Month: April 2016

(credit: Ptigarstheone)

On Friday, Apple formally responded to the government’s demand that the company help unlock a seized iPhone in New York, which pre-dates the debacle that played out earlier this year in San Bernardino.

As Ars reported last month, federal prosecutors have asked a more senior judge, known as a district judge, to countermand a magistrate judge who earlier ruled in Apple’s favor, which is why Apple had to file now. In that ruling, US Magistrate Judge James Orenstein concluded that what the government was asking for went too far. In his ruling, he worried about a "virtually limitless expansion of the government's legal authority to surreptitiously intrude on personal privacy."

The case involves Jun Feng, a drug dealer who has already pleaded guilty, and his seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7. Prosecutors have said previously that the investigation was not over and that it still needed data from Feng's phone. As the government has reminded the court, Apple does have the ability to unlock this phone. Moreover, as Department of Justice lawyers note, Apple has complied numerous times previously.

This week, film director James Cameron announced that he will be making four sequels to his 2009 box-office smash Avatar.

Following in the hallowed footsteps of other filmmakers who sought to unnecessarily increase the number of installments that a story really needs, Cameron decided to go big. "He first envisioned two sequels,” Variety reported. "But after meeting with a team of four screenwriters and a group of 'some of the top artists and designers in the world,' he realized that he had way too much material for just two films.” Clearly, no one has told the great filmmakers of our day about killing your darlings.

The original Avatar still holds the record for all-time worldwide box office sales. It follows a human’s attempt to infiltrate an alien civilization known as the Na’vi by adopting a Na’vi body. The Na'vi populate the planet of Pandora, which contains a precious metal that Earth-dwellers want to mine. Instead of learning how to manipulate the Na’vi into giving the humans a pass to mine the planet, the main character develops sympathies for the Na’vi, and therein lies the friction.

Sling TV's next frontier could be streaming local TV. (credit: Sling TV)

Not two years after Aereo’s business model was shot down by the Supreme Court, another, slightly different attempt at pushing local TV onto the Internet for streaming could be coming from a partnership between Dish Network’s SlingTV and EchoStar’s Sling Media.

On Friday, Dave Zatz of Zatz Not Funny! said he had received a tip from a source indicating that Sling Media would be pushing out what is essentially a set-top box that would help Sling TV subscribers watch local TV from the Sling TV app. If that’s not confusing enough, the box will apparently be called AirTV, per an Echostar trademark application Zatz reported on last year.

As a result, customers of Sling TV will be able to buy an AirTV box that will look very similar to Sling Media’s M1 Slingbox, which will connect to your home antenna and your home network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet to push local channels to your mobile device or browser. “I’ll go ahead and assume the ultimate goal here is for the OTA channels from one’s residence to be co-located amongst the pay television channels of Sling TV’s $20 streaming service in a unified guide,” Zatz wrote.

(credit: Sorosh Tavakoli)

Bathrooms are a prime location for smearing disease-causing microbes all over your hands. Yet, despite societal pressures and prodding signage, a lot of people don’t clean their grimy mitts after a potty break. Some audacious folks just skip the sink all together, while others don’t wash for long enough (experts recommend singing “Happy Birthday” twice in your head) or omit the cleansing soap step. All of those sanitation-slackers threaten to spread disease—particularly in healthcare settings packed with vulnerable patients. But what the latter groups do to dry off their un-cleaned hands may end up setting off a germ bomb.

Researchers have long known that warm hand dryers can launch bacteria into the air—compared to dabbing with paper towels, which unleashes virtually none. But new jet air dryers, made by Dyson, are significantly more problematic—they launch far more viruses into the air, which linger for longer periods of time and reach much farther distances, researchers recently reported in the Journal of Applied Microbiology. This is particularly concerning because viruses, unlike many infectious bacteria, can easily maintain their infectiousness in the air and on surfaces, and just a few viral particles can spark an infection.

“The results of this study suggest that in locations where hygiene and cross-infection considerations are paramount, such as healthcare settings and the food industry, the choice of hand-drying method should be considered carefully,” the authors concluded.

(credit: Dr F. Eugene Hester, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

More than 3 million Internet-accessible servers are at risk of being infected with crypto ransomware because they're running vulnerable software, including out-of-date versions of Red Hat's JBoss enterprise application, researchers from Cisco Systems said Friday.

About 2,100 of those servers have already been compromised by webshells that give attackers persistent control over the machines, making it possible for them to be infected at any time, the Cisco researchers reported in a blog post. The compromised servers are connected to about 1,600 different IP addresses belonging to schools, governments, aviation companies, and other types of organizations.

Some of the compromised servers belonged to school districts that were running the Destiny management system that many school libraries use to keep track of books and other assets. Cisco representatives notified officials at Destiny developer Follett Learning of the compromise, and the Follett officials said they fixed a security vulnerability in the program. Follett also told Cisco the updated Destiny software also scans computers for signs of infection and removes any identified backdoors.

The US Capitol Building. (credit: House of Representatives)

The House of Representatives today approved a Republican proposal that limits the Federal Communications Commission's authority to regulate Internet providers.

The "No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act" was ostensibly proposed to prevent the FCC from setting the rates charged by Internet providers. But the bill defines "rate regulation" so broadly that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler says it could prevent the commission from enforcing net neutrality rules against blocking and throttling.

The FCC says it has no plans to impose strict utility rate regulation on Internet providers, but it can review whether specific rates are "unjust" or "unreasonable" under its authority to regulate common carriers. This bill would remove that authority and could also limit the FCC's authority to prevent ISPs from applying data caps in discriminatory ways.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

The future of virtual reality beyond immersive gaming and 360-degree movie-watching is mysterious to say the least. At this year's Tribeca Film Festival, we're getting a taste of what devices like the Oculus Rift and Samsung's Gear VR could allow all kinds of creatives to do and the types of experiences we could have using this new medium.

The Storyscapes exhibition at the festival showcases a number of VR experiences and installations that all focus on interactive storytelling. We got to try out a few of them, using mostly the Gear VR headset, and in one case the consumer version of the Oculus Rift, and all of them manage to tell very different stories using the same VR medium. Oscar Raby's "The Turning Forest" is on the fanciful side of the spectrum, incorporating a tunnel-like forest installation and colorful animations to take you through an imaginary world. Meanwhile, other projects examine very real and raw parts of our society, like The Guardian's "6x9," which puts you in the position of an inmate in solitary confinement.