Month: July 2016

(credit: Brian Wibbenmeyer)

A former executive for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, Christopher Correa, was sentenced Monday to 46 months in prison. In 2013, he successfully guessed a password to access an online database for confidential data held by another baseball team, the Houston Astros.

Correa pleaded guilty earlier this year to five counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a notorious 1980s-era hacking statute.

“You have made it harder for them to live their lives,” US District Judge Lynn N. Hughes said during the court hearing, referred to the necessity of tighter security around all of Major League Baseball.

(credit: Netflix)

It’s been a little over a year since HBO launched its streaming-only online platform HBO Now, and the network is declaring that investment, along with HBO Go and HBO On Demand, a success. On Monday, HBO sent around a press release saying that the digital platforms had been drivers of “record viewership,” especially with season six of Game of Thrones.

Netflix, on the other hand, was not so lucky. That staid bastion of cord-cutter viewership saw its “weakest subscriber expansion in two years,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Still, Netflix was able to keep content costs down enough to beat earnings expectations, the paper noted.

Both companies have threatened traditional pay-TV models in the past. Netflix was earliest on the scene, and HBO cut deals with its pay-TV partners to make a standalone HBO package a possibility.

A Google self-driving car. (credit: Google)

As the recent kerfuffle around Tesla's Autopilot has shown, we still have some way to go before everyone is on board with the idea of people being driven by their cars on public roads. Until we get to a point where fully autonomous (level 4) cars are capable of taking us from A to B with no human intervention beyond telling it the destination, self-driving cars are going to need a (relatively) alert human occupant in the driver's seat, ready to take control if necessary.

While it is true that many automakers are pushing for self-driving vehicles, they're not the only ones. Both in the US and elsewhere, governments are also gung-ho for the technology, as it has the potential to make a real dent in the annual death toll on our roads.

Over in Germany, Reuters reports that the country's transport ministry has issued a proposal that would allow for drivers of autonomous cars to relax their guard somewhat. They will have to remain seated behind the controls—so don't expect chairs that swivel out of the way just yet—and there will have to be on-board data recorders that log the car's autonomous behavior.

(credit: CDC)

An elderly Utah resident who contracted Zika virus while traveling abroad may have mysteriously passed the virus on to a family caretaker, according to health officials who are investigating the "unique" and "surprising" case.

Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed Monday that both the elderly resident, who died in late June, and the caretaker, who has recovered, had tested positive for the virus. Yet, it's unclear how the caretaker became ill; the caretaker hadn’t done either of the two things thought to put one at risk of infection—that is, travel to an area where mosquitoes are transmitting the virus, or have sex with an infected person.

With mosquitoes being the primary transmission route for the virus, the circumstances could suggest that mosquitoes in Utah were responsible for spreading the virus, possibly from the elderly resident. It would mark the first time mosquitoes have been found spreading the virus within the continental US. But that scenario is extremely unlikely, health experts cautioned, because the two types of mosquitoes that commonly spread Zika, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, aren’t present in the area in which the two Utah residents lived. However, the CDC is now testing local mosquitoes to absolutely rule out this possibility.

Artist's conception of the water snow line around V883 Orionis. (credit: A. Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF))

A team of researchers has imaged the water snow line in a forming exosolar system for the first time. The system in question, V883 Ori, is only about half a billion years old and is in an early stage of development, with planet formation probably not yet started. The observations, taken in radio wavelengths by the Atacama Large millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), identify where in the system it gets cool enough for water to freeze out into a solid, influencing the formation and composition of bodies within the exosolar system.

Liquid water can’t exist in space, so ice that gets close enough to its star or protostar will heat up enough to sublimate—going from its solid form straight to gas. The snow line is the distance from the protostar where this transition takes place. Other substances, like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, have their own snow lines at varying distances from the protostar; the one discussed here is for water.

It has been difficult to image snow lines previously because they’re so close to their protostar, usually within about five astronomical units (AU) of it. For comparison, the Earth is only one AU from the Sun.

"Welcome to America's hottest talk line. Ladies, to talk with interesting and exciting guys free, press 1 now. Press 1 now."

That's the greeting callers get when they dial the number on the back of their Maine electronic food-stamp card. Either the Maine Department of Health and Human Services has branched out into the phone-sex market or it's a misprint. Turns out the agency hasn't opened a sex line, and instead the phone number to reach the agency is off by one digit on the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards.

Agency spokesman John Martins told local media that the department is aware of the mistake, and it's being corrected.

We had a little makeover...

A few weeks ago we launched an ambitious new redesign aimed at improving the site's functionality and performance while putting in place the building blocks for new expansion plans, including secure browsing and more customized layout options. Ultimately, network and storage failures conspired against a full deployment of the site, so we reverted back to the old site and hardware configuration. We also vowed to not come back until we had addressed not only those issues, but some of the biggest concerns users had in the first day the site was (sort of) up. In no specific order, those were:

Page flow — The redesigned front page had too much white space, so it wasn't immediately clear how stories were moving down the page. We've scaled it back while still keeping a looser, less dense feel. Just want a simple list view? Switch to it! Simply click on the menu icon above (≡). Incidentally, there is where you can also find the Unified View, which shows stories from both Ars Technica and Ars Technica UK.

The dark theme — Longtime readers know that the original Ars color scheme was white text on a black background with orange and green accents. The passion for it is strong, and we've brought it back to the new design. You can make the switch via the menu icon above (≡).