Month: July 2016

The Silent Phone app from Silent Circle is encrypted end-to-end, so there's really no call for a canary.

News reports that Silent Circle, the commercial encrypted voice-over-IP service company that manufactures the security-focused Blackphone, had removed its "warrant canary" webpage have apparently created some confusion. Things only got fuzzier since the company counsel stated that the page’s removal was a “business decision” and not the result of a warrant being served against the company for customer data. But the explanation for that decision, made more than a year ago with no fanfare, is actually very simple: Silent Circle's customers don't care. In fact, the warrant warning might have been a liability with some of Silent Circle's core customers, who might be more likely to be serving a warrant than receiving one.

Many of Silent Circle’s customers are in the government and corporate sector. "Our customer base is generally not concerned with law enforcement," Vic Hyder, Silent Circle's chief strategy officer, explained to Ars. "They use Silent Circle to protect their business activities from criminals and competition for the most part."

As Ars reported when we tested the original Blackphone and the Blackphone 2, the Silent Phone service definitely keeps customer security at the core. It provides end-to-end encrypted voice, video, and text messaging, and the service doesn’t provide any way for the Switzerland-based company to monitor or log the contents of messages, much as Apple’s iMessage service can’t. In addition to a layer of SSL encryption between the two ends of a call or message stream, Silent Phone applies another layer of encryption based on an exchange of keys. As a result, once the call or message thread is established, all of the data is protected between devices. In cases of calls from Silent Phone to an unsecured phone, the call is encrypted all the way to Silent Circle’s access point to the switched public phone network.

(credit: urbanwheel.co)

More than half a million so-called “hoverboards” are being recalled, according to a Wednesday announcement by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The government agency noted that there have been 99 reported incidents of batteries that have exploded or caught fire roughly within the last year.

Since March 2016, most self-balancing scooter sales have been halted in the United States anyway after Segway brought a patent suit. Prior to that, the devices were banned by several airlines in December 2015 over the same battery safety concerns.

As Ars reported earlier, the main reason hoverboards have self-destructed is because of their batteries. All of the major hoverboard brands use rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for power, and those can be dangerous for two reasons: cheapness and mistreatment. Li-ion batteries are used in everyday devices such as smartphones and tablets, but typically the companies making those devices can afford to use higher-quality, more expensive batteries.

This is a render created by Android Police based on its evidence. It represents both "Marlin" and "Sailfish," which supposedly will be the same design in two different sizes. (credit: Android Police)

It is officially Nexus rumor season. After last week's "Google Phone" rumor, this week we've got renders of what the 2016 Nexus phones will look like. Android Police—which has a great track record when it comes to Nexus leaks—has created a render of the device "based on evidence from [its] source."

Previous rumors said that HTC would be building two Nexus devices for Google, a 5-inch device codenamed "Sailfish" and a 5.5-inch device called "Marlin." The report says this render is meant to represent both devices—a bigger and smaller phone of the same design.

Usually Nexus devices are co-branded by Google and the OEM, but Android Police's render doesn't have an HTC logo. The site says "the 'G' logo on the back of the device may or may not be part of the final design," and "it remains unclear to us if the final design will include an HTC logo, but we are inclined to believe the answer is no." That "Google Phone" rumor from the Telegraph last week said Google was making a phone separate from the Nexus line that would be self-branded, but maybe there isn't a third phone and the Nexus line is just getting a rebrand.

Come and sail the methane seas of Titan! (credit: NASA)

Saturn's moon, Titan, is one of the most exotic places in the Solar System, with large lakes filled with nearly pure, liquid methane, a thick atmosphere that provides surface pressures similar to those on Earth, and very cold temperatures of about -180 degrees Celsius. Aside from Earth, Titan is the only body in the Solar System with liquid on its surface.

This has always tantalized astrobiologists who have wondered about the possibility of some kind of unknown life living in those methane lakes. Now scientists have found some solid theoretical reasons to believe that some of the complex chemistry in Titan's atmosphere could support life on the world.

Citing experimental and observational data, the researchers note the abundance of hydrogen cyanide in Titan's atmosphere. This is a hydrogen-bonding molecule that may combine with other molecules on the surface to form polymers, including polyimine. Using quantum mechanical calculations, the scientists demonstrated that polyimine has electronic and structural properties at very cold temperatures that could potentially facilitate prebiotic chemistry in conditions like those on the surface of Titan, especially in tidal pools near the large seas.

Is that exploding Red Dead Redemption sales I see in front of me?

If you have been reading any gaming news today, you've probably stumbled on one of dozens of articles headlined by the "fact" that sales of the Xbox 360 version of Red Dead Redemption are "up over 6,000 percent" at Amazon. The apparent cause: Rockstar confirming Tuesday that the game would be backward compatible with the Xbox One starting on Friday, July 8.

These two pieces of news are being taken together as evidence that the Xbox One's backward compatibility feature is immensely popular and that untold hordes of Xbox One owners (who apparently don't own a copy of the game for a last-generation system) have been clamoring for a chance to play Rockstar's 2010 Western classic. When you dig into the story a bit, though, the numbers aren't so clear cut.

First, you have to realize that Amazon's much-cited "Movers and Shakers" rankings, which are the source of all of these stories, don't actually measure sales increases directly. The big, green numbers that the media is quick to hype actually measure the relative increase in sales ranking position, which doesn't correlate directly to actual unit sales levels.

US Olympic rowers will be wearing Sunderland’s innovative seamless sports apparel at the Rio games this summer. (credit: Philadelphia University)

Today’s technology can do some pretty amazing things. It recently let us get up close and personal with Jupiter and even create low-fat chocolate. But, so far, it’s struggling with a new challenge—allowing athletes to safely play amid raw sewage.

Textile engineers at Philadelphia University announced last week that they’ve developed seamless, light-weight, antimicrobial suits for the US Olympic rowing team. In August, the team will wear the suits as they compete in the summer games in Rio de Janeiro, which is surrounded by water brimming with raw sewage, pollution, drug-resistant bacteria, virus loads up to 1.7 million times the level considered hazardous in the US, and a recent oil slick.

In a Berlin Hospital, Heil had infections scraped out of his skin without anaesthetic. (credit: Erik Heil)

To protect athletes, the new suits contain two layers: one that wicks water away from the skin and another that contains a chemical-based antimicrobial finish. The design is aimed at preventing illnesses, such as the severe drug-resistant, flesh-eating infections German sailor Erik Heil suffered on his legs and hip after racing in a test event in Rio last year.

Aston Martin

The AM-RB 001 shares a lead designer with the Red Bull Racing F1 car in the background—Adrian Newey.

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Seemingly, there comes a time in every great Formula 1 car designer's life when he (and sadly they are almost always a he) gets a little bored of the straightjacket of rules that bound creativity. Inevitably, thoughts soon turn to applying some of that race-bred knowledge to "the ultimate road car," sometimes to extremely good effect. Gordon Murray and the McLaren F1 is the best known example, although Ferrari's F50 deserves a mention too. Its V12 is based on an actual Formula 1 engine, and that engine is fully stressed (i.e. rigidly mounted to the carbon fiber tub, with the suspension attached to it). Now Adrian Newey and Red Bull Racing—along with Aston Martin—want to join this club with the AM-RB 001.

Now, Aston Martin is a company that is no stranger to the hypercar, having built the One-77 and more recently the Vulcan. But that car is not street legal. Its racing experience comes from competing against versions of the company's production cars at Le Mans and elsewhere. The AM-RB 001 on the other hand was born in more rarefied air, which is where Newey and Red Bull enter the picture.

Newey is probably the most successful engineer working in Formula 1 right now. His designs have won 10 World Drivers Championships and 10 World Constructors' Championships since 1991 (first at Williams, then McLaren, and with Red Bull Racing since 2006). But Formula 1 recently got a bit boring for Newey. Fears that he would leave (possibly for the challenge of working at Ferrari) earned him a pair of golden handcuffs from the team, with an expanded portfolio (Red Bull Advanced Technologies) giving him some creative freedom outside the sport.