Month: April 2016

President Vladimir Putin visits the Vostochny Cosmodrome in October 2015. (credit: Kremlin Press Service)

Spaceflight began in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space. Four years later, Yuri Gagarin launched from the same pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. However, Kazakhstan declared its independence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and since then Russia has had to lease its launch facilities.

No longer. Russia began working on a new spaceport, the Vostochny Cosmodrome, in 2011. Located in the far east of Russia, the modern, $3 billion facility is one of President Vladimir Putin's signature projects. Yet it has been beset by hunger strikes, claims of unpaid workers, and other challenges. For example, in 2015, Russia’s Prosecutor General reported that $126 million had been stolen during construction. Additionally, a man driving a diamond-encrusted Mercedes was arrested after embezzling $75,000 from the project.

However, after a visit by Putin in October, the project appears to have swiftly progressed. A series of launch tests and checks in March came off without incident. And now, reports the Russian news agency TASS, it is ready for spaceflight. "I wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be ready to launch our space rocket," Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said Tuesday.

(credit: Brian Klug)

On Friday, the self-described black hat hacker who claimed responsibility for the Hacking Team dump last year, and who goes by the handle "Phineas Phisher," published the technical details of how he pulled off the caper—and encouraged others to follow his example.

The apparently bilingual hacker originally published the details in Spanish—"just having some fun trolling the English speaking internet," he posted on Reddit—but subsequently translated the document into English.

Private intelligence contractor Hacking Team develops and sells hacking tools to governments around the world, a practice many have questioned as enabling human rights violations.

Sony may be tight-lipped for now, but it's looking increasingly likely that it will release an updated version of the PlayStation 4 later this year. So far the rumoured console has gone under the moniker PS4K or PS4.5, but a new report from gaming site GiantBomb suggests that the codename for the console is "NEO," and it even provides hardware specs for the PlayStation 4's improved CPU, GPU, and higher bandwidth memory.

Those specs include a CPU clock speed bump from 1.6GHz to 2.1Ghz, an improved AMD GPU with 36 Compute Units (CU) running at 911MHz, and a memory bandwidth bump up to 218GB/s. While GiantBomb noted that the CPU cores remain based on AMD's Jaguar architecture—which was originally a chip developed for laptops—the GPU specs tie into recent rumours that AMD had landed big design wins for its new Polaris architecture.

Should the PS4 NEO GPU feature 36 CUs, that would mean around 2304 stream processors—effectively doubling the amount from the old chip. According to TechPowerUp, those specs are extremely similar to AMD's Polaris 10 "Ellesmere" chip, which is rumoured to be used in an upcoming standalone Radeon R9 480 graphics card. While AMD has refused to comment on the scuttlebutt—telling Ars "we do not comment on rumour or speculation"—the company has noted in the past that the focus of Polaris is on power efficiency and "console-class gaming on a thin-and-light notebook."

(credit: Johan Larsson)

Google has hit out at News Corp after Rupert Murdoch's company lodged a formal complaint against the search and ad giant to the competition wing of the European Commission.

News Corp's newspaper the Wall Street Journal—citing an insider—reported that Murdoch's media empire was "concerned Google reinforces its dominance in general search by 'scraping' or copying content from publishers to display the results of news article."

Google has been accused by News Corp of altogether stripping its search results of articles that publishers prevent from being copied, according to the WSJ.