Month: January 2016

(credit: John F. Martin for General Motors)

On Thursday, General Motors launched a new “personal mobility brand” called Maven, through which the company will try to infiltrate the many ride-on-demand companies that have sprung forth from Silicon Valley. The initial business plan involves a car-sharing service, also called Maven, which will allow people to rent GM vehicles à la Zipcar or City CarShare.

The announcement came shortly after GM announced a $500 million investment in Lyft, which it told the public would be used for developing autonomous vehicles as well as to solidify a partnership between the two companies (Lyft will now also allow its drivers to rent GM vehicles if they prefer not to use their own). Then, just two days ago, GM unexpectedly purchased Sidecar, an Uber rival that shut down in December amid intense competition.

“GM is at the forefront of redefining the future of personal mobility,” GM President Dan Ammann said in a statement. Amman went on to say that the automaker’s strategic relationship with Lyft and its decades of work developing GM’s OnStar system would allow Maven "to provide the high level of personalized mobility services our customers expect today and in the future.”

The founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination on Wednesday, and he won't comply with a subpoena for documents issued from a Senate panel investigating pharma drug pricing tactics.

The 32-year-old Shkreli was also subpoenaed to appear before a different panel, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to testify about the price of a life-saving drug he increased by more than 5,000 percent.

Shkreli became the poster child for greed last year after he raised the price of Daraprim—used to treat parasitic infections—from $13.50 a pill to $750. A single pill once sold for $1. Now facing criminal charges that he allegedly defrauded investors, Shkreli has said he should have boosted prices for the drug even more.

Apple has squashed a bug in its iOS operating system that made it possible for hackers to impersonate end users who connect to websites that use unencrypted authentication cookies.

The vulnerability was the result of a cookie store iOS shared between the Safari browser and a separate embedded browser used to negotiate "captive portals" that are displayed by many Wi-Fi networks when a user is first joining. Captive portals generally require people to authenticate themselves or agree to terms of service before they can gain access to the network.

According to a blog post published by Israeli security firm Skycure, the shared resource made it possible for hackers to create a booby-trapped captive portal and associate it with a Wi-Fi network. When someone with a vulnerable iPhone or iPad connected, it could steal virtually any HTTP cookie stored on the device. Skycure researchers wrote:

Four states and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) are seeking up to $24 billion in fines from Dish Network after a judge ruled that the company and its contractors made more than 55 million illegal telemarketing calls using recorded messages and phoning people on do-not-call lists. The trial to decide whether Dish was aware that it was breaking the law and whether the company is responsible for calls made by its subcontractors began yesterday.

A spokesperson for Dish, which is based outside of Denver, Colorado, noted in an e-mail to Ars that "Most of the Dish calls complained about took place almost ten years ago and Dish has continued to improve its already compliant procedures.” The spokesperson added that in 2008, the satellite TV and Internet provider hired Possible Now, a company that specializes in marketing and regulatory compliance, to make sure that Dish’s marketing practices were legal. According to Dish, Possible Now gave the company a passing grade on compliance with federal regulatory rules.

However, the DOJ as well as Ohio, Illinois, California, and North Carolina say that Dish disregarded federal laws on call etiquette. US lawyers are asking for $900 million in civil penalties, and the four states are asking for $23.5 billion in fines, according to the Denver Post. "Laws against phoning people on do-not-call lists and using recorded messages allow penalties of up to $16,000 per violation,” the Post added.

The YAL-1 Airborne Laser platform showed lasers could blow up missiles during boost phase. But it was way too big, too expensive, and had to get too close to launch sites. Drones could solve all three problems, the Missile Defense Agency's chief believes.

The Missile Defense Agency is giving a second look at the idea of airborne lasers as a defense against ballistic missiles. But this time, instead of using giant chemical lasers carried by enormous crewed aircraft, the MDA is hoping that solid-state lasers will soon be up to the job—and that they will be able to be carried by drones.

Over a decade ago, the US Air Force mounted a megawatt laser on a 747 as part of an effort to develop a flying weapon to shoot down ballistic missiles as they launch. The Airborne Laser Laboratory (ABL) had several successful tests, but then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates cancelled the program in 2011 because of both its expense and impracticality.

"The reality is that you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful than the chemical laser in the plane right now to be able to get any distance from the launch site to fire," Gates said in a House Appropriations committee hearing in 2009. To shoot down an Iranian ballistic missile, he argued, "the ABL would have to orbit inside the borders of Iran in order to be able to try and use its laser to shoot down that missile in the boost phase. And if you were to operationalize, this you would be looking at 10 to 20 747s, at a billion and a half dollars apiece, and $100 million a year to operate. And there's nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept."