Month: February 2016

(credit: Shawn)

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday, will go down in history as the backbone of the court's modern conservative wing. The Reagan-appointee's long tenure touched upon so many facets of life that intersection with the Ars worldview was inevitable.

When viewed through this lens, the 79-year-old justice's writings concerned cases involving Aereo, video gaming, GPS tracking, thermal imaging, drug dogs, Second Amendment rights, Obamacare, and DNA among a host of other topics. So as the remembrances and reflections continue to trickle out, here's a reminder of how Justice Scalia's opinions and dissents impacted the technologies and policies we keep an eye on at the Orbital HQ.

American Broadcasting v. Aereo: The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in a 2014 decision that resulted in the shuttering of the over-the-air broadcast TV company Aereo. New York-based Aereo needed the broadcasters' permission to sell monthly subscriptions, the court ruled. The court sided with broadcasters who said that Aereo offering customers tiny antennas to transmit the signal was akin to a cable company. In dissent, Scalia wrote, "The Court manages to reach the opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted rules for service-provider liability and adopting in their place an improvised standard ("looks-like-cable-TV") that will sow confusion for years to come."

(credit: NoHoDamon)

Hackers have siphoned about $103,000 out of Bitcoin accounts that were protected with an alternative security measure, according to research that tracked six years' worth of transactions. Account-holders used easy-to-remember passwords to protect their accounts instead of the long cryptographic keys normally required

The heists were carried out against almost 900 accounts where the owners used passwords to generate the private encryption keys required to withdraw funds. In many cases, the vulnerable accounts were drained within minutes or seconds of going live. The electronic wallets were popularly known as "brain wallets" because, the thinking went, Bitcoin funds were stored in users' minds through memorization of a password rather than a 64-character private key that had to be written on paper or stored digitally. For years, brain wallets were promoted as a safer and more user-friendly way to secure Bitcoins and other digital currencies, although Gregory Maxwell, Gavin Andresen and many other Bitcoin experts had long warned that they were a bad idea.

The security concerns were finally proven once and for all last August when Ryan Castellucci, a researcher with security firm White Ops, presented research at the Defcon hacker convention that showed how easy it was to attack brain wallets at scale. Brain wallets used no cryptographic salt and passed plaintext passwords through a single hash iteration (in this case, the SHA256 function), a shortcoming that made it possible for attackers to crack large numbers of brain wallet passwords at once. Worse, a form of the insecurely hashed passwords are stored in the Bitcoin blockchain, providing all the material needed to compromise the accounts.

For years now, dedicated PC gamers have known Blizzard as one of the few large publishers that has kept an almost singular focus on their platform of choice. So it might come as a surprise that the company seems to be thinking about mobile platforms as the focus for its upcoming real-time strategy plans.

Speaking to VentureBeat recently, a trio of Blizzard executives suggested that the idea of bringing real-time strategy (RTS) to mobile platforms deserves "conscious evaluation," as Senior Vice President and co-founder Frank Pearce put it. That means potentially changing up the way the genre has been known to work in its home on PC, he said.

"If we were going to continue to evaluate experiences in real-time strategy, I think we’d have to figure out what that means to the current player space," Pearce said. "Legacy of the Void is great. [But] I don’t think that people want to sit down and play 45 minute missions any more. I think that space might need some reinventing."

Let us show you how fast 5G will be—as you can see, it will be almost half the speed of 11G. (credit: Embassy Pictures)

AT&T is testing an early version of its 5G network this year, saying it will be 10 to 100 times faster than LTE and might be used for home Internet service. "An early use of 5G’s underlying technology could be delivering broadband to homes and businesses, and it’s possible that we could have limited commercial availability this year depending on the trials," an AT&T spokesperson told Ars.

This sounds like it could fit in with AT&T plans to provide fixed wireless Internet to areas without good wired broadband.

AT&T's announcement on Friday said the 5G network will rely on millimeter waves, which are 30GHz and above and require line-of-sight connections. As we've written before, 5G will also likely use spectrum below 1GHz in order to connect areas that can't be covered by extremely high frequencies.

An artist's conceptualization of DARPA's ACTUV sub hunting robo-ship in action. (credit: DARPA)

One of the biggest problems the US Navy faces today is the threat of quiet, short-range diesel-electric submarines. When running on batteries alone, these subs are extremely difficult for the Navy's ships, subs, and patrol craft to detect with passive sonar. In war games with US allies—and in recent propaganda-generating "drills" by Iran's navy—US ships have consistently ended up in the periscope crosshairs of diesel submarines that have gone undetected or that the Navy has simply lost track of. The best way to keep tabs on diesel submarines is to literally stay on top of them, tracking them with subs or ships from the moment they set out to sea until they return home.

This is the sort of thing the US Navy used to do with Soviet submarines operating off the coast of the US. The problem is that doing it for diesel submarines in distant parts of the world would tie up ships and sailors, pulling them away from other missions—and the US Navy doesn't have the same sort of resources for antisubmarine warfare that it had during the Cold War to bring to bear on the diesel-electric subs of potential adversaries. This is especially true for those operating in waters far from the US. That's a problem that a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project now nearing fruition seeks to solve with drone ships.

During a roundtable with media last week, Deputy Director Steve Walker announced that DARPA and its contractor Leidos would launch the first full prototype of an autonomous ship designed to hunt submarines and trail them for weeks at a time. Eventually, autonomous vessels could be deployed to track the latest generation of quiet diesel-electric submarines over distances of thousands of miles, providing targeting information to US Navy submarines, ships, and patrol planes—or simply harassing the subs with relentless active tracking to deter them from carrying out their mission.