Month: April 2016

What're those SteamVR "chaperone" grid lines doing in an Oculus-exclusive game? Find out yourself if you own an HTC Vive and use the new Revive patch on many "exclusive" Oculus games. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

In the race to the top of virtual reality, Oculus and HTC have kicked off a hardware showdown the likes of which we haven't seen since the "Nintendon't" days. However, the war includes a curious compatibility issue: HTC's current software hub, SteamVR, can be accessible by Oculus headset wearers, but Oculus Home doesn't currently support the HTC Vive.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has publicly stated that "we can only extend our SDK to work with other headsets if the manufacturer allows us to do so," seemingly passing the buck to HTC and Valve in regards to why its Oculus Store games don't natively support the other leading PC headset. Valve has denied this assertion. Either way, we no longer have to wait for the companies to settle their legal and licensing differences, thanks to the efforts of the LibreVR plug-in, dubbed Revive.

Short version: It works, as proven by the above screenshot we snapped of pack-in Oculus game Lucky's Tale running within the SteamVR interface (complete with its "chaperone" boundary lines). The author's test system, which includes a 4.2 GHz i7 processor and a GTX 980Ti, ran all test games without hitches in performance, while other users have reported similarly smooth performance on "VR-ready" Windows 10 PCs.

Founder and CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, at TEDMED 2014. (credit: TEDMED)

After investigations revealed major problems at its blood-testing lab in California, the high-profile medical startup Theranos is in deep water with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). As Ars has reported before, the company faces sanctions, including losing its approval to test human samples.

But, according to a Wednesday report in The Wall Street Journal, the sanctions may also include banning Theranos' CEO and founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and its president, Sunny Balwani, from owning or running any lab for at least two years. The potential ban was mentioned in a letter dated March 18 from the CMS to Theranos. The letter has not been publicly disclosed, but WSJ reporters viewed it.

According to those reporters’ sources, Theranos had 10 days to respond, which it did. The CMS is now looking over its response. If the agency is still displeased with Theranos’ performance, the revocation of its approval to test blood samples and the ban could go into effect within 60 days. Theranos could still appeal the decision, the WSJ noted, but appeals rarely succeed. Between 2001 and the end of 2010, the CMS did not lose a single such case.

Matthew Keys is accused of giving up the CMS login information that ultimately resulted in this short-lived defacement of the LA Times' website. (credit: US DOJ)

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—A federal judge sentenced journalist Matthew Keys to two years in prison Wednesday after he was convicted last year of three counts of conspiracy and criminal hacking.

Prosecutors had asked the judge to impose a sentence of five years, while Keys’ attorneys asked for no prison time.

As Ars reported earlier, Keys was accused of handing over a username and password for former employer KTXL Fox 40's content management system (CMS) to members of Anonymous and instructing people there to “fuck some shit up.” Ultimately, that December 2010 incident resulted in someone else using those credentials to alter a headline and sub-headline on a Los Angeles Times article. The changes lasted for 40 minutes before editors reversed them. (At the time, the two media companies were both owned by Tribune Company.)

(credit: CDC)

After months of speculation and mounting data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially confirmed Wednesday that the Zika virus does indeed cause microcephaly, a devastating birth defect in which babies are born with small, malformed heads and brains.

Researchers with the agency came to the conclusion after a review of existing data on the virus. There was no single piece of evidence that tipped the scales, the authors note. Rather, the accumulation of data from numerous sources convinced them of the link. Their analysis is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“This study marks a turning point in the Zika outbreak,” Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, said in a statement. “We are also launching further studies to determine whether children who have microcephaly born to mothers infected by the Zika virus is the tip of the iceberg of what we could see in damaging effects on the brain and other developmental problems.”