Month: November 2016

Enlarge / Netflix on Comcast's X1 set-top box. (credit: Comcast)

Netflix is launching on Comcast's X1 set-top boxes nationwide this week, as two companies that were formerly bitter enemies have found a way to make money together.

"Netflix content will be fully integrated into [Comcast's] Xfinity On Demand," the companies said in an announcement Friday. The companies' mutual customers will be able to "seamlessly move between the Netflix app and their cable service" without having to "change inputs or juggle remotes," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said. Comcast's voice search will work with Netflix, and customers will be able to "browse Netflix content alongside other on-demand movies and shows."

The Netflix/Comcast integration was reported in July, though it's just making its way to customers now.

(credit: Marco Paköeningrat)

Three Facebook users have sued the social networking giant over alleged discriminatory policies that they say violate the Federal Housing Act of 1964.

Late last month, ProPublica published a story outlining the fact that Facebook’s advertising mechanism allowed for housing ads to exclude a specific “Ethnic Affinity,” such as “African-American” or “Asian-American.” ProPublica managed to post a fake housing ad and excluded anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic people. When the ProPublica reporters showed the ad to prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman, he described it as "horrifying" and "as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find."

According to the proposed class-action lawsuit, by allowing such ads on its site, Facebook is in violation of the landmark civil rights legislation, which specifically prohibits housing advertisements to discriminate based on race, gender, color, religion, and other factors.

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With fewer than 24 hours before polls open for the 2016 US presidential election, consider this your periodic reminder that e-voting machines expected to tally millions of votes are woefully antiquated and subject to fraud should hackers get physical access to them.

A case in point is the Sequoia AVC Edge Mk1, a computerized voting machine that will be used in 13 states this year, including in swing states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The so-called direct-recording electronic vote-counting system has long been known to be susceptible to relatively simple hacks that manipulate tallies and ballots. Researchers from security firm Cylance are driving that point home with demonstration hacks. The first one causes one or more votes for one candidate to count as votes for that candidate's rival. A second one alters the names as they appear on the electronic balloting screen.

The hacks work by tampering with—or more precisely, reflashing—the PCMCIA card, a storage device in the voting machine that's similar to the tiny hard drive that's used by many digital cameras. The fraud could be carried out by inserting a maliciously modified card inside a Sequoia AVC Edge machine, although the attackers would likely have to circumvent tamper-evident seals that are designed to flag such abuse. The video above shows the hack being used to alter both the public and protective counters the machine uses to count and recount results to ensure tallies are valid. The decade-old hack first came to public attention in 2007 in a research paper titled Source Code Review of the Sequoia Voting System.

Enlarge (credit: Nick Glenn)

A sheriff's department in Iowa has changed its drone usage policy in response to criticism from the county attorney, ensuring it would never again be used to search for missing animals and livestock.

According to WHO TV, Boone County attorney Daniel Kolacia chastised the sheriff for deploying a drone to “track down some loose cattle north of Ogden,” a town of about 2,000 people approximately 50 miles northwest of Des Moines. (The entire county has a population of just over 26,000.) The 24 cows belonged to a county supervisor, Chet Hollingshead, who requested the sheriff send out the drone in the name of "public safety," as he didn't want his cattle hit. All but five cows were recovered.

Kolacia, who did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, reportedly sent a letter to county officials saying that county property should not be used for personal use. "If I see or hear anything, any wrongdoing, it's my job to remind people what the law says and that we all follow the law," Kolacia told the television station late last month.

Enlarge / Back in 2006, EarthLink planned on being a major broadband player. (credit: NIall Kennedy)

Internet provider Windstream today announced that it will buy EarthLink for $673 million in an all-stock transaction. The merger is focused on creating a stronger network operator for business customers, but it also provides a reminder that after all these years, dial-up Internet is still being sold.

EarthLink was founded in 1994 to provide dial-up Internet service and had more than 1 million customers by the late 1990s. But while dial-up has long been overtaken by DSL, cable, and fiber network technologies, EarthLink is still offering its original Internet service and boasts, "We're the dial-up Internet experts. It's what we've been doing best since 1994."

EarthLink dial-up costs $9.95 a month for the first three months and $24.95 a month thereafter (or $14.50 a month if you prepay for a year). For that price, you'll get "Unlimited 56K dial-up access," e-mail, and "10MB of webspace for your own website," the company says. EarthLink also advertises DSL, cable, and satellite service through reseller agreements that allow EarthLink to sell the services without building the networks itself.

Enlarge / The USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000), commissioned in Baltimore in October. Its two AGS guns depend on projectiles too expensive to pass a Navy gut-check. (credit: US Navy)

The USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) is the US Navy’s latest warship, commissioned just last month—and it comes with the biggest guns the Navy has deployed since the twilight of the battleships. But it turns out the Zumwalt's guns won’t be getting much of a workout any time soon, aside from acceptance testing. That’s because the special projectiles they were intended to fire are so expensive that the Navy has canceled its order.

Back when it was originally conceived, the Zumwalt was supposed to be the modern-day incarnation of the big-gunned cruisers and battleships that once provided fire support for Marines storming hostile beaches. This ability to lob devastating volleys of powerful explosive shells deep inland to take out hardened enemy positions, weapons, and infrastructure was lost after the Gulf War’s end, when the last of the Iowa-class battleships were retired. To bring it back, the Zumwalt’s design included a new gun, the Advanced Gun System (AGS). As we described it in a story two years ago:

The automated AGS can fire 10 rocket-assisted, precision-guided projectiles per minute at targets over 100 miles away. Those projectiles use GPS and inertial guidance to improve the gun’s accuracy to a 50 meter (164 feet) circle of probable error—meaning that half of its GPS-guided shells will fall within that distance from the target.

The projectile responsible for that accuracy—something far too complex to just be called a "shell" or "bullet"—is the Long Range Land-Attack Projectile (LRLAP). Each projectile has precision guidance provided by internal global positioning and inertial sensors, and bursts of LRLAPs could in theory be fired over a minute following different ballistic trajectories that cause them to land all at the same time.