Month: June 2016

Piccard and Borschberg talk with Ars. Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

NEW YORK—Early Saturday morning, in the midst of a round-the-world flight, Solar Impulse 2 made the short hop from Pennsylvania to New York City. After gliding past the Statue of Liberty, it made its way to John F. Kennedy Airport, where it will remain until the weather permits it to start the next leg of its journey. After spending the morning soaking up the sunlight to charge its batteries, the plane was wheeled into one of Kennedy's massive hangers to give the press a chance to meet both it and the pilots who are taking it around the world.

This is the second of the team's solar-powered craft we've been able to see up close, and it's not a radical departure from the earlier one, which had completed a flight across the US by landing at JFK. Solar Impulse 2 is slightly larger and a bit more robust looking than its sister, but the general outlines are quite similar: a four-engined, glider-shaped craft, with most of its upward-facing surfaces covered in solar panels.

The US broadband industry has lost its lawsuit attempting to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules and the related reclassification of Internet service providers as common carriers.

ISPs' First Amendment claims (among others) were rejected. "Because a broadband provider does not—and is not understood by users to—'speak' when providing neutral access to Internet content as common carriage, the First Amendment poses no bar to the open internet rules," judges wrote said a decision released today by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (full text).

The net neutrality order, passed over a year ago, is FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's signature move during a whirlwind time as head of the commission.

A German university student has demonstrated an effective way to get code of his choosing to run on the computers of software developers, at least some of whom work for US governmental and military organizations.

The eye-opening (if ethically questionable) research was conducted by University of Hamburg student Nikolai Philipp Tschacher as part of his bachelor thesis. Using a variation of a decade-old attack known as typosquatting, he uploaded his code to three popular developer communities and gave them names that were similar to widely used packages already submitted by other users. Over a span of several months, his imposter code was executed more than 45,000 times on more than 17,000 separate domains, and more than half the time his code was given all-powerful administrative rights. Two of the affected domains ended in .mil, an indication that people inside the US military had run his script.

"There were also 23 .gov domains from governmental institutions of the United States," Tschacher wrote in his thesis. "This number is highly alarming, because taking over hosts in US research laboratories and governmental institutions may have potentially disastrous consequences for them."

(video link)

Microsoft went into this year's E3 with something to prove. Since the launch of the Xbox One it has been dogged with criticism from players that the system isn't powerful enough, with its rival Sony enjoying smooth 1080p performance on the PlayStation 4 instead of the 900p they were often lumbered with. That's not to mention that, while beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the Xbox One is simply too big and bulky for many people, particularly with that large external power brick.

The new Xbox One S and the upcoming Project Scorpio address both of these issues. The former is a shrunken version of the existing Xbox One that ditches the power brick and includes a vertical stand, making it easier to slot into an entertainment centre. The latter promises to become the fastest console available—although we've yet to see what Sony has in store with the PlayStation Neo—thanks to a new GPU and CPU with 6 teraflops of processing power. With that kind of hardware under the hood, Scorpio should handle 4K games and VR with little trouble.