Month: June 2016

(credit: Chris Blakeley)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has successfully convinced a federal judge to block the disclosure of where the bureau has attached surveillance cams on Seattle utility poles. The decision Monday stopping Seattle City Light from divulging the information was expected, as claims of national security tend to trump the public's right to know.

However, this privacy dispute highlights a powerful and clandestine tool the authorities are employing across the country to snoop on the public—sometimes with warrants, sometimes without. Just last month, for example, this powerful surveillance measure—which sometimes allows the authorities to control the camera's focus point remotely—helped crack a sex trafficking ring in suburban Chicago.

Meanwhile, in stopping the release of the Seattle surveillance cam location information—in a public records act case request brought by activist Phil Mocek—US District Judge Richard Jones agreed (PDF) with the FBI's contention that releasing the data would harm national security.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a ton of new deals today. Of note is this steal of a deal on a redesigned Dell desktop: you can now get the Dell Inspiron 3650 desktop—complete with a Core i7 Skylake processor, 16GB of RAM, and an AMD R9 360 discrete graphics card—for just $579. Dell has revamped this PC with modern design cues from its XPS line, and it's built to take up 45 percent less space than the original. This is one of the best prices on a Skylake-equipped desktop we've seen, so grab it while you can.

Check out the rest of the deals we have, including discounts on new E3 releases and more.

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Enlarge (credit: Gerald England)

Underscoring the flourishing world of for-profit hacking, researchers have uncovered a thriving marketplace that sells access to more than 70,000 previously compromised servers, in some cases for as little as $6 apiece.

As of last month, the xDedic trading platform catalogued 70,624 servers, many belonging to government agencies or corporations from 173 countries, according to a report published Wednesday by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. That number was up from 55,000 servers in March, a sign that the marketplace operators carefully maintain and update the listed inventory.

"From government networks to corporations, from Web servers to databases, xDedic provides a marketplace for buyers to find anything," Kaspersky researchers wrote in a separate blog post. "And the best thing about it—it's cheap! Purchasing access to a server located in a European Union country government network can cost as little as $6." The post continued:

Matthew Keys talks to reporters after he was sentenced to two years in prison. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Reporter Matthew Keys will not be going to federal prison today as he was scheduled to. His attorney, Jay Leiderman, tweeted the news today after he and the other lawyers on Keys’ legal team filed an emergency motion with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last night.

An automatic stay has issued in the @MatthewKeysLive case. He will not be reporting to prison today.

— Jay Leiderman (@JayLeidermanLaw) June 15, 2016

The Tuesday filing automatically triggers a temporary stay, according to the 9th Circuit’s Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. So the California journalist convicted in 2015 of hacking-related crimes will remain out of custody for now.

Keys was convicted at trial under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the notorious anti-hacking federal law that dates back to the 1980s. An effort to reform that law has languished in Congress. The 29-year-old was scheduled to begin serving his two-year sentence beginning Wednesday at 2pm Pacific Time at a federal prison camp in Atwater, California, about 120 miles east of San Francisco.

A conceptual illustration of how POSYDON will work. (credit: BAE Systems)

A technology being developed under a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program could soon bring GPS-like navigation below the waves. The POSYDON program seeks to create a network of acoustic underwater beacons that act like GPS satellites—broadcasting a burst of data encoded into sound waves that underwater craft can use to get a fix on their location.

GPS uses radio signals from satellites carrying time and position data, allowing a receiver to passively pick up that data and calculate its position. But while GPS works well for ships, ground vehicles, and aircraft, the radio signal from GPS satellites doesn't penetrate very far below the ocean's surface. It’s a technical problem that submarines have dealt with since long before GPS was available. It has forced subs to come close to the surface and raise an antenna mast if crews want to figure out where they are.

During the Cold War, the US developed an incredibly accurate—and expensive—technology for helping submarines navigate the seas without surfacing. The solution was based on inertial sensors: gyroscopes measured acceleration and movement relative to the Earth in a fashion similar to the guidance systems used for ballistic missiles. Gyroscopes have since gotten a lot smaller, and the fundamental parts of inertial navigation are now part of most smartphones. But precise inertial systems are still very expensive and not easy to miniaturize. Really accurate inertial navigation has continued to be a problem for undersea drones.

(credit: NASA)

When the LIGO collaboration announced the first, unambiguous detection of the gravitational waves produced by a black hole merger, several of the researchers hinted that there would be further news emerging from the mass of data obtained during the first run of Advanced LIGO. That news has now arrived in the form of GW151226, a merger of two black holes roughly seven and 14 times the mass of our Sun.

Because of their small size, the black holes spent more time producing gravitational waves prior to their collision. In some ways, this gives us more information, but the lower intensity of the waves mean that there are much larger errors attached to most of its properties.

For physicists, GW151226 was a slightly delayed Christmas gift: it arrived at 3:40 in the morning UTC on December 26, 2015. LIGO has automated software systems that scan the data to look for events quickly enough to notify astronomers, who can turn conventional instruments in the direction of the detection. These systems realized there was something interesting going on 70 seconds after the gravitational waves hit Earth. The preliminary estimate was that random noise should produce an event like this only once every 1,000 years, so the astronomers (or, as the paper puts it, "electromagnetic partners") got sent an alert.

Pictures: A future Xbox One controller.

PC gamers may not be able to lord their preferred control scheme over their console brethren for much longer. Microsoft is promising that Xbox One developers will be able to easily integrate mouse and keyboard controls for their console games in a matter of months.

"Truthfully in our dev kit modes now keyboard works, mouse support is a little bit further away," Microsoft's Phil Spencer said in an interview with PCGamesN. "I say it because I know it’s not years away, it’s more like months away, but we don’t have an exact date yet."

Based on the quote, it's hard to say if that means full keyboard-and-mouse Xbox One games are just months away from market or if that's just when developers will be able to start work on adding such support for future games. Either way, it's a clear sign that Microsoft is speeding along in bridging gaming's decades-long PC-vs-console control scheme gap.