameWorks games are played on AMD systems, they can often do so with reduced performance or graphical quality.

To combat this, AMD is today announcing GPUOpen, a comparable set of tools to GameWorks. As the name would suggest, however, there's a key difference between GPUOpen and GameWorks: GPUOpen will, when it is published in January, be open source. AMD will use the permissive MIT license, allowing GPUOpen code to be used without any practical restriction in both open and closed source applications, and will publish all code on GitHub.

Making the libraries open source should make AMD's library much more appealing than it currently is. AMD already has offerings in this space; in particular, its TressFX library handles fur and hair generation in a manner comparable to Nvidia's HairWorks. Developers can, if they take the time and effort, even include both; the PC release of Grand Theft Auto V has both TressFX and HairWorks support. But this is extra work, and many developers won't bother. This tends to leave one or other GPU vendor at a disadvantage.

As you may have heard, this week a new Star Wars film is coming out. Chances are, it may even be good. Or, if you're as excited about The Force Awakens as I am, you know it will be good. The trouble is, between now and the time that most people see the film this Thursday, the Internet will be awash with chatter from the film's recent premiere in Los Angeles, and from early press screenings. There's a chance, however unlikely, that said chatter will say the film is bad.

Obviously, those people will be wrong. Fortunately, the Internet has come up with a way of blocking naysayers and negative nancys until the rest of us can watch the film and give it the positive reception it so clearly deserves. A new Chrome extension, Force Block: the Star Wars spoiler blocker, blocks pages containing what it thinks might be spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, replacing them with various Star Wars quotes. There's even a whitelist should any regular Star Wars content get blocked.

Having just tried out the extension on a Guardian article about the premiere, I can confirm it works as described. You can of course choose to ignore the spoiler warning and continue to view the content, but remember that for most part, these people will all wrong and in reality Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the best Star Wars since Star Wars. Definitely.