Month: September 2016

Enlarge / To understand goats, you have to walk like them. Or something.

I'm the Ars correspondent responsible for the Nobel Prize coverage. And each autumn, the fact that they're coming up tends to slip my mind until a very specific moment: the announcement of the Ig Nobel Prizes, organized by the Annals of Improbable Research. Each year, honorees are cited for doing scientific work that, at first glance, seems devoid of sane motivation. But sometimes (not always) a more careful look at their work shows that it's getting at a serious scientific issue, if perhaps in a baroque or roundabout way.

This year's awards, handed out at a ceremony that traditionally includes everything from a mini-opera to a Nobel Laureate acting as an official Sweeper of Paper Airplanes, was no exception. I'm partial to the science behind figuring out the brand personality of rocks, since it adds rigor to a field that was apparently lacking it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here, in no particular order, are the honorees.

The New York Times released cellphone footage on Friday showing the confusion leading up to the Tuesday shooting death of a black man by Charlotte police.

The two-minute footage, which does not show the shooting itself, was taken by the wife of the victim, Keith Lamont Scott. The development comes a day after Charlotte's police chief said the department would not publicly release video footage of Smith's shooting that was captured by police body and dash cams.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Chief Kerr Putney, however, did allow the family to view the police footage on Thursday. The family said the video could not conclusively demonstrate whether the victim had a handgun, as police have said.

Enlarge / Rep. Mike Honda (pictured here) sued his challenger, Ro Khanna, "Ro for Congress," and Brian Parvizshahi, Khanna's former campaign manager, on Thursday. (credit: Bill Clark / Getty Images News)

Mike Honda, the congressman who represents a large portion of Silicon Valley, has sued his political opponent, Ro Khanna, under a federal anti-hacking law known as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Khanna, a former Department of Commerce official, is trying to unseat Honda in the upcoming November 2016 election. Honda, who has been a member of the House of Representatives for 15 years, previously defeated Khanna in a tight race in 2014.

The lawsuit claims that Brian Parvizshahi, who was Khanna’s campaign manager until Thursday evening, worked as an intern for a Honda campaign fundraising firm, Arum Group, for just a few weeks in the summer of 2012. However, when Parvizshahi left Arum Group, his access to a Dropbox account that included data on thousands of donors was not revoked.

The Google OnHub, Google's now old router? (credit: Ron Amadeo)

As part of Google's multi-device release extravaganza on October 4, Android Police claims Google is going to launch a Wi-Fi router. Another Wi-Fi router.

Google's current Wi-Fi router is the Google OnHub, a $200, single-port router that was released over a year ago. Google promised that the OnHub would receive regular updates, and while minor bugfixes and security updates were provided, much of the hardware is still left unactivated: the USB port still doesn't work, and the included smart home antennas are still dormant. Popular user-requested features like IPv6 support and NAT loopback never arrived, either.

Now Google is apparently poised to release a new Wi-Fi router, simply called "Google Wi-Fi." Android Police says the new router looks like a "white Amazon Echo Dot"—so a hockey puck with a light on top—and it costs $129. The site also says the router will have mesh Wi-Fi capabilities, meaning you can buy more than one and link them together for better coverage.

Enlarge

Apple released iOS 10.0.2 to the general public today, the first update for iOS 10 since it was released last week (10.0.1, not 10.0, was the version number of the first public build).

The update's main fix is for the Lightning-to-3.5mm dongle that ships with the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. Headsets plugged into the dongle could become unresponsive if plugged into an idle phone for more than five or so minutes. Getting the headset and any volume or playback controls to work again required unplugging the dongle and plugging it back in. With today's update, that should no longer be a problem.

The update also solves a problem that caused the Photos app to crash when enabling iCloud Photo Library and a problem that prevented app extensions from being enabled.

(credit: Jeff Pachoud/Getty Images)

UPDATE 4:52pm PDT: The judge presiding over the case on Friday neither held Oracle's attorney in contempt or issued any sanctions. Instead, the judge ruled that issuing such an order would be "heavy handed." (PDF) The judge ordered that Oracle would have to pay for Google's expenses in its successful bid to seal the transcript of the lawyer's courtroom disclosure—an amount that will be determined later.

ORIGINAL STORY:

The federal judge who presided over the Google-Oracle API copyright infringement trial excoriated one of Oracle's lawyers Thursday for disclosing confidential information in open court earlier this year. The confidential information included financial figures stating that Google generated $31 billion in revenue and $22 billion in profits from the Android operating system in the wake of its 2008 debut. The Oracle attorney, Annette Hurst, also revealed another trade secret: Google paid Apple $1 billion in 2014 to include Google search on iPhones.

Enlarge / A photo of First Lady Michelle Obama's passport from a dump of the e-mail of White House contractor Ian Mellul. Mellul's password may have been in a 2013 Adobe user data breach.

On September 21, a dump of an e-mail account belonging to a White House contractor was posted to the "hacktivist" website DCleaks.com. This is the same site that already revealed e-mails from former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Navy captain leading a weapons procurement program, and a public relations person who has done advance work for Hillary Clinton. The latest victim did advance work for travel by First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Attributing the leak will be difficult because, as with previous "dumps" published on DCleaks, the compromised account's password information was widely available on the Internet from a previous data breach.

An unnamed US intelligence official was quoted by NBC News as calling the leak of contractor Ian Mellul's e-mails "the most damaging compromise of the security of the president of the United States that I've seen in decades"—one caused by the use of an outside personal e-mail account for government business. The e-mails included full scans Mellul had forwarded to himself from a White House e-mail account of passports, including Michelle Obama's. Mellul likely forwarded the e-mails to his Gmail account because he couldn't access White House mail offsite without a secure device.

Government sources have described DCleaks.com as being connected to Russian intelligence organizations. But just about anyone could have gotten into Ian Mellul's e-mail if he was using the same password for his Gmail account that was exposed in a 2013 breach of Adobe user data—just as was Navy Captain Carl Pistole's. The accounts of Powell and of Sarah Hamilton were both leaked as part of a 2012 breach of Dropbox's user data, according to data from HaveIBeenPwned.

Enlarge / Screen grab of SpaceX static fire anomaly from YouTube video. (credit: USLaunchReport.com)

On Friday, SpaceX released an update on its investigation into the recent loss of its Falcon 9 rocket (the rocket exploded on September 1 at its Florida-based launch pad and took its Israeli satellite payload with it). After a preliminary review, the company has tentatively found that a "large breach in the cryogenic helium system of the second stage liquid oxygen tank took place." The breach occurred during propellant loading in advance of a static fire test, in which the vehicle's engines are fired before launch to ensure their readiness.

While this represents a step forward, SpaceX still has not identified the root cause of the accident. The company has, however, concluded that the problem is not related to the June 2016 loss of another Falcon 9 rocket in flight, which also failed because of an upper-stage incident. "All plausible causes are being tracked in an extensive fault tree and carefully investigated," the company stated in its update. "Through the fault tree and data review process, we have exonerated any connection with last year's CRS-7 mishap."

According to SpaceX, the biggest challenge with investigating the September 1 accident is that the failure happened during a very short period of time. Just 93 milliseconds passed between the initial sign of an anomaly to a loss of data. An accident investigation team, including officials from SpaceX, the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, the US Air Force, and the industry continues to look at 3,000 channels of data from this short time period, as well as debris and photographs that have been collected.

Enlarge / No, not really, Capcom. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

On Thursday, Street Fighter V's first "season" concluded with a downloadable update that included the game's 22nd fighting character. (If you're curious: the new guy is Urien, a tall fellow who first appeared in Street Fighter III wearing only a thong.) But the download updated more than just the game's roster. It also brought apparent sweeping changes to the PC version—which now demands kernel access from players before every single boot of the game.

Windows' User Account Control (UAC) system warns computer users when an application wants to write or delete sensitive files, and, in the case of PC games, you typically only see these warnings during installations. SFV's Thursday patch, however, apparently includes "an updated anti-crack solution" that Capcom insists is "not DRM" but rather an anti-cheating protocol. The anti-crack solution is causing a UAC prompt to pop up for the PC version's users. (Our own Aurich Lawson confirmed the news by booting the latest patched version; his error message appears above.)

Unfortunately, Capcom's public-facing messages about PC version "hacks" have not been about cheats but about players finding workarounds to unlocking in-game content. In July, Capcom issued a stern warning to any PC player who found alternate ways to unlock Street Fighter's alternate costumes, which normally require grinding through the game's lengthy "survival" modes. Capcom producers also condemned PC players who used characters hidden in that game's version before they were officially released. Thursday's patch notes mentioned that the new anti-crack solution is particularly targeted at "illicitly obtaining in-game currency and other entitlements" (so it's, you know, DRM).