Month: January 2016

In an FCC filing, Google has told the US government that it believes its secret airborne network won't interfere with any existing networks and won't harm any people or animals. Google has been hoping to perform a "two-year nationwide test" of the network and recently addressed some concerns people had raised about it.

In the filing, Google only calls the project a "nationwide testing of airborne and terrestrial transmitters in the 71-76 and 81-86 GHz bands (collectively, the E-band)." It wants to keep the project a secret, but all signs point to it being for Project Loon, Google's airborne network of balloons which it has primarily tested in New Zealand. The application is signed by Astro Teller, the head of Google's "X" division, which houses Project Loon.

The "E-Band" that Google says it will use is often deployed as a wireless backhaul option for network providers. Fiber is, of course, preferable, but Fiber is expensive and sometimes—like in the case of Project Loon—you just can't use a wire. Most E-Band applications use highly-directional antennas and are capable of multi-gigabit speeds over a mile or two. Google notes that it will have both terrestrial antennas that "will be pointed upward" along with airborne transmitters. In Project Loon, this would suggest the E-Band would be used for balloon-to-ground and balloon-to-balloon communication.

Since the early 20th century, teachers at Montessori schools have taught reading and math by having kids trace letters and numbers with their fingers. This trace-to-learn idea, which has become semi-legendary among students, now appears to have some scientific basis. A group of Australian researchers found that kids who learn mathematical formulas while tracing the outlines of shapes are able to understand and recall their lessons more easily.

University of Sydney educational psychologist Paul Ginns worked with 279 students between the ages of nine and 13, teaching them algebra and geometry by asking them to trace over practice examples with their fingers while reading about the underlying math. Students might trace a triangle while learning the Pythagorean Theorem, for example. After tracing, students recalled the math more easily and gave correct answers about it more often than students who did not trace.

Ginns, who studies memory in learning, believes that the physical act of tracing may give the task "processing priority" in the brain.

Curtis Green, a former Silk Road lieutenant, was sentenced Friday to time served and four years of supervised release by a federal judge in Baltimore. As one of the top employees of the underground drug marketplace, Green faced felony drug charges in 2013 after being arrested. Soon after, he took a plea deal.

Green was also known as “chronicpain” in the Silk Road community. Famously, Ross Ulbricht (as Dread Pirate Roberts) believed he killed Green. Ulbricht was under the impression that Green had stolen money from Silk Road, when in fact that money was stolen by two corrupt Baltimore-based federal agents. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Carl Mark Force played the part of the fictitious hitman who “killed” Green and sent a photo to Ulbricht.

When it turned out that Force was one of two law enforcement officials who were involved in a conspiracy to steal from Silk Road for their own benefit, Green became a cooperating witness in the investigations of those agents. He testified in the sentencing hearing of Shaun Bridges, the corrupt Secret Service agent.

Even when a culture leaves behind extensive written records, it can be hard to understand their knowledge of technology and the natural world. Written records are often partial, and writers may have been unaware of some technology or simply considered it unremarkable. That's why the ancient world can still offer up surprises like the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient mechanical computer that highlighted the Greeks' knowledge of math, astronomy, and the mechanical tech needed to tie them together.

It took several years after the discovery for the true nature of the Antikythera Mechanism to be understood. And now something similar has happened for the Babylonians. Clay tablets, sitting in the British Museum for decades, show that this culture was able to use sophisticated geometry to track the orbit of Jupiter, relying on methods that in some ways pre-figure the development of calculus centuries later.

We already knew that the Babylonians tracked the orbits of a variety of bodies. There are roughly 450 written tablets that describe the methods and calculations that we're aware of, and they date from 400 to 50 BCE. Most of the ones that describe how to calculate orbital motion, in the words of Humboldt University's Mathieu Ossendrijver, "can be represented as flow charts." Depending on the situation, they describe a series of additions, subtractions, and multiplications that could tell you where a given body would be.

Documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden show new evidence of a long-running surveillance campaign against drones flown by the Israelis, Syrians, and other nations in the region. The operation by the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) signals intelligence organization, with the assistance of the NSA, intercepted scrambled analog video feeds from remotely piloted aircraft and tracked the movement of drones. In some cases, the operation even intercepted video from Israeli fighter aircraft during combat missions.

There was no supercomputing magic involved in at least most of the video interceptions. As part of an operation codenamed "Anarchist," NSA and GCHQ analysts used Image Magick (an open source image manipulation tool) and other open source software developed to defeat commercial satellite signal encryption. One of the tools, called antisky, was developed by Dr. Markus Kuhn of the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory. The tools could be used by anyone able to intercept satellite signal feeds then exhibit the patience and skill to sort through the pixels. However, the conversion to digital video feeds on some drones has apparently made video interception more difficult.

The signals were intercepted at a GCHQ station at the Royal Air Force's communications installation in the Troodos mountains of Cyprus. The facility, near Mount Olympus, is used by the GCHQ for exploiting satellite and radio communications in the eastern Mediterranean and Levant regions—including Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, and much of North Africa. The encrypted signals were then processed with Image Magick and antisky, according to a training manual obtained by The Intercept. That manual details the process of "brute forcing" the breaking of encryption on satellite video feeds.

We'll admit we've gotten a bit caught up in the buzz for Tom Clancy's The Division since its stellar premiere trailer at E3 2013, so much so that we put the game on our most anticipated games of 2016 list. After I played a few hours of the closed beta for the game on Xbox One yesterday, my anticipation isn't gone, but it has been dulled quite a bit.

That's not to say there weren't things I liked. The beta shows off the same kind of detailed environmental design as those initial trailers, rendering a disease-ruined and fallen world where hauntingly beautiful signs of decaying civilization are everywhere you look. I also like the game's augmented-reality style interface, which overlays paths and information neatly over the "real world," including map projections that make it easy to figure out where you are and which way to go. The mix of high-end, near-future technology and crumbling urban infrastructure is certainly visually striking.

The online party integration also seems pretty solid so far. While you can see a whole server full of players running around and buying items in central "safe zones," individual missions are split off into smaller team-based instances. It's relatively easy to join up with friends or strangers to take on those missions in small groups and coordinate your goals on a shared map. The only quibble is that voice communication seems to be the only reliable way to communicate; there are no in-game tools to quickly highlight nearby points of interest or send quick commands and information to your team (if there are, I didn't find them).

Ancillary Justice was published with little fanfare in 2013. Its author, Ann Leckie, had never published a novel before and was a relative unknown outside the world of science fiction book fandom. But then, word started to get around on the blogs—Ancillary Justice was something special, a galaxy-spanning epic with characters and conflicts that took a tired genre in mind-blowing new directions. The buzz reached a fever pitch when the book won both the Hugo and the Nebula for 2013, the two top US awards for science fiction.

Leckie followed up rapidly with two sequels, Ancillary Sword (October 2014) and the New York Times bestseller Ancillary Mercy (October 2015), which surprised readers by abandoning many conventions of trilogies. There is no giant spherical object in space that must be destroyed; there is no bad guy with a singular purpose; there's not even a good guy whose journey offers us an arc of transformation or redemption.

The series will no doubt be remembered as one of the most exciting and confounding developments in space opera of the past several decades. Without question, it has changed the way the science fiction book world thinks about space opera.

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