Month: May 2016

Ars was invited to the end-of-year sumo competition, where the victor was “Taetay.” Shot/Edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

NEW YORK—For the past ten years, professor Brian Cusack has been teaching robot design and construction to science and engineering students at Cooper Union. The mechatronics class is an intense, 14-week immersion in robot design, programming, building, testing process, and competition.

This week, the class kicked off Cooper Union's End of Year Show with a robot "sumo" competition. The goal of the competition involves two autonomous robots (no remote controls) which can sense the edge of a square “ring” using infrared sensors and use programmed motors to push the other robot out of the ring. The lighting is important for the sensors to pick up the white outline of a black ring.

After working for several hours unsuccessfully Thursday morning to inflate an expandable module attached to the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Jeff Williams and a team of engineers in Houston decided to delay operations for a day. Williams summed up the efforts by saying, "That's the space business."

The initial steps of the process to expand Bigelow Aeropace's habitat from a length of 5.7 feet to 13 feet went well. But when Williams opened a valve to add air into the module, pressure inside it began to increase at a greater rate than expected, and the habitat expanded only very slowly. When Williams stopped and then repeated the valve-opening process four more times, the same anomalous pressure rises occurred. After engineers on the ground conferred, they decided to delay the expansion efforts until Friday morning at the earliest.

Teams from NASA, which has paid Bigelow $17.8 million to test the concept, and Bigelow are expected to meet today to study data from the expansion attempts, determine what went wrong, and then make a decision on whether to proceed Friday.

A big change is rolling out on Reddit that will affect the way you post and view images on the site. Through a thread created by a Reddit product team member named Andy (u/amg137), the site announced that it's launching an image-upload tool for single photos and GIFs on select subreddits. This means the site is shifting away from its informal partner Imgur, which currently hosts the majority of Reddit's uploaded images.

With the tool, users will be able to upload images up to 20MB and GIFs up to 100MB in size directly to Reddit. When viewing a thread that started with an image or a GIF, users will click on the thread and be taken to the thread page, with the media at the top and the comments below.

With Imgur-hosted images, clicking on the Reddit link takes you directly to that image on Imgur's site. To see thread discussion, you had to click on the "comments" link directly below it. Andy explains in the post that the company is hoping the native image tool will make the Reddit experience more seamless. "For a long time, other image hosting services have been an integral part of how content is shared on Reddit—we’re grateful to those teams, but are looking forward to bringing you a more seamless experience with this new feature," he writes.

My actual drive from Washington, DC, to Columbus, Ohio, and back took about 12 hours in total, but thanks to the magic that is time-lapse, you can come with me in a mere 90 seconds. Video edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

On Sunday, my colleague Lee Hutchinson regaled you all with a tale of his semi-autonomous driving adventure in one of Tesla's high-speed electric chariots. But that's not the only semi-autonomous (Level 2 self-driving, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) road trip we've conducted here at Ars. You can read all about how we got on with Volvo's latest and greatest XC90 SUVs in a week or so. Plus, there's the new Audi A4, which in Dynamic mode really puts the mantra of "trust the machine" to the test as it late-brakes for exits at up to 0.5G. And finally, I was also fortunate enough to have put many miles on an Audi A7 TDI, driving from DC to Columbus, Ohio, and back when I went to visit the Venturi Buckeye Bullet 3.

Much of the technology that underpins these systems is shared among the industry. A handful of companies like Bosch, Delphi, and Mobileye provide sensors, control units, and even algorithms to car makers, who then integrate and refine those systems.

Ars Technica Live #2: Surveillance, with guest Elizabeth Joh. Filmed by Chris Schodt/Edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Last week, we filmed our second episode of Ars Technica Live in Oakland, California, and we had a tremendously interesting conversation with UC Davis law professor Elizabeth Joh, who researches surveillance technology and policing. Right out of the gate, Joh made it clear that the problem isn't surveillance per se—governments "need surveillance," she said, to figure out what its citizens require in terms of benefits, help, and security. The problem is when this surveillance becomes invasive, and the government inhibits freedom of expression and punishes unconventional behavior. How do we balance the need for surveillance and the need for free expression and privacy in a democratic society?

Joh talked a lot about the future legal landscape we're creating with cutting-edge technologies like self-driving cars, facial recognition, and body cams. When you're talking about law and policy, the issue is always that adoption of devices like body cams tends to precede careful thought about what rules will govern them. After the Ferguson protests, for example, police departments started using body cams as an accountability measure. But there are no federal guidelines for how cops will use these cams. Will they be able to turn them off whenever they want? Who has access to the data they collect? Can they use facial recognition in body cams? All of these questions remain unanswered, yet body cams are in widespread use across the US.

Dozens of HTTPS-protected websites belonging to financial services giant Visa are vulnerable to attacks that allow hackers to inject malicious code and forged content into the browsers of visitors, an international team of researchers has found.

In all, 184 servers—some belonging to German stock exchange Deutsche Börse and Polish banking association Zwizek Banków Polskich—were also found to be vulnerable to a decade-old exploit technique cryptographers have dubbed the "forbidden attack." An additional 70,000 webservers were found to be at risk, although the work required to successfully carry out the attack might prove to be prohibitively difficult. The data came from an Internet-wide scan performed in January. Since then, Deutsche Börse has remedied the problem, but, as of Wednesday, both Visa and Zwizek Banków Polskich have allowed the vulnerability to remain and have yet to respond to any of the researchers' private disclosures.

The vulnerability stems from implementations of the transport layer security protocol that incorrectly reuse the same cryptographic nonce when data is encrypted. TLS specifications are clear that these arbitrary pieces of data should be used only once. When the same one is used more than once, it provides an opportunity to carry out the forbidden attack, which allows hackers to generate the key material used to authenticate site content. The exploit was first described in comments submitted to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It gets its name because nonce uniqueness is a ground rule for proper crypto.

Ah, there you are. That didn't take too long, surely? Just a click or a tap and, if you’ve some 21st century connectivity, you landed on this page in a trice.

But how does it work? Have you ever thought about how that cat picture actually gets from a server in Oregon to your PC in London? We’re not simply talking about the wonders of TCP/IP, or pervasive Wi-Fi hotspots, though those are vitally important as well. No, we’re talking about the big infrastructure: the huge submarine cables, the vast landing sites and data centres with their massively redundant power systems, and the elephantine, labyrinthine last-mile networks that actually hook billions of us to the Internet.

And perhaps even more importantly, as our reliance on omnipresent connectivity continues to blossom, the number of our connected devices swells, and our thirst for bandwidth knows no bounds, how do we keep the Internet running? How do Verizon or Virgin reliably get 100 million bytes of data to your house every second, all day every day?