Month: September 2016

The first consumer virtual reality headset for a game console is coming to stores on October 13, but it has already arrived in Ars Technica's orbiting HQ. Yes, a full two-and-a-half years after our first trade show demo, the PlayStation VR is in our hands and currently hooked up to our PS4 and TV via way too many wires.

Out of the box, our very first impression in how comfortable and easy to put on the headset is. The rear headband extends out quite far on its slider, with a strong elastic springiness to snap it back to the underside of the back of your skull. From there, a quick turn of a knob on the back tightens the headset for a precise fit.

On the front, the headset's weight is supported by a large, heavily padded, semisphere that rests comfortably on your upper forehead, far away from any sensitive nasal passages. The display itself floats free in front of your eyes rather than resting heavily on your nose, and it can slide forward and back by simply depressing a button. Thin, flexible rubber light blockers bend around the sides of the face and nose to lock out any outside distractions once the display is aligned properly.

Enlarge (credit: Antoine Taveneaux)

A controversial broker of security exploits is offering $1.5 million (£1.2 million) for attacks that work against fully patched iPhones and iPads, a bounty that's triple the size of its previous one.

Zerodium also doubled, to $200,000, the amount it will pay for attacks that exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities in Google's competing Android operating system, and the group raised the amount for so-called zeroday exploits in Adobe's Flash media player to $80,000 from $50,000. After buying the working exploits, the company then sells them to government entities, which use them to spy on suspected criminals, terrorists, enemies, and other targets.

Last year, Zerodium offered $1 million for iOS exploits, up to a total of $3 million. It dropped the price to $500,000 after receiving and paying for three qualifying submissions. On Thursday, Zerodium founder Chaouki Bekrar said the higher prices are a response to improvements the software makers—Apple and Google in particular—have devised that make their wares considerably harder to compromise.

Enlarge / Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden are seated inside a mock-up of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. Chris Ferguson, of Boeing, describes the interior of the spacecraft. (credit: NASA)

Senior managers in NASA’s International Space Station program have begun internal discussions about the possibility of buying additional Soyuz seats for US astronauts in 2019, two sources have told Ars. Although any final decision will likely come after the presidential election, the issue is “on people’s minds” at Johnson Space Center as confidence in operational commercial crew flights beginning from US soil by or before 2019 is shaky.

Ars understands that NASA has not formally broached the topic with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency which builds the Soyuz spacecraft and rockets and manages their launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Negotiations would need to begin fairly soon, however, as it typically takes as long as three years of lead time for the Russians to manufacture additional launch vehicles.

Uncertainty in the production timelines for Boeing and SpaceX, which are both developing capsules to carry humans to the space station, has driven contingency discussions about additional seats at the Houston-based space center. Publicly, NASA has maintained the hope that at least one private vehicle would be capable of operational missions by the end of 2017 or early 2018. Boeing has already slipped its schedule into early 2018, however. SpaceX has maintained the possibility of a later 2017 launch date, but with its recent accident, delays seem inevitable. Privately, NASA planners are concerned about additional delays that might slip those schedules further, into 2019.

Enlarge / Chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee Lamar Smith, R-Texas. (credit: Getty Images)

From his position as Chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) has seen fit to wade into oil giant Exxon Mobil’s legal troubles in a big way. Several state attorneys general—most notably New York AG Eric Schneiderman—are seeking records from Exxon following news stories detailing Exxon’s own climate research in the 1970s and 1980s. After its own research found that climate change was clearly linked to fossil fuel burning, Exxon shuttered that research and began publicly promoting doubt over global warming.

The investigations are looking into whether Exxon effectively misled its investors about the company’s risks—just as tobacco companies were found to have done in the 1990s.

Last week, it was discovered that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been following the Exxon investigation and seeking records from the company itself. The Wall Street Journal reported that the SEC was interested in how Exxon values its assets as climate policies grow stronger, as well as “Exxon’s longstanding practice of not writing down the value of its oil and gas reserves when prices fall.”

Microsoft wants to "democratize artificial intelligence" and bring AI to systems that everyone uses. So to reflect that desire, the company is shaking up its organization. The company is creating a new group, the AI and Research Group, by combining the existing Microsoft Research group with the Bing and Cortana product groups, along with the teams working on ambient computing (a world in which everything around us is computerized and connected and responsive to our presence), robotics, and the Information Platform Group (which covered both Bing advertising and natural user interfaces).

Together, the new AI and Research Group will have some 5,000 engineers and computer scientists. It will be lead by 20-year Microsoft veteran Harry Shum, who was previously the Executive Vice President of Technology and Research. It makes AI into a fourth engineering group, alongside Windows, Office, and Azure.

Microsoft has been pushing more intelligent services. For consumers, these include Skype Translator, Cortana, and, rather less successfully, its Tay chatbot. And the Cortana Intelligence Suite for businesses and developers has provided the option to add machine learning, image recognition, and similar capabilities to various applications. Uber is a recent client of this: it's using Microsoft's facial recognition service to ensure that drivers are using their own accounts, requiring them to take a selfie at the start of each session which is then compared to one on file. Earlier this week, the company also demonstrated the use of reprogrammable chips to accelerate AI-style neural net workloads on its Azure cloud computing service to perform high-speed text translation.

Enlarge / Portrait of Asian-American band The Slants (L-R: Joe X Jiang, Ken Shima, Tyler Chen, Simon 'Young' Tam, Joe X Jiang) in Old Town Chinatown, Portland, Oregon, in 2015. (credit: Anthony Pidgeon via Getty Images)

The Supreme Court on Thursday said it would decide, once and for all, whether federal intellectual property regulators can refuse to issue trademarks with disparaging or inappropriate names.

At the center of the issue is a section of trademark law that actually forbids the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from approving a trademark if it "consists of or comprises immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter; or matter which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute."

The case before the justices, which they will hear sometime in the upcoming term beginning in October, concerns the Portland-based Asian-American rock band called the Slants. Previously, decisions have come down on both sides regarding trademarking offensive names. The most notable denial is likely the name of the NFL's Washington franchise, "Redskins." But lesser known denials include "Stop the Islamization of America," "The Christian Prostitute," "AMISHHOMO," "Mormon Whiskey," "Ride Hard Retard," "Abort the Republicans," and "Democrats Shouldn't Breed."

Enlarge / Looks like a great place for a chemistry lab. Now if only FedEx would deliver the raw materials. (credit: NASA)

Elon Musk is proposing a ton of audacious things to get to Mars before the 2020s are over. But perhaps the most striking feature of his plan is the simplest. He's not just sending people to Mars; he's planning on bringing them back.

At this point, every journey to Mars has been a one-way trip. NASA is only just now planning a rover for a 2020 launch that will gather samples for return to Earth—how we're going to get the small collection of samples back hasn't yet been specified. By contrast, Musk intends to return everything: the people, the ship, and presumably any souvenirs that clear customs. That intention is going to require radically rethinking the approach.

One of the key things that will have to change is what our hardware does once it gets there. So far, all our equipment has been designed to sample the chemistry that's present (though that will change on the 2020 rover—we'll have more on that in an upcoming story). Musk's plan envisions creating a chemical factory on the red planet, one that makes all the fuel needed to get back off the surface and return a ship to Earth.

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 21: Mylan Inc. CEO Heather Bresch holds up a 2-pack of EpiPen as she testifies during a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee September 21, 2016 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The committee held a hearing on "Reviewing the Rising Price of EpiPens." (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) (credit: Getty | Alex Wong)

Over the nine or so years that Mylan, Inc. has been selling—and hiking the price—of EpiPens, the drug company has been misclassifying the life-saving device and stiffing Medicaid out of full rebate payments, federal regulators told Ars.

Under the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program, drug manufacturers, such as Mylan, can get their products covered by Medicaid if they agree to offer rebates to the government to offset costs. With a brand-name drug such as the EpiPen, which currently has no generic versions and has patent protection, Mylan was supposed to classify the drug as a “single source,” or brand name drug. That would mean Mylan is required to offer Medicaid a rebate of 23.1 percent of the costs, plus an “inflation rebate” any time that Mylan raises the price of the brand name drug at a rate higher than inflation.

Mylan has opted for such price increased—a lot. Since Mylan bought the rights to EpiPen in 2007, it has raised the price on 15 separate occasions, bringing the current list price to $608 for a two-pack up from about $50 a pen in 2007.That’s an increase of more than 500 percent, which easily beats inflation.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a number of deals to share today. We have an early deal on the new Amazon Fire TV Stick—now you can preorder the streaming device, which features an updated processor and an included Alexa-enabled remote, and get a $10 Amazon credit, two months of Hulu, and one month of Sling TV for just $40. This is a steal for everything that you're getting, especially considering the original Fire TV Stick was incredibly popular. With the new model, you'll get more power and the flexibility of using the remote with Alexa voice-controlled features.

Check out the full list of deals below, too.

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Lee Cheng is one of the few attorneys to fight back against patent trolls and prevail. And at the latest Ars Live event, we talked to him about his most famous case, how people can fight patent trolls today, and what the future of patent abuse will look like in coming decades. His answers, as expected, were incredibly candid and hilarious.

In 2007, a patent troll known as Soverain had already gotten millions of dollars out of The Gap and Amazon for their online shopping cart patent when they hit Newegg with a suit. Cheng's colleagues in the legal community said you'd better just pay up—this patent is legit. Cheng didn't see it that way. Newegg had just reached a billion in sales, and he thought this piece of litigation would be the first of many lawsuits brought by companies that wanted a piece of Newegg's success. And sure enough, soon after the shopping cart claim, Newegg was hit with patent claims on several aspects of online search. Cheng decided he wasn't going to lie down and take it. He thought he could win on appeal if he could just make it through the courts in the Eastern District of Texas, where 40 percent of patent infringement claims are brought.