Month: September 2016

Enlarge / Atlanta (credit: Microsoft)

ATLANTA—At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President for Cloud and Enterprise, explained that the company wants IT professionals to feel empowered and digitally transform the organizations. Accordingly, Microsoft is focusing on three areas to do this: security, intelligence, and the cloud.

The company announced a range of new security and data analytics features designed to make Windows, Office 365, and Azure run better. More importantly, they were designed, at least in part, to specifically make Windows 10 the safest, most secure place to work. Microsoft may be offering its software on more platforms than before, but while you don't have to use Windows, the company is suggesting you probably should.

The strongest example of this was the integration of Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDATP), which uses big data analysis to detect suspicious behavioral patterns that indicate a hacker or other security issue, and Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), which works to trap malicious URLs and attachments.

Enlarge / Plex on Amazon Drive. (credit: Plex)

Plex, a service for streaming video and other media from a home PC or NAS device, has teamed up with Amazon to help customers stream their content from the cloud.

Plex is a great tool for making movies, music, and photos available to just about any device, whether you're at home or traveling. But the home computer that holds your Plex content must be powered on and connected to the Internet in order for it to work. A power failure or Internet outage at home could thus leave a Plex user without any streaming content when they're traveling.

Plex Cloud, announced today, could solve that problem. "Plex Cloud eliminates the need to run your own local Plex Media Server and manage an always-on computer or NAS," the announcement said. "Let Amazon worry about nasty stuff like power failure, corruption, and data loss. It turns out they’re pretty good at that stuff!"

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It has been almost a year since The Wall Street Journal dropped a bomb of a scoop on the Android community, saying Chrome OS would be "folded into" Android. The resulting product would reportedly bring Android to laptops and desktops. According to the paper, the internal effort to merge these two OSes had been underway for "roughly two years" (now three years) with a release planned for 2017 and an "early version" to show things off in 2016. It seems like we're still on that schedule, and now Android Police claims to have details on the new operating system—and its first launch device—coming Q3 2017.

First up, we've got a host of new code names to throw at you. The hybrid OS is apparently called "Andromeda." Besides being the name of a galaxy, it's probably meant as a geeky portmanteau of "Android" and "Chrome." Google also has a launch device cooking for Andromeda, which is officially codenamed "Bison"—Android Police says this is the unofficial codename of "Pixel 3." "Pixel 3" is a reference to the "Chromebook Pixel" (Google's flagship laptop line for Chrome OS), but since this edition isn't running Chrome OS, you can't really call it a "Chromebook" anymore.

We've seen Android and Chrome OS slowly come together in various ways recently, with Chrome OS gaining the ability to run Android apps and Android snagging Chrome OS' dual partition update system. It's easy to see the hybrid OS reports as an overhyped version of these products, but Android Police says Andromeda is a "completely distinct effort" from what is currently public. "Andromeda is a much larger, more ambitious initiative that is being pursued via merging Chrome features into Android not vice versa" the report says. "It would be more accurate to say Bison [AKA the Pixel 3 laptop] will run Android [rather] than Chrome OS."

Enlarge / The new sign, "Ophiuchus," means "Snake Bearer." And who's got two thumbs and loves snakes? THIS GUY RIGHT HERE. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

According to a post on NASASpacePlace, everything we thought we knew about the influence the heavens have over our Earthly lives has been thrown into chaos. NASA has announced that the celestial sphere above us contains not twelve canonical zodiacal constellations, but 13. The heretofore overlooked constellation, Ophiuchus, is purported to guide and command events surrounding humans born between November 29 and December 17—so, if you used to be a Sagittarius, then congratulations: you’ve got a new sign, baby!

The addition of Ophiuchus—the snake bearer, in case you were wondering—has obvious and far-reaching implications for the entire western Babylonian-derived zodiac calendar. For one thing, squeezing it in means changing the effective dates of all the other signs. According to Yahoo News, the new 13-sign calendar plays out like this:

• Capricorn: January 20-February 16
• Aquarius: February 16-March 11
• Pisces: March 11-April 18
• Aries: April 18-May 13
• Taurus: May 13-June 21
• Gemini: June 21-July 20
• Cancer: July 20-August 10
• Leo: August 10-September 16
• Virgo: September 16-October 30
• Libra: October 30-November 23
• Scorpio: November 23-November 29
• Ophiuchus: November 29-December 17
• Sagittarius: December 17-January 20

The changes are as sweeping as they are staggering. For example, I woke up this morning firmly believing that I was an outgoing, courageous, independent, generous Leo. However, now I have to come to grips with the fact that I am in fact a stupid, sulky, inconsiderate, pessimistic Cancer. I have gone from lion to crab, and it weighs heavily upon me.

A social hangout website for teenage girls has sprung a leak that's exposing plaintext passwords protecting as many as 5.5 million user accounts. As this post went live, all attempts to get the leak plugged had failed.

Operators of i-Dressup didn't respond to messages sent by Ars informing them that a hacker has already downloaded more than 2.2 million of the improperly stored account credentials. The hacker said it took him about three weeks to obtain the cache and that there's nothing stopping him or others from downloading the entire database of slightly more than 5.5 million entries. The hacker said he acquired the e-mail addresses and passwords by using a SQL injection attack that exploited vulnerabilities in the i-Dressup website.

The hacker provided the 2.2 million account credentials both to Ars and breach notification service Have I Been Pwned?. By plugging randomly selected e-mail addresses into the forgotten password section of i-Dressup, both Ars and Have I Been Pwned? principal Troy Hunt found that they all were used to register accounts on the site. Ars then used the contact us page on i-Dressup to privately notify operators of the vulnerability, but more than five days later, no one has responded and the bug remains unfixed.

Update (Sept. 27): As expected, Microsoft has pulled Xbox One support from the emulator discussed below. Those that purchased and downloaded the app before the change can still use it on their systems, but new purchases can only use the app on Windows PC and mobile devices (and Windows Holographic, if they happen to have that).

Despite the change, the written description for the app still claims Xbox One support, leading to anger from some commenters on the Windows Store page. "I'm pissed," writes one commenter going by the handle jackson. "I just hear about this and I go to buy it so I can play some sweet n64 games but now the app doesn't run on Xbox. So either this gets updated, or I WANT A REFUND!"

Original story: In previous generations, if you wanted to emulate one game console on another, you'd generally have to use some sort of jailbreak or hack to install unauthorized homebrew apps on the system. Today, thanks in part to Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform, you can download a Nintendo 64 emulator to your Xbox One directly from Microsoft's official store.

In the seminal science fiction series Space Odyssey, novelist Arthur C. Clarke called attention to the Jovian moon Europa’s special place in the Solar System. At the end of the series’ second novel, 2010: Odyssey Two, a spaceship sent to the Jupiter system receives a message from aliens: “All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.” In data released publicly Monday NASA didn't get quite such a declarative message from the intriguing moon, but the new information is nonetheless thrilling.

For the second time during the last five years, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what are likely water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. When they observed the moon in the far ultraviolet spectrum in 2014, they observed water vapor emissions during three out of 10 sessions. This indicates the existence of periodic jets of water emanating from the moon's interior. If the plumes do, in fact, emerge and rain down on the surface, it may be significantly easier for scientists to study the moon's interior ocean. "Europa is a world of great interest," Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said during a news conference Monday. That would seem to be an understatement.

Why this matters

Monday's news is significant because it comes as NASA is taking formative steps toward launching a pair missions to Europa in the 2020s—an orbiter to scout the moon, and a lander that will follow a couple of years later. The same engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California who masterminded Curiosity's landing on Mars have turned their attention toward how best to land a probe on Europa's icy surface. And it is no easy feat. The moon creaks as Jupiter’s gravitation bulk rends its frozen surface in deep crevasses, pushing and pulling the ice upward and downward by tens of meters every few days. And with only a very tenuous atmosphere, it is cold: -210 degrees Celsius. The radiation from nearby Jupiter would kill a human in a matter of hours or days.