Month: December 2015

This message may have driven many Keurig users to vote with their dollars. But now Keurig is getting an infusion of private money. (credit: Ryan Lane)

In the finance world today, everyone is abuzz with the news of a giant buyout—JAB Holding company, which manages the money of one of Germany’s wealthiest families, agreed to buy struggling coffee maker Keurig Green Mountain for $13.9 billion, valuing the company at $92 a share, compared with the $51.70 a share that the company was trading at last Friday afternoon.

When first we heard of Keurig Green Mountain’s Keurig 2.0 coffee maker, news was that the appliance would brew only pods approved by Keurig specifically—no third-party pods allowed.

When the Keruig 2.0 came out, that was exactly the case. The scheme was akin to what we’ve seen from some content distributors in Digital Rights Management (DRM), which makes it harder to, say, move a Kindle book to a non-Kindle tablet. In Keurig’s case, approved pods had special ink markers printed on their lids, and the Keruig 2.0 had a scanner looking for said special marker. If the marker wasn’t there, the Keurig displayed an “Oops!” message and would not continue to brew the coffee.

Gas detectors used in factories and other industrial settings to identify toxic conditions contain several vulnerabilities that can allow hackers to remotely sabotage the devices, according to an industry advisory published late last week.

The vulnerabilities in the Midas and Midas Black gas detectors manufactured by Honeywell can be exploited by hackers with a low skill level, according to the advisory, which was published Thursday by the Industrial Control System Cyber Emergency Response Team. The first weaknesses is a "path traversal" weakness, which allows remote attackers to bypass the normal authentication system. A second one results in the failure to encrypt user passwords when they're being transmitted.

"Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow a remote attacker to gain unauthenticated access to the device, potentially allowing configuration changes, as well as the initiation of calibration or test processes," the advisory warned. The notice went on to advise organizations that rely on on the detectors to install versions 1.13b3 or 2.13b3, which patch against the vulnerabilities. The advisory pointed to this link from Honeywell.

The cover of the book. (credit: XKCD)

HOUSTON—I'd guess that the majority of Ars readers are familiar with XKCD, the stick-figure Web comic drawn by former NASA contractor and engineer (and now Hugo award winner) Randall Munroe. It's rare for Ars to stop by a workplace to interview a source where there aren't XKCD comic strips festooning the walls (the "sudo make me a sandwich" comic is particularly popular among sysadmins), and discussion threads on forums across the Internet will frequently include a "relevant XKCD" link to emphasize or summarize a particular point with a comic on the topic.

Munroe draws and releases XKCD under Creative Commons licensing, and makes the majority of his income these days from XKCD merchandise—like his new book, Thing Explainer, which Munroe is currently promoting. The book takes the conceit demonstrated in the "Up-Goer Five" comic—labeling a diagram of a complex machine using only first thousand most-common English words—and goes nuts with it, breaking out dozens of different drawings with a similar labeling style. Highlights include "the pieces everything is made of" (the periodic table), the bags of stuff inside you (the organs and systems inside a human body), and "the shared space house" (the International Space Station).

Ars caught up with Munroe before a book-related talk at Space Center Houston, and he was kind enough to give us a few minutes to talk about space, Up-Goers, and the iterative process of explaining things.

Tiffany Kelly

Stormtroopers watched over the entire press event.

20 more images in gallery

LOS ANGELES—The release of Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens is less than two weeks away, and while we still don’t know a lot about the plot, we do know who the new and old characters are in this seventh film in the series. On Sunday, we were introduced in person to a few of the actors who have important roles.

Ars was invited to a Star Wars media event featuring the cast and crew. And inside the event venue, Disney’s presence was very apparent: they asked members of the media if they wanted a “dark side” or “light side” wristband upon entrance (we picked light because it felt like a political decision), and there was an opportunity to pose for a photo with R2D2 and C-3PO. Merchandise for the film was on display, and attendees could test the Disney Infinity Star Wars video game or see short videos in VR on Google Cardboard. It felt like you were inside a store in Tomorrowland at Disneyland.

The big draw was a press conference cast and crew hosted by Mindy Kaling (who is also involved with Disney after she voiced a character in Pixar’s Inside Out). So many important Star Wars folks were in attendance that the evening offered two panels of Episode VII chatter. The first group included Carrie Fisher (reprising her rose as Leia), Daisy Ridley (as lead character Rey), Lupita Nyong'o (who plays alien Maz Kanata), Adam Driver (he’s Kylo Ren, the one with the cross lightsaber in the trailer), director J.J. Abrams, and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan.