Month: June 2016

On Thursday, Detroit automaker General Motors and the US Navy announced a partnership in which the Navy would be able to take advantage of hydrogen fuel cell research from GM to develop a long-endurance unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV).

According to Karen Swider-Lyons, the head of the Naval Research Laboratory’s (NRL) Chemistry Division of its Alternative Energy Section, the Navy is looking for “weeks if not months of endurance” from a UUV. She stressed that research and testing is still in early stages, and that the Navy had not yet pinpointed a single application it wanted to apply fuel-cell powered underwater drones to. “As the technology becomes available we’ll see,” Swider-Lyons said on a conference call this morning. “You can look at the history of unmanned air vehicles and guess.”

Fuel cell technology has been lauded as a potentially revolutionary energy source for zero-emissions vehicles, using hydrogen to create electricity and emitting H₂O as waste. While fuel-cells are more energy dense than batteries, batteries have generally won out when it comes to building zero-emissions cars because hydrogen refueling centers are scarce and storing hydrogen itself can require a high-pressure container or very cold temperatures.

Researchers have detected a family of malicious apps, some that were available in Google Play, that contain malicious code capable of secretly rooting an estimated 90 percent of all Android phones.

In a recently published blog post, antivirus provider Trend Micro said that Godless, as the malware family has been dubbed, contains a collection of rooting exploits that works against virtually any device running Android 5.1 or earlier. That accounts for an estimated 90 percent of all Android devices. Members of the family have been found in a variety of app stores, including Google Play, and have been installed on more than 850,000 devices worldwide. Godless has struck hardest at users in India, Indonesia, and Thailand, but so far less than 2 percent of those infected are in the US.

Once an app with the malicious code is installed, it has the ability to pull from a vast repository of exploits to root the particular device it's running on. In that respect, the app functions something like the many available exploit kits that cause hacked websites to identify specific vulnerabilities in individual visitors' browsers and serve drive-by exploits. Trend Micro Mobile Threats Analyst Veo Zhang wrote:

Ars Technica Live #3. Filmed by Chris Schodt, edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

In our third episode of Ars Technica Live, your intrepid hosts Annalee Newitz and Cyrus Farivar talked to journalist Sarah Jeong about online harassment. Jeong is the author of The Internet of Garbage, a book about how companies and online communities are using technology to cope with harassment and bullying. Watch the video, filmed before a live audience of Ars readers in Oakland, California at Longitude Bar.

Editor's Note: Our apologies for the sound issues. You can hear everything, but there are some crackles and annoyances. We promise to have that fixed for our episode next month.

The pictures that came from New Horizons' flyby of Pluto have set off a scramble to make sense of the dwarf planet's terrain. Pluto's clearly geologically active, with mountains and fresh surfaces that haven't been pummeled by impacts yet. One of those features, Sputnik Planum, appears to be an ocean of frozen nitrogen, fed by nitrogen glaciers that line its shores. But a new analysis suggests that this isn't the only ocean on the dwarf planet.

An analysis of the internal structure and heating of Pluto indicates that there are two likely probabilities: either it has a deep ocean of liquid water, or the water on Pluto has frozen solid and compacted into a dense form of ice called ice II. And the authors of the analysis suggest that the liquid ocean makes more sense given Pluto's surface features.

The analysis was done in a similar manner to the ones that tackled Sputnik Planum: figure out Pluto's composition and its heat budget and trace the effects of the heat as it escapes to the surface. The heat itself comes from Pluto's rocky core, which carries some of the same radioactive isotopes that help keep the Earth's core nice and toasty. Above that, however, Pluto is mostly water, with difficult-to-determine fractions of things like ammonia and methane.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a bunch of deals to share today. Of note, we have a bestseller from earlier this month—you can still get the redesigned Dell Inspiron 3650 PC with Core i7 Skylake processor, 16GB of RAM, and an AMD R9 360 GPU for just $579. That's over $300 off its original price of $899, so if you're on the market for a new desktop, this is one you should consider.

Also check out the rest of the deals below.

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A report from The Information (subscription required) claims that Huawei is building its own in-house OS as a possible "Plan B" to Android. To spearhead the development of an in-house operating system—and improve its Android skin—Huawei has hired former Apple designer Abigail Brody. The report says that the non-Android OS "isn’t far along" and is a "contingency measure" in case Google's current Android terms become undesirable to Huawei.

Huawei is the number three smartphone OEM, behind Samsung and Apple. The Chinese company isn't a huge deal in the West, though—a big portion of those sales come from Huawei's home turf. Huawei is often seen as being in a position similar to Samsung's, just at an earlier stage of development. Like Samsung, Huawei is a massive company. It's the world's largest telecom equipment manufacturer, and it designs its own SoCs. Now Huawei is taking another page from the Samsung playbook, and the company is trying to develop an Android alternative.

Samsung's homegrown operating system is Tizen, a Linux-based OS that works a lot like Android (especially Samsung's Android phones) but lacks the app ecosystem and developer support of Android. That's the challenge with creating an Android alternative—can you make something that's so much better than Android that the lack of apps becomes acceptable for consumers?

Patent trolls don't fare well at the Supreme Court. When they show up, their cases tend to result in decisions that are ruinous for the profit margins of their industry. Two prominent examples: the 2006 eBay v. MercExchange case effectively ended trolls' abilities to get injunctions, and the 2014 Alice Corp. case made it far easier for patent defendants to invalidate abstract software patents.

And yet, the cases keep coming. The most recent example is Cuozzo Speed Technologies LLC v. Lee, a case that was resolved earlier this week with an 8-0 opinion dismantling arguments presented by Cuozzo, a patent-holding entity controlled by two New York patent lawyers, Daniel Mitry and Timothy Salmon. The two attorneys own dozens of other patent shell companies through their consultancy, Empire IP.

What were Mitry and Salmon hoping for? Using the Cuozzo case as their vehicle, they hoped to tweak changes in the rules for "inter partes reviews," or IPRs, a proceeding created by Congress in 2012 that allows the patent office to take a second look at patents to see if they should never have been issued in the first place. While the tech sector still seeks legislative reform to end the spate of "patent troll" lawsuits, IPRs have been an effective way to shut down some patent cases at a fraction of the cost of a full-blown court trial.