Month: May 2016

Publicity shot from Craig Wright's now-deleted website. (credit: Craig Wright)

Craig Wright, the Australian investor who claimed just three days ago to be the inventor of Bitcoin, said he's backing away from the world stage.

Wright's claims were debunked by experts within hours, who noted that his Satoshi signature was actually a 2009 signature he copied from the blockchain.

Just yesterday, Wright said he knew his claims would need "extraordinary proof," and that such proof was on the way. A day later, he has decided not to prove it after all. Wright says that he "broke" as he was about to publish proof of access to the earliest keys. "I do not have the courage," he wrote in a note on his website. "I cannot."

Late tonight SpaceX will attempt to launch its first rocket since the triumphant landing of its Falcon 9 first stage a month ago. The launch window opens at 1:21am ET (6:21am BST) and will last for two hours. The primary payload for tonight's launch is a Japanese broadcast satellite.

The company will again attempt to land its first stage on the automated drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic Ocean. However this attempt will prove more dynamically challenging than the April landing. That mission carried a Dragon spacecraft, which was destined for the International Space Station about 400km above Earth. Tonight the Falcon 9 rocket must deliver the Japanese satellite into orbit 36,000km above the planet's surface.

As a result, early on Friday morning, the first stage will accelerate to a greater velocity, moving almost parallel to the surface and away from the launch site; it will then release the second stage and the primary payload. This trajectory will leave the vehicle with far less fuel to arrest its horizontal motion and control its descent to the barge waiting below. "JCSat is pushing the envelope as a very hot and fast mission," Elon Musk tweeted a week ago.

Windows 10 is now on more than 300 million active devices, according to numbers released today by Microsoft. It continues to be the most rapidly adopted version of Windows ever. At the end of March, Microsoft said that the operating system had hit 270 million active users.

The Windows 10 release is, of course, unlike any past version of Windows in two important ways. First, the operating system was released as a free upgrade for many users of Windows 7 and Windows 8. Second, the operating system is offered as a regularly updated "service"; rather than waiting years for a new version of Windows before new features can be added, Microsoft is adding new capabilities in periodic updates. The next of these, the Anniversary Update, is due this summer and will add richer pen/stylus support, the ability to run some Linux programs natively, and extensions to the Edge browser.

Microsoft's original stated goal was to have 1 billion Windows 10 users within the first two to three years. At the current rate of adoption, this seems plausible, though sustaining the current uptake rate over three years will be a challenge. Making this harder is the imminent demise of the free upgrade program. After July 29, upgrading from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 will cost $119.

You can check out any time you'd like, but you can never... well, you know the song. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Comcast customers who were charged for adult movies they said they didn't order weren't able to prove their case until they decided to cancel their service and send back their cable box. The proof they were being charged incorrectly? Comcast's computer system accused them of ordering more movies after they returned the cable equipment.

The story was reported Tuesday by ABC Action News in Tampa Bay. Alyssa and Jason Overstreet had been Comcast customers for eight years, never ordering any adult movies, when suddenly Comcast started charging them for pay-per-view porn films supposedly ordered in the middle of the night, the report said.

"Comcast charged the Overstreets for about 20 of these films," with the first erroneous charge occurring on March 30, the ABC affiliate said.

(credit: Flickr: Rego Korosi )

YouTube may be the next tech giant to fight for a piece of the television world. The online video company has been reportedly working on a subscription-based online video streaming service called "Unplugged." According to the Bloomberg News report, Unplugged would offer online video and live TV channels in bundles from media providers for a $35 monthly fee.

YouTube has apparently been working on Unplugged for a while. The report suggests that the company started working on a TV streaming service in 2012, but it has since sped up its efforts due to looming competition from companies like Dish and Sony that already have their own streaming platforms. The entirety of YouTube's architecture has reportedly been revamped to support such a service, and it could debut as early as 2017.

YouTube already has its Red subscription service, which lets users stream ad-free videos, watch videos offline, and listen to ad-free music. Unplugged would be different since it would have live TV channels and other exclusive content. YouTube has reportedly been in talks with Comcast's NBCUniversal, Fox, CBS, and Viacom to stream content from those networks, but it has yet to secure any rights. This part of the business has proven difficult for other companies looking to get into TV streaming, including Apple.

The launch of the Soyuz-2.1a rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome on April 28. (credit: Kremlin)

Last week, the inaugural launch of a rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in far eastern Russia was delayed for a day due to a technical glitch, most likely caused by a cable with defective soldering joints. Russia President Vladimir Putin was on hand and was reportedly not amused by the one-day delay.

Under blue skies, the Soyuz-2.1a rocket launched without incident the next day, April 28. Politically, the damage appears to have been done, however. On Monday, it was reported that Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin had formed a special investigation commission to investigate the one-day launch delay. Journalist Anatoly Zak, who covers the Russian space industry on his web site Russian Space Web, reported: "Given a minor technical impact of the delay, the investigation likely had [a] primarily political nature, namely it was aimed to demonstrate to the Kremlin that the industry problems were being dealt with."

Soon after the commission undertook its work, Leonid Shalimov, the head of NPO Automatics, which was responsible for the failed cables, resigned. The head of the Roscosmos State Space Corporation, Igor Komarov, and the country's senior space official, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, escaped the incident with only reprimands from Putin.

(credit: Health and Human Services)

High tech companies have disrupted the way we get our food, transit, and friends—and now they want to disrupt the way we sleep. To help them along, branding group K-Hole has released a report designed to help corporations cash in on the public's new obsession with getting rest. K-Hole is a gang of coolhunters, just like something out of a William Gibson or Jim Munroe novel, who are paid to spot trends. A couple of years ago, they got famous for popularizing the idea of "normcore," a clean-cut hipster style that emphasized simplicity and unobtrusiveness.

In this new report, Slowave: An Exploration on Sleep and Society, K-Hole member Sean Monahan makes a series of interesting observations about the sleep market, paid for mattress-maker Casper. On its website, Casper bills itself as a company trying to "innovate sleep research" with "engineering." In reality, it sells mattresses, pillows, and sheets to people online. Monahan told Ars by phone that Casper commissioned this report so it would "know what the future of sleep is." Of course, he conceded, that's "inherently hard to answer because sleep hasn’t changed all that much over past couple thousand years." But that didn't stop him from trying, and the result is a tour of sleep-related products, plus recommendations about how to market to consumers who are not currently "leaning into the pleasure of sleep."

Though written in a language that is a mashup of marketing speak and academic critical theory, the Slowave report does identify some intriguing trends. Monahan argues that sleep has been a commodity for a long time, though often in a negative sense. Starting in the 1950s, companies started marketing drugs to prevent people from sleeping. As we moved into the modern era, apps and self-help books tutored people in lifehacks like "polyphasic sleep" designed to help people do more on less sleep.

Editor in chief Ken Fisher seemingly molesting a giant Ars sign.

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Ars Technica UK launched exactly a year ago today. (I originally wanted to launch the site on May 4th, so that we could make all sorts of bad Star Wars jokes, but unfortunately that was a national holiday.) It has been a busy, exciting, and stressful year for everyone at Ars Technica UK. It turns out that launching a new division of an 18-year-old website is a lot of hard work! Who would've thought it?

But, I'm happy to announce, the first year has been a resounding success. Case in point: look at the awesome community meetup we had in London last week! About 120 of you turned up and spent five hours talking about such wondrously diverse topics as TTIP, cars, GPU overclocking, and the incoming Snooper's Charter. I talked so much, and so emphatically about the full gamut of nerdy topics that I lost my voice!

Editor in chief Ken Fisher at the inaugural Ars Technica UK community meetup. Look how much larger our events have become! (credit: Sebastian Anthony / Aurich Lawson)

We've had three meetups over the past year, each a bit larger than the last. The first question I always ask attendees is, "Do you like Ars UK?" followed swiftly by "Is there anything we're doing wrong?"