Month: October 2016

(credit: Nintendo of America)

As expected, last week's official reveal of the Nintendo Switch game system both answered questions and created new ones. That was followed this week by an announcement of the next announcement: the Nintendo Switch Presentation 2017.

This will take place, as you might expect, next year—as in, on January 12. Both the company's Japanese and American arms made announcements via Twitter on Thursday, so we expect that the livestream will occur simultaneously in multiple languages, much like the company has done for its Nintendo Direct YouTube events in recent years. The Japanese notice mentions a formal Switch event taking place in Tokyo on January 14 and 15, as well.

Curiously, Nintendo described the Switch in this Wednesday night announcement as its "new home gaming system," in spite of its August 20 reveal video revolving very loudly around its portability. In that peppy, millennial-loaded advert, young people were seen satisfying their Switch gaming addiction while attending parties, walking dogs, and taking a halftime break at a pick-up basketball game.

We use the Surface Studio. Video by Jennifer Hahn (video link)

NEW YORK—Microsoft has built a really strange computer.

As a piece of design, there's a lot to like about the Surface Studio. There's no avoiding the fact that its screen, a custom built 28 inch 4500×3000 unit that's barely more than a centimeter thick—is strikingly gorgeous. It's large, it's bright, its colors are glorious (it supports the DCI-P3 color space with 30 bits per pixel, which gives it much more punch and depth, especially for reds), and its thickness, or rather, lack thereof, is remarkable. There's no taper or anything like that; the display is a uniform 12.5mm/0.5" thick and it looks incredible. It makes the LCDs that sit on my desktop at home look as dated as my LCDs make a CRT screen look.

Enlarge / Using the attached device, an attacker's remote control on the right is able to hijack the original remote control on the left. (credit: Jonathan Andersson)

The advent of inexpensive consumer drones has generated a novel predicament for firefighters, law-enforcement officers, and ordinary citizens who encounter crafts they believe are interfering with their safety or privacy. In a series of increasingly common events—several of them chronicled by Ars—drones perceived as trespassing have been blown out of the sky with shotguns. Firefighters have also complained that hobbyist drones pose a significant threat that sometimes prompts them to ground helicopters.

Now, a researcher has demonstrated a significantly more subtle and proactive remedy that doesn't involve shotgun blasts or after-the-fact arrests by law enforcement. It's a radio transmitter that seizes complete control of nearby drones as they're in mid-flight. From then on, the drones are under the full control of the person with the hijacking device. The remote control in the possession of the original operator experiences a loss of all functions, including steering, acceleration, and altitude. The hack works against any drone that communicates over DSMx, a widely used remote control protocol for operating hobbyist drones, planes, helicopters, cars, and boats.

Besides hijacking a drone, the device provides a digital fingerprint that's unique to each craft. The fingerprint can be used to identify trusted drones from unfriendly ones and potentially to provide forensic evidence for use in criminal or civil court cases. Unlike most other counter-drone technologies publicly demonstrated to date, it isn't a frequency jammer that merely prevents a remote control from communicating with a drone. Instead, it gives the holder the ability to completely seize control of the unmanned craft. It was presented on Wednesday at the PacSec 2016 security conference in Tokyo by Jonathan Andersson, the advanced security research group manager at Trend Micro's TippingPoint DVLab division.

Enlarge / Scanning electron micrograph of HIV. Virions are the green spheres on the surface of blood cells. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

A damning myth about the origins of HIV in North America spun out of a single “ambiguous oval,” according to the authors of a new genetic study on the virus.

The study, published today in Nature, uses reconstructed genetic sequences to show that the virus landed on the continent around 1971, a full decade before it was discovered in 1981 and identified as a retrovirus in 1983. And the man vilified for having delivered it to the United States, a French Canadian airline steward named Gaëtan Dugas, aka Patient Zero, had nothing to do with its arrival, the study authors report. In fact, Dugas’ moniker “Patient Zero” was actually a misinterpretation of the identifier “Patient O” used in a dataset for an AIDS cluster study centered in California. Patient O was meant to signify that he was a patient from Outside California.

Gaëtan Dugas (credit: Gobonobo)

In that early 1980s cluster study, researchers tracked down Dugas after several HIV/AIDS patients reporting have sex with him. The detective work allowed the researchers to link sexual activity with the virus’ spread. However, the study was published with the now infamous number rather than the letter, locking the misnomer into the scientific literature and history books.

The National Geographic Channel, fresh off its sale to Fox, is now focusing on creating premium original content. Its first effort: a fact-based dramatization of what it might be like to send the first human visitors to Mars in the 2030s. As part of that effort, the company has taken over an empty lot in downtown Manhattan and seeded it with a collection of interconnected domes meant to evoke what the first habitations on Mars might look like.

The place is set up as if it were a recruitment center for Mars-bound astronauts. And the hardware inside is set up to allow visitors to experience a bit of what it might be like to arrive on Mars through some pretty impressive virtual reality hardware.

The press got a chance to check things out today as part of the launch of the miniseries, entitled simply Mars. Everyone involved in it, including the large panel of the technical consultants on hand to talk about the program, said the emphasis was on making it as fact-based and realistic as possible. We'll have a discussion of their efforts a bit closer to the program's airing. For now, we'll focus on the Earth-bound Mars experience that National Geographic has put in place in Manhattan.

(credit: Tesla Motors)

Tesla Motors posted its second-ever profitable quarter on Wednesday, announcing that it had made a profit of $22 million (£18 million) during the third quarter of 2016. By comparison, the company lost $293 million in the second quarter. During Q3, Tesla brought in a total of $2.3 billion, nearly double from Q2 2016.

In a statement, the company cited “new product launches, increased store efficiency and new store openings,” as being a primary driver of revenue.

Tesla continued:

Enlarge / When will we finally get to test Apple's AirPods outside of demo events? We're not sure, but definitely not by the end of this month. (credit: Apple)

Apple's new wireless, $180 AirPods have less than a week to meet their original shipping target of "late October," and now the company has confirmed that such a launch is officially off the table.

A Wednesday statement, given to Ars Technica just one day ahead of the company's latest Mac-related press event, confirmed Apple's decision to delay the wireless headphones' launch. In the statement, Apple tells Ars that the company "needs a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers."

"The early response to AirPods has been incredible," the Apple statement reads. "We don't believe in shipping a product before it's ready."

Enlarge / AT&T will own a bunch of new media properties if it is allowed to buy Time Warner. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

AT&T has suggested that it might not need Federal Communications Commission approval of its purchase of Time Warner Inc., but that may just be wishful thinking.

Some news organizations have reported that Time Warner has only one FCC license, for a TV station in Atlanta, and that the AT&T/Time Warner merger wouldn't be reviewed by the FCC if Time Warner sells that TV station to a third party. That is not correct, however. Time Warner programmers such as HBO, CNN, and Turner Broadcasting System also have dozens of FCC licenses that let them upload video to satellites used by pay-TV companies.

These licenses are crucial for distributing video to cable TV providers. It isn't only satellite TV companies like Dish or the AT&T-owned DirecTV that use satellites to send programmers' video to consumers' homes—even cable companies like Comcast use what's called a "headend in the sky" to receive and distribute video.