Month: May 2016

We're not sure that Nintendo NX will go with this EXACT advertising campaign, but, hey, why not? This week's chip-based game rumors would have to fall into place, at any rate. (credit: FunnyShirts.org)

When Nintendo finally stopped producing cartridges for home consoles in 2001, the games industry breathed a sigh of relief. Finally! Nintendo was waking up to a modern era, one in which plummeting media prices and rising memory capacities made old cartridges look obsolete.

Now, Nintendo is in a peculiar position—one in which it may not only return to chip-based media for its upcoming "NX" home system's software, but also one in which doing so may look like a good move.

The savvy reporters at British media-reporting site Screen Critics were first to notice a major financial report from Macronix, a Japanese company that has provided memory-related chips to consoles as far back as the N64. Macronix had already commented on serving as a chip supplier of some sort for Nintendo NX in January of this year, but in speaking about its current fiscal year (which, for Japanese companies, ends in March 2017), the company spoke about higher expectations for its "NOR Flash" business linked to the launch of the new Nintendo hardware.

(credit: Flickr/ecig click)

The US Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday that it has extended its authority and will now regulate electronic cigarettes, hookah tobacco, cigars, and other tobacco products under the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act.

The regulatory move, first proposed in 2014, is largely aimed at protecting kids from tobacco and nicotine products. The result is that e-cigs and the other products will now be subject to the same federal regulations as regular cigarettes. These regulations include some relatively uncontroversial rules such as a ban on selling e-cigs to minors (which some states have already done), requiring a photo ID to buy e-cigs, not selling e-cigs out of vending machines, and a ban on free e-cig samples.

But the regulations also require that e-cigarette manufactures register with the agency and put any new devices through a pre-market regulatory approval process. By “new,” the FDA means any novel devices put on the market after February 15, 2007. Devices released before then will be grandfathered into the regulations. However, in the relatively young e-cig market, the vast majority of current products were introduced after 2007 and will be subject to the approval process.

Alexandra Elbakyan won't let her Sci-Hub pirate site of academic journals die— despite publisher Elsevier's lawsuit. (credit: Courtesy of Alexandra Elbakyan)

We reported a few weeks ago on a popular pirate site for science journals whose oversees admin was being sued by one of the world's leading academic publishers, Elsevier. Elsevier is the same New York publisher that the late Aaron Swartz had noted in his "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" that told academics and researchers they had a "duty" to free the knowledge they were privileged to read behind Elsevier's paywall.

Because of the lawsuit, which Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has refused to participate in, she's been engaged in a game of domain-name Whac-A-Mole in response to Elsevier winning court orders demanding the shuttering of the popular site's domain name. The site allows anybody, not just academics, to access tens of millions of scholastic research articles for free.

When Ars interviewed Elbakyan and learned that she had a similar philosophy to Swartz, she had already altered the site's domain from sci-hub.org to sci-hub.io and changed others because of a court order blocking the .org domain. Now that domain, registered with Chinese registrar Now.cn, has also been killed. That has forced the site to move to sci-hub.bz and sci-hub.cc. This cat-and-mouse domain game is reminiscent of the decade-long game the admins of The Pirate Bay have been playing. When one domain gets lost to a court order, the site springs up on another.

Artist's impression of a ULX, which could be either a black hole or a neutron star in this image. Coming "towards us" is the outflow of gas, moving at relativistic speed. (credit: ESA–C. Carreau)

Researchers are gaining ground in the struggle to understand the mysterious objects known as UltraLuminous X-ray sources (ULXs). These objects, named for their extreme brightness at X-ray wavelengths, are thought to be dense, compact objects like black holes or neutron stars. Their luminosity (which extends to other wavelengths) arises as they actively draw matter from an orbiting companion.

“We think these ‘ultra-luminous X-ray sources’ are somewhat special binary systems, sucking up gas at a much higher rate than an ordinary X-ray binary,” said Ciro Pinto from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK, an author of a recent study. “Some host highly magnetised neutron stars, while others might conceal the long-sought-after intermediate-mass black holes, which have masses around 1000 times the mass of the Sun. But in the majority of cases, the reason for their extreme behaviour is still unclear.”

It’s been difficult to study them in detail because we've lacked the sensitivity needed to identify the emission lines and/or absorption lines created by specific elements. When light passes through material such as gas, certain wavelengths are absorbed by elements in the gas, leaving a blank line in the light source’s spectrum. Emission lines are light emitted by the element itself.

AUSTIN, Texas—Following a string of rumours, teasers, and enterprise exposé, chip-maker Nvidia will unveil consumer graphics cards based on its new Pascal architecture during a live event in Austin on Friday, May 6.

While Nvidia remains tight-lipped about what exactly will be shown—most rumours point towards two graphics cards, the GTX 1080 and 1070—those with quiet weekend plans can tune into the event livestream above at 8pm CDT (6pm PDT, 9pm EDT, or 2am BST on Saturday morning).

For the uninitiated, Pascal is Nvidia's latest and greatest graphics architecture, which promises to be both faster and more power efficient than the previous-generation Maxwell architecture. Exact details on the consumer chips won't appear until Friday, but the P100 enterprise card Nvidia unveiled in April does shed some light on what consumer Pascal might look like.

Closed gas station. Clifton, Texas. (credit: Getty Images | Donovan Reece)

For as many plaudits as Tesla has received for its cars, plenty of its success must lie with that network of Superchargers. The far-sighted idea to build out the recharging infrastructure necessary to make road trips possible in an electric vehicle has surely done much to win friends, particularly among those vocal drivers for whom the inability of a car to drive across several of the smaller states in a day is an instant disqualification.

Outside of Tesla's walled garden, things can be a lot more confusing. There are different kinds of plugs. Some charging stations take all day to top up your battery; others can do it in a handful of hours. Maybe you get to the right charger, but an inconsiderate jerk in a gasoline-powered car is parked in the spot. These are all annoyances in the lives of EV early adopters and things that we'll need to change before those dreams of an all-EV passenger fleet are realized.

Chargepoint is one of the companies that wants to get us there, and on Wednesday it raised another $50 million to help it do so. As most EV drivers will know, Chargepoint's network is pretty extensive, with more than 28,000 charging points here in the US. Unlike other charging networks like NRG EVgo, it doesn't actually own the hardware; think of it more like Uber or AirBnB.

A visualization of Frontier outage reports on DownDetector. (credit: DownDetector)

A California legislative committee will hold hearings on problems former Verizon customers are having more than a month after their service was switched to Frontier Communications.

Frontier purchased Verizon's FiOS and DSL businesses in California, Florida, and Texas, taking over the fiber and copper networks on April 1. Outages and various other service problems hit customers almost immediately, and Frontier still hasn't solved all the problems.

Mike Gatto, a Democratic legislator from Los Angeles who is chairman of the California State Assembly's Utilities & Commerce Committee, issued a statement yesterday about the "ongoing Frontier Communications telephone and Internet outages after the Verizon FiOS changeover."

(credit: Qualcomm)

For the past five years, a vulnerability in many Android phones has left users' text messages, call histories, and possibly other sensitive data open to snooping, security researchers said Thursday.

The flaw, which is most severe in Android versions 4.3 and earlier, allows low-privileged apps to access sensitive data that's supposed to be off-limits, according to a blog post published by security firm FireEye. But instead, the data is available by invoking permissions that are already requested by millions of apps available in Google Play. Company researchers said the vulnerability can also be exploited by adversaries who gain physical access to an unlocked handset. Indexed as CVE-2016-2060, the bug was first introduced when mobile chipmaker Qualcomm released a set of programming interfaces for a system service known as the "network_manager" and later the "netd" daemon.

"CVE-2016-2060 has been present on devices since at least 2011 and likely affects hundreds of Android models around the world," FireEye researchers wrote. "This vulnerability allows a seemingly benign application to access sensitive user data including SMS and call history and the ability to perform potentially sensitive actions such as changing system settings or disabling the lock screen. Devices running Android 4.3 (“Jelly Bean MR2”) or older are the most affected by the vulnerability, and are likely to remain unpatched. Newer devices utilizing SEAndroid are still affected, but to a lesser extent."