Month: September 2016

An artist's rendering of the orbital rings of Space Belt—a private data network built on laser-linked satellites set to start launching next year.

In what may be the oddest news I report on this year, an organization offering cryptocurrency to promote solar power generation has signed a deal to purchase data center capacity in space in order to secure its blockchain wallets from hacking. The SolarCoin Foundation—a "global rewards program" for solar power generators launched in 2014 that awards blockchain currency for each megawatt-hour of electricity generated—has agreed to acquire orbital data storage capacity on the satellite-data centers of SpaceBelt, the planned orbital data communication, processing, and storage service from satellite startup Cloud Constellation.

In an interview with Ars in May, Cloud Constellation CEO Scott Sobhani explained that SpaceBelt would consist of a network of satellites linked by laser communications, providing a 10-gigabit dedicated orbital network backbone. The satellites, operating in a mix of relatively low orbits, would also provide a cross-connect for a variety of existing satellite communications frequencies. SpaceBelt will apparently include a "unique blockchain technology," according to a press release announcing the deal with SolarCoin, that somehow secures blockchain wallets better by putting them in space.

"SolarCoin will be able to provide its customers with an inviolable record of their transactions, and parties can be recorded and viewed via the internet," a Cloud Constellation spokesperson said in the company's statement on the deal. "[SolarCoin Foundation] will purchase space on the SpaceBelt network to securely host its Cold Storage Vault and protect its $5 billion treasury of SolarCoin currency. When operational, SolarCoin will be the first currency transaction sent to and from space."

Enlarge / The iPhone 5 running iOS 10. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

I’ve been tracking the performance of new iOS versions on the slowest supported hardware for four years now, and I don’t think my findings have been positive since I wrote about iOS 6 on the iPhone 3GS. iOS 7 was a bad fit for the iPhone 4, and iOS 7.1 was only an improvement in a relative sense. iOS 8 and iOS 9 were tolerable on the iPhone 4S, but they were still significant slowdowns compared to iOS 6 and 7.

But we have some reason to be optimistic about iOS 10 on the iPhone 5. The phone is more than twice as fast as the 4S and has double the RAM. Its screen is the same size and resolution as the one in the just-launched iPhone SE, so you know that Apple and all other app developers are still fine-tuning their apps for it.

So how enthusiastic should iPhone 5 and 5C owners be about iOS 10? Can you get the new features without worrying about a slowdown, or should you give Apple some more time to optimize (or more money for another phone)?

Reusing four-year-old passwords from MySpace for GitHub? (credit: ABC Photo Archives / Getty Images)

Plaintext passwords, usernames, e-mail addresses, and a wealth of other personal information has been published for more than 2.2 million people who created accounts with ClixSense, a site that claims to pay users for viewing ads and completing online surveys. The people who dumped it say they're selling data for another 4.4 million accounts.

Troy Hunt, operator of the breach notification service Have I Been Pwned?, said he reviewed the file and concluded it almost certainly contains data taken from ClixSense. Besides unhashed passwords and e-mail addresses, the dump includes users' dates of birth, sex, first and last names, home addresses, IP addresses, account balances, and payment histories.

A post advertising the leaked data said it was only a sample of personal information taken from a compromised database of more than 6.6 million ClixSense user accounts. The post said that the larger, unpublished data set also includes e-mails and was being sold for an undisclosed price. While the message posted over the weekend to PasteBin.com has since been removed, the two sample database files remained active at the time this post was being prepared. The Pastebin post, which was published on Saturday and taken down a day or two later, read in part:

Enlarge / Evolution in action, as distinct lineages leave traces while they expand into new habitats. (credit: Harvard Medical School)

For most species we see, evolution is a slow process, requiring generations to show its effects. But the species we can't see—bacteria and other microbes—can go through dozens of generations in a single day. For them, evolution can be a rapid process, as antibiotic resistance has made us painfully aware.

That's why researchers often use bacteria to study evolutionary processes. In perhaps the most famous experiment, a single lab has now sent E. coli through tens of thousands of generations of competing with each other for limited resources and has tracked the resulting changes on the DNA level.

But evolution isn't always a constant competition of all against all, as takes place in these experiments. Instead, you get migrations and exploitation of new habitats, allowing rare founders to spawn entire populations. Now, a research team has figured out a nice way to study founder dynamics in a bacterial culture and has consequently allowed the branching of evolutionary lineages to be watched like a movie.

Enlarge / SO MUCH! (credit: Archive.org)

Gamers of a certain age will remember a time when free game demos were a key part of video game marketing and distribution. It started in the early '90s, when free shareware demos of games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom cemented the practice of giving away the first chapter of a game to encourage a full purchase. It continued with the abundant demo discs that came bundled with many early CD and DVD-based systems and which came packaged with official magazines throughout their runs. And it continued into the online console era, when every Xbox Live Arcade game was required to have a free demo version alongside it.

Free game demos still exist, of course, but they're not quite so compulsory for publishers, and they can be downright difficult to find on modern consoles. A couple of recent news stories have shown that the humble old game demo might still have some life left in it, though.

The first case is Sony's upcoming PlayStation VR headset, which Sony announced today will come packed with a demo disc sporting teasers for 18 different VR experiences (sorry, European readers, but you only get eight demos on your disc). In a blog post announcing the demo disc, Sony stressed that it includes "demos of entertainment and gaming content spanning across a wide variety of diverse genres. That way, you can get a sense of the content you enjoy the most and can even click to purchase and download the game after trying the demo."

Enlarge (credit: Google Fiber)

Google Fiber is about to start connecting homes and businesses in the North Carolina Research Triangle, despite rumors of layoffs and disappointing subscriber totals. The Triangle is Google Fiber's 8th metro area, along with Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; Charlotte, North Carolina; Kansas City in Kansas and Missouri; Nashville, Tennessee; Provo, Utah; and Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Triangle rollout may happen slowly. The service is going live first in Morrisville, which has about 23,000 residents, instead of the larger cities of Raleigh and Durham. Google Fiber said on Facebook that crews will start connecting customers in Morrisville "over the next few weeks." The company provided details on expansion plans to WRAL TechWire:

Other parts of the Triangle will receive service in coming months as Google Fiber builds out a network that will include more than 5,000 miles of high-speed cabling, according to Erik Garr, who oversees Google Fiber operations across the southeast.

"We have made great progress in building our network, and we begin service customers Tuesday. We are very excited," Garr said in an interview on Monday. "There is still a ton of work to do in the months and years ahead, but people can begin signing up at our website Tuesday."

Google began construction of its network last year.

The expansion into Morrisville comes at a turbulent time for Google Fiber. The company delayed construction in San Jose, California, and Portland, Oregon, while it considers whether to do future deployments with wireless technology instead of fiber.

Enlarge / See that in the bottom left? A speed limit sign! (credit: Android Police)

Offering free turn-by-turn navigation in Google Maps crushed the standalone GPS industry, but there has been one feature standalone systems have that Google Maps never picked up: speed limit display. OIder GPS systems would display their speed limit data somewhere in the interface, allowing drivers to see the (hopefully) current limit even when there wasn't a nearby sign.

Some users have now reported seeing a speed limit sign in the bottom right corner of Google Maps Navigation. Android Police has screenshots of the new addition in the Google Maps Android app (pictured above) and in Android Auto. Code for speed limit capability started showing up in Google Maps 9.35, but whether you get the new feature or not is up to a server-side switch.

For now these are just random user reports, but hopefully an official announcement of the new feature will happen soon, along with a wide roll out.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches earlier this year. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX is continuing to sort through thousands of channels of data in regard to its September 1 accident, which led to the loss of its Falcon 9 rocket and its Amos-6 satellite during preparations for a static fire test. The company has nonetheless begun working toward an ambitious November return to flight for its rocket.

During a speech Tuesday in Paris, at the World Satellite Business Week meeting, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the company "anticipates" a return to flight as early as November, most likely from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Details of the speech were first reported in a series of tweets by Peter B. de Selding, Paris bureau chief for Space News. A SpaceX official confirmed the validity of the information to Ars.

SpaceX's Launch Complex 40 sustained significant damage during the static fire incident, and it may take as long as a year for repairs to be completed. So a November launch in Florida would occur from the company's Launch Complex 39A, a historical site the company has been modifying after leasing it from NASA in 2014. The company had intended to use the refurbished launch pad primarily for commercial crew missions and its Falcon Heavy rocket. Shotwell also said the return to flight mission could take place at Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base but seemed more confident in a launch from Florida. Both pads will be ready by November, she said, and the location will depend on the customer—as yet undetermined—for the mission.