Month: August 2016

(credit: Getty Images | DonNichols)

The second quarter of each year is generally bad for pay-TV companies, but subscriber losses this year reached new heights.

The 11 biggest pay-TV providers in the US, representing 95 percent of the market, lost 665,000 net video subscribers in Q2 2016, Leichtman Research Group reported today. This is more than double the losses of two years ago. Previously, the companies lost 545,000 subscribers in Q2 2015, 300,000 in Q2 2014, and 350,000 in Q2 2013.

This year's Q2 net losses "surpass[ed] the previous quarterly low set in last year's second quarter," said the research group president, Bruce Leichtman. The group has been tracking the industry since 2002.

A Tennessee county whose sheriff praised Jesus on the Bradley County department's Facebook page—and then deleted negative comments about the post—is settling a federal First Amendment lawsuit for $41,000.

Sheriff Eric Watson wrote a post titled "He is risen..." on Easter, prompting a lawsuit by an atheist group and unnamed local residents in the eastern county of about 100,000. The deal calls for $15,000 in damages to be paid to the American Atheists organization and other plaintiffs in addition to $26,000 in legal fees.

"This settlement is a clear win for the plaintiffs, whose First Amendment rights to free speech and to be free of government establishment of religion were infringed upon," Amanda Knief, the legal and policy director of American Atheists, said in a statement. "We are pleased the sheriff has agreed to do the right thing by no longer using this official government social media account to promote religion."

This movie has everything that a nerd could possibly desire: spaceships, astronauts, and a group of brilliant mathematicians who made NASA's Apollo mission possible.

Hidden Figures focuses on the achievements of Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji Henson from Person of Interest and Empire), winner of the 2015 National Medal of Freedom. Johnson is a retired mathematician at NASA whose work helped plot the trajectories of orbiting spacecraft. It's your classic "nerd genius makes good" tale, as teachers helped discover the young Johnson's incredible math skills that eventually led to her meteoric rise (and college at the age of 15). She was so brilliant that NASA hired her out of graduate school in the 1950s—even though she lived at a time when black women were rarely welcomed into the science and engineering professions.

What I love about this story is how it celebrates the minds behind the space program. Based on a book that comes out next month, Hidden Figures is also a personal story about Johnson's struggles and her friendships with two other black women working at NASA, engineer Mary Jackson (the incredible Janelle Monáe) and mathematician Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer). But most of all, this is just one of those feel-good geek stories about how math can actually change the world. Hidden Figures should make for a fascinating companion piece to movies like Apollo 13 and Gravity, which celebrate astronauts while putting scientists mostly into the background. Possibly only The Martian has thus far successfully shown the drama of science unfolding alongside the drama of being an astronaut (and that was science fiction, of course, rather than a retelling of actual events).

Today, Microsoft released official support for Minecraft on the Oculus Rift VR headset, making good on a promise that was made 11 months ago. That official support, however, helped lead to the end of a popular mod that has been letting players experience Minecraft on the Rift for years now.

"Now that Microsoft/Mojang have released VR support for MCPE/Win10 Minecraft, they are exercising their rights over our unofficial mod (Minecrift)," mod co-creator mabrowning wrote on Reddit. "I received notice a few days ago that I can no longer use the name 'Minecrift' or the minecraft-vr.com domain. I've already shutdown the website, but anyone who wants to get a copy of the code should grab it from GitHub before that goes offline, too."

Later in the thread, mabrowning clarified that Microsoft's problem was merely with the name of the Minecrift project and the minecrift-vr.com domain that hosted it. To be fair to Microsoft, names like Minecrift and Minecraft-VR do seem to carry a high chance of being legitimately confused with the new official "Minecraft for Rift" product (it's somewhat admirable that Microsoft didn't take exception to the name before now, in fact).

(credit: Ron Amadeo)

An estimated 80 percent of Android phones contain a recently discovered vulnerability that allows attackers to terminate connections and, if the connections aren't encrypted, inject malicious code or content into the parties' communications, researchers from mobile security firm Lookout said Monday.

As Ars reported last Wednesday, the flaw first appeared in version 3.6 of the Linux operating system kernel, which was introduced in 2012. In a blog post published Monday, Lookout researchers said that the Linux flaw appears to have been introduced into Android version 4.4 (aka KitKat) and remains present in all future versions, including the latest developer preview of Android Nougat. That tally is based on the Android install base as reported by statistics provider Statista, and it would mean that about 1.4 billion Android devices, or about 80 percent of users, are vulnerable.

"The tl;dr is for Android users to ensure they are encrypting their communications by using VPNs, [or] ensuring the sites they go to are encrypted," Lookout researcher Andrew Blaich told Ars. "If there's somewhere they're going to that they don't want tracked, always ensure they're encrypted."

(credit: HEI Hotels & Resorts)

The chain that owns Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt, and Intercontinental hotels—HEI Hotels & Resorts—said this weekend that the payment systems for 20 of its locations had been infected with malware that may have been able to steal tens of thousands of credit card numbers and corresponding customer names, expiration dates, and verification codes. HEI claims that it did not lose control of any customer PINs, as they are not collected by the company’s systems.

Still, HEI noted on its website that it doesn’t store credit card details either. “We believe that the malware may have accessed payment card information in real-time as it was being inputted into our systems,” the company said.

The breach appears to have hit 20 HEI Hotels, and in most cases, the malware appears to have been active from December 2, 2015 to June 21, 2016. In a few cases, hotels may have been affected as early as March 1, 2015. According to a statement on HEI’s website, the malware affected point-of-sale (POS) terminals at the affected properties, but online booking and other online transactions were not affected.

(credit: Getty | Tom Pennington)

After a week of trying to part with green tides in two outdoor swimming pools, Olympic officials over the weekend wrung out a fresh mea culpa and yet another explanation—neither of which were comforting.

According to officials, a local pool-maintenance worker mistakenly added 160 liters of hydrogen peroxide to the waters on August 5, which partially neutralized the chlorine used for disinfection. With chlorine disarmed, the officials said that “organic compounds”—i.e. algae and other microbes—were able to grow and turn the water a murky green in the subsequent days.

The revelation appears to contradict officials’ previous assurances that despite the emerald hue, which first appeared Tuesday, the waters were safe.

(credit: Getty Images)

The owner of a patent on podcasting is hoping to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Personal Audio and its owner, Jim Logan, lost their patent last year after lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed the US Patent and Trademark Office that various types of Internet broadcasts pre-date the patent, which claims a 1996 priority date.

The podcasting patent became famous and received national media attention after it was used to sue several high-profile podcasters, including Adam Carolla, who raised $500,000 and fought back for a time before reaching a settlement in 2014. Personal Audio had also sued several big TV networks, and its case against CBS went to a jury in September 2014. The jury found the patent valid and awarded Personal Audio $1.3 million, a victory that Personal Audio's lawyers have noted in their appeal arguments.