Month: April 2016

You too can look as cool as Ars' own Sebastian Anthony when trying the Vive at a retail demo station.

No matter how many reviews you read or how many videos you watch, you can't really understand what the new round of virtual reality hardware is like until you try it. For those without an early-adopting, VR-savvy friend nearby, HTC is rolling out dozens of retail demo stations where you can put the SteamVR-powered Vive through its paces. And if the demo convinces you to lay down at least $800 on a piece of the future, those retail location will also be taking pre-orders for delivery beginning in June, according to HTC.

Currently, the Vive demos are only available at three Microsoft Stores—in New York City, Bellevue, and Salt Lake City. Microsoft has plans to expand the program to 11 more stores in the US (and one in Sydney, Australia) by the end of the month and up to 30 locations by the end of the year. (Users have to be 18 years old to take part in the demos, according to Microsoft's website.) Gamestop, meanwhile, will start demonstrating the Vive at 10 locations across the US starting April 18.

That's a lot of Vive demo stations to keep track of, so we threw together a quick Google Map (below) that shows how far you'll have to travel to get your free taste of the headset (color-coded by retailer and demo start dates, click through for more details). Customers in central Florida, the New York area, Southern California, and the Pacific Northwest are spoiled for choices, while pickings are currently much slimmer in the vast middle of the country. Who's up for a really nerdy roadtrip?

Just open access to +1.1 million papers, nbd.

Most of you have probably heard of arXiv.org by now. Basically, every paper I report on is probably on the arXiv in some form. The site hosts draft manuscripts in physics and astronomy. Many of them eventually appear in academic journals, although others will spend their entire existence in the arXiv.

Five years ago, I assumed that every field had its own equivalent of arXiv. So imagine my surprise when I tried to upload my first chemistry paper to the chemistry equivalent. Apparently, there was one—but publisher Elsevier eventually gained control of it and began requiring registration. The site is probably a wasteland by now.

Until recently, biology hadn't even managed to create anything that Elsevier would want to acquire. But now, biologists are finally getting on the pre-print train with a bioRXiv.

(credit: ALFRED SACCHETTI, MD)

One man's Fitbit device proved to be much more than a smart pedometer. After a 42-year old New Jersey man suffered a seizure at work one day, emergency room doctors used his Fitbit Charge HR to understand his heart rate history and decide how they could best treat him.

Upon arrival at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden, doctors noticed that the man had an atrial fibrillation, or an irregular, fast heartbeat. However, they weren't sure if it was a chronic condition or if it was caused by the seizure itself. Knowing this detail would determine how the doctors could treat the patient: If the arrhythmia was caused by the seizure, they could electrically cardiovert the patient to alleviate it. If it was chronic, the cardioversion could potentially cause a stroke. A stroke could also occur if the arrhythmia was left untreated.

That's where the man's Fitbit Charge HR came in. The doctors accessed the Fitbit app on his smartphone and found his average heart rate as recorded throughout the course of his fitness program. "[It] revealed a baseline pulse rate between 70 and 80 beats/min, with an immediate persistent increase to a range of 140 to 160 bpm at the approximate time of the patient’s seizure. The pulse rate remained elevated until administration of the diltiazem in the field," researchers wrote in the report that now appears in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Who's that behind you? Oculus's prying eyes, that's who! (credit: Oculus)

Critical backlash against Oculus's privacy policy reached Capitol Hill on Thursday, when Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) demanded that Oculus and its parent company Facebook answer for the data its new headset collects from virtual reality users.

"Oculus’ creation of an immersive virtual reality experience is an exciting development," Franken wrote in an open letter to Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe, "but it remains important to understand the extent to which Oculus may be collecting Americans’ personal information, including sensitive location data, and sharing that information with third parties."

The question is, what exactly is Oculus asking to collect—and how much worse is it compared to other online services' EULAs?

(credit: European Commission)

Leaked extracts from an imminent assessment of the EU-US Privacy Shield replacement for Safe Harbour suggests that a key group of EU data protection authorities will not support it in its present form.

It is expected that the Article 29 Working Party will say that it is "not yet in a position to confirm that the current draft adequacy decision does, indeed, ensure a level of protection [in the US] that is essentially equivalent to that in the EU." Any transatlantic data transfer scheme that does not provide an "essentially equivalent" level of protection is unlikely to withstand a legal challenge in the EU courts.

The leaked extracts, which have been seen by Ars, were found in an online PDF of the mandate for the German members of the Article 29 Working Party, which is expected to publish its official position of the Privacy Shield scheme soon. The extracts were first pointed out on the blog of the lawyer and privacy expert Dr. Carlo Piltz, who wrote: "These excerpts show that the European Data Protection Authorities are not able to okay the draft adequacy decision by the European Commission." At the time of publishing, it appears the mandate file has been deleted or removed from the Web.

Adobe has rushed out a Flash update to plug a security hole spotted by infosec researchers, who warned that Windows 10 users of the software may have been exposed to the flaw for more than a week.

Ne'er-do-wells could exploit the flaw by sending ransomware to Windows 10 machines. Adobe said its updates addressed critical vulnerabilities in Flash, and advised users to install the latest version of the software. It said in a security bulletin:

Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and ChromeOS. These updates address critical vulnerabilities that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

Adobe is aware of reports that CVE-2016-1019 is being actively exploited on systems running Windows 10 and earlier with Flash Player version 20.0.0.306 and earlier.

Researchers at Proofpoint—which has a good explainer of the flaw here—worked with other infosec folk to track down the latest security hole in Flash that could be exploited by attackers with a type of ransomware dubbed "Cerber." The ransomware is understood to have been in the wild since at least March 31.

On Thursday, Wall Street’s bookkeeper announced that it had successfully tested blockchain technology to manage single-name credit default swaps (CDS) among four big banks: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan.

In a credit default swap, one bank buys the debt owed to another bank with the understanding that if the debt holder defaults on their loan, the buyer bank will be compensated by the selling bank. In the years leading up to the 2008 recession, the buying and selling of credit default swaps was not watched by regulators at all, and as an NPR explainer described it in October 2008, "If bad mortgages got the financial system sick, credit default swaps helped spread the illness worldwide."

The need for more transparency is where blockchain comes in. The concept of the blockchain ledger was developed and popularized by virtual currency Bitcoin, and on a blockchain ledger peer-to-peer transactions can be monitored by every entity that’s party to the ledger, theoretically resulting in more transparency. And recently Silicon Valley has pushed the finance world to appropriate the blockchain concept to make more traditional transactions more efficient, as well: if transactions are seamlessly recorded on a shared ledger, using a middleman to clear the transactions is no longer necessary.