Month: August 2016

The virtual reality market is still new enough that we're seeing plenty of experimentation and iterative design work on the hardware itself. So it's not a huge surprise that Samsung and Oculus are out with a new, redesigned version of the Gear VR, even though it has been less than a year since the device was officially launched as a consumer product (and less than two years since the early "Innovator Edition" hit stores).

For the most part, the new Gear VR works like the old Gear VR. You still use certain Samsung Galaxy phones (anything since the Galaxy Note 5 will work) to provide the display and processing guts. The Gear VR headset itself still provides some crucial extra processing for tracking the angle of your head and a touchpad on the side for basic in-app controls (you can also use bluetooth controllers for more complex games). The Gear VR still can't track your head's position in space, though, so when you lean forward in a Gear VR app, the whole world comes with you in a nauseating fashion.

The main reason for the redesign is the launch of Samsung's Galaxy Note 7, which sports a USB Type-C connection that isn't compatible with last year's Gear VR model. The new Gear VR sports a Type-C docking dongle on the front by default, but that can be slid out and easily replaced with an older USB micro dock for compatibility with older Galaxy phones. The pass-through charging slot on the underside of the Gear VR is also USB Type-C now, though the headset comes with a tiny adapter to take a charge through older cables.

After weeks of rumors and unconfirmed reports, European scientists have officially announced the discovery of an Earth-sized world around the closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri. Although the planet theoretically orbits its star in a region where water could exist as a liquid on its surface, no direct information can be gleaned about whether Proxima b has an atmosphere, water, or other characteristics that would increase its habitability. Nonetheless, it is tantalizing to imagine a habitable world so close to home.

The existence of a likely terrestrial world orbiting Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years from the Sun and part of a three-star system that includes two distant members, Alpha Centauri A and B, has been speculated about for some time. That's because Guillem Anglada-Escudé, an astronomer at the Queen Mary University of London, and colleagues used spectrograph data from the European Southern Observatory in Chile during the 2000s to discern a wobble in the star’s movement.

Then, earlier this year, with a concerted observing program over 60 nights at the observatory, they gathered additional data to rule out other explanations for Proxima Centauri's wobbling, such as flares or other stellar activity. It had to be the gravitational effect of a nearby planet. “Statistically, there can be no doubt now,” Anglada-Escudé said during a telephone news briefing about the findings, published Wednesday in Nature.

Airlander 10's second test flight, which took place this morning, ended with the giant airship nosediving into the ground. The cockpit was damaged, but Hybrid Air Vehicles says the crew members are "safe and well."

HAV told Ars that the flight lasted for 100 minutes and that it "completed all the planned tasks." HAV said the incident was not an unplanned dealtitudinal craft-terrafirma conflict, but rather "a heavy landing" as the craft returned to Cardington Airfield.

HAV said it will now run through a "robust set of procedures for flight test activities and investigation of issues" to work out what went wrong. We'll update this story when the company releases more info.

Enlarge / From an upcoming paper laying out a new attack against 64-bit block ciphers used by HTTPS and OpenVPN. (credit: Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaëtan Leurent)

Researchers have devised a new attack that can decrypt secret session cookies from about 1 percent of the Internet's HTTPS traffic and could affect about 600 of the Internet's most visited sites, including nasdaq.com, walmart.com, match.com, and ebay.in.

The attack isn't particularly easy to carry out because it requires an attacker to have the ability to monitor traffic passing between the end user and one of the vulnerable websites and to also control JavaScript on a webpage loaded by the user's browser. The latter must be done either by actively manipulating an HTTP response on the wire or by hosting a malicious website that the user is tricked into visiting. The JavaScript then spends the next 38 hours collecting about 785GB worth of data to decrypt the cookie, which allows the attacker to log into the visitor's account from another browser. A related attack against OpenVPN requires 18 hours and 705GB of data to recover a 16-byte authentication token.

Impractical no more

Despite the difficulty in carrying out the attack, the researchers said it works in their laboratory and should be taken seriously. They are calling on developers to stop using legacy 64-bit block-ciphers. For transport layer security, the protocol websites use to create encrypted HTTPS connections, that means disabling the Triple DES symmetric key cipher, while for OpenVPN it requires retiring a symmetric key cipher known as Blowfish. Ciphers with larger block sizes, such as AES, are immune to the attack.

Enlarge (credit: The Last Ship, Warner Bros Television)

A massive leak of documents on India’s new military submarines from French shipbuilder DCNS is the result of a hack, the country's defence minister said on Wednesday.

Manohar Parrikar claimed, according to local reports, that the entire designs of its Scorpene submarines hadn't been disclosed. “First step is to identify if its related to us, and anyway its not all 100 percent leak,” he was quoted as saying.

The documents were made public by The Australian on Tuesday, which described the breach as an “Edward Snowden-sized leak.”