Month: November 2016

Enlarge / You're going to need some help if you want to switch from the current array of ports to USB-C and Thunderbolt 3. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you put in an order for a new MacBook Pro, welcome! You’re about to enter a brave new world, one where all your ports look the same as each other but remain totally different from every other port on whatever laptop you were using before.

It’s not just the MacBook Pro making this transition. More and more laptops and phones are either including a USB Type-C port or switching to it entirely, and, going forward, this standard is going to get even harder to avoid. We’ve been big fans of the technology’s potential since before we even knew what it would look like. And while in practice it has created more than a little confusion, it should still be an improvement over the jumble of ports that we’ve had to live with previously.

That said, the future looks brighter than the present, especially if you happen to have a phone or tablet or laptop that completely forgoes all other ports in favor of USB-C. Dongles, adapters, and new cables will easily be the norm for the next half-decade or so until everyone catches up, and it’s frustrating to have to dig through piles of Amazon listings to find stuff that will get the job done.

Enlarge / Epicenter and shaking intensity (contours) for Sunday night's earthquake. (credit: USGS)

A small town in Oklahoma was once again shaken Sunday night by an earthquake—part of the Sooner State’s new seismic reality. The state's normal geological quiet has been interrupted by the injection of wastewater into deep disposal wells. Most of that water comes from conventional (rather than fracked) oil and gas extraction, as contaminated water comes up with the oil. Injecting the wastewater back down into deep, salty aquifers is an inexpensive way to deal with it, but the practice has triggered earthquakes on old faults underlying north-central Oklahoma.

A magnitude 5.0 earthquake—one of the largest the state has seen—struck at about 7:45pm Sunday night near the small town of Cushing. It caused significant damage to more than 40 buildings downtown. Bricks came down from the outer walls of buildings, ceilings and roofs were damaged, and lots of windows were shattered, but luckily no one was seriously injured. Schools were closed yesterday, while the downtown area remains shuttered as building inspections take place.

These pictures of a building in downtown Cushing were taken by Stacey Hamilton, who shared them on our @NewsOn6 Facebook page. #okquake pic.twitter.com/hBB9vPLOVC

— Amy Slanchik (@amyslanchik) November 7, 2016

To help recovery efforts along, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin declared a state of emergency for the county. The state’s Corporation Commission, which oversees disposal wells, also directed all wells within 6 miles of Cushing to wind down injections over the next week. Wells within 15 miles were ordered to reduce their injections. (Gradually shutting down injections is safer than causing an immediate change in water pressure.)

Enlarge / The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

I frequently point friends and family toward Apple's refurbished store to get decent deals on Macs and iPads. The selection isn't comprehensive but it's pretty good, and once a device has been on the market for a few months it's usually possible to save a few hundred dollars without really giving up anything. Up until now, though, Apple has never offered iPhones through its refurbished store—something that finally changed today.

Starting this week, Apple is directly selling refurbished iPhones to customers for the first time. As of this writing, Apple is only selling iPhone 6S models in 16GB capacities and 6S plus models in 16GB and 64GB capacities—per usual, we'd recommend staying away from the 16GB phones, but that decision is ultimately up to you. You'll pay $449 or $529 for a 16GB 6S or 6S Plus, and $589 for a 64GB 6S Plus. The phones come with the same Lighting cable, power adapter, and headphones as new models, and these models include the same one-year warranty that you can extend to two years with AppleCare+ for $129.

Attentive readers will note that all of these models are versions of the 6S that Apple no longer actively sells. The 16GB and 64GB capacities were replaced by 32GB and 128GB capacities when the iPhone 7 was released. It's possible that more iPhones will come to the refurbished store eventually, but it's also possible that once Apple sells through its current stock the iPhone will disappear from the refurbished store once again. In either case, it's a good way to get a decent deal on what is essentially a new phone, even if it is last year's model.

Enlarge / Eric Trump, son of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, looks at wife Lara Yunaska's voting booth. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images News)

Donald Trump's son, Eric Trump, tweeted out a picture of his own vote and then deleted it, technically a violation of New York state law. Additionally, both Trump men were captured in photos or video violating the principle of ballot secrecy by seemingly checking out their wives’ ballots.

(credit: CNN)

As Ars reported last week, a federal judge in New York rejected plaintiffs’ attempts to halt an existing state and New York City law that bans the practice of a ballot selfie. The judge wrestled with balancing First Amendment free speech rights against the public policy interest in keeping a secret ballot so that voting is not unduly influenced.

“The absence of recent evidence of this kind of voter bribery or intimidation does not mean that the motivation to engage in such conduct no longer exists,” US District Judge P. Kevin Castel wrote. “Rather, it is consistent with the continued effectiveness of the New York statute.”

Tens of thousands of ex-Time Warner Cable (TWC) video subscribers have canceled their service since the company was bought by Charter, and pricing changes appear to be the driving factor.

In the third quarter ending September 30, the first full quarter since the merger, Charter lost 47,000 video customers, with all of the losses happening in former TWC territory. Charter gained TV subscribers in its pre-merger territory and in the territory of Bright House, a smaller cable company that it also purchased.

"Quarterly video customer performance improved year-over-year at pre-deal Charter and at Bright House, while TWC video net loss was 54,000 worse than last year, primarily driven by an increase in video downgrade activity, given legacy pricing and packaging issues," Charter CFO Christopher Winfrey said in an earnings call last week, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. "So in total, we lost 47,000 residential video customers in the quarter, primarily driven by the losses at TWC."

Enlarge (credit: portal_gda)

Lawyers for Artem Vaulim, the alleged head of KickassTorrents (KAT), recently attempted to get criminal copyright infringement charges against their client tossed. Last week, however, prosecutors fired back. In a court filing from last Friday, authorities argued that Vaulin should not even be allowed to file a motion to dismiss until he makes a formal appearance in federal court in Chicago, where the case is underway.

Vaulin was arrested in Poland in July, where he now awaits extradition to the United States. KAT was the world’s largest BitTorrent distribution site before it was shuttered by authorities earlier this year. Prosecutors have alleged that KAT unlawfully distributed over $1 billion worth of copyrighted materials.

After Vaulin makes an appearance, his legal team can re-file a motion to dismiss. At that point, prosecutors wrote, the motion should be denied anyway as the defense’s primary theory—that there is no such law that prohibits secondary criminal copyright infringement—is bunk.

Enlarge / Is Gus Grissom angry after the Liberty Bell 7 nearly took him to the bottom of the ocean? Weary? Thoroughly shaken? It's hard to know for sure. (credit: NASA)

Update, July 17, 2021: When it comes to NASA history, July 21 may not have the same significance as July 20, the date when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969. But back on July 21, 1961, another pivotal moment in the evolution of human spaceflight took place when Gus Grissom splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean within a small Mercury capsule—almost drowning in the process. The lessons NASA learned that day and in the following weeks undoubtedly changed the course of human spaceflight. This overlooked event has its 60th anniversary next Wednesday, and as such we're resurfacing Space Editor Eric Berger's examination of Grissom's landing from the Ars archives. This story first published on November 8, 2016, and it appears unchanged below.

Gus Grissom had just entered the history books. A mere 10 weeks after Alan Shepard made America’s first human flight into space, Grissom followed with the second one, a 15-minute suborbital hop that took him to an altitude of 189km above the blue planet. After the small Mercury capsule’s parachutes deployed, Grissom splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, seemingly bringing a flawless mission to a close.

Only it wasn't flawless, nor was it closed. At that moment, Gus Grissom almost drowned.

Philip Stark with his boxes of ballots (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Today is Election Day in the United States, so we are resurfacing this story on auditing election results that originally ran in 2012.

NAPA, CALIFORNIA—Armed with a set of 10-sided dice (we’ll get to those in a moment), an online Web tool, and a stack of hundreds of ballots, University of California-Berkeley statistics professor Philip Stark spent last Friday unleashing both science and technology upon a recent California election. He wanted to answer a very simple question—had the vote counting produced the proper result?—and he had developed a stats-based system to find out.

On June 2, 6,573 citizens went to the polls in Napa County and cast primary ballots for supervisor of the 2nd District in one of California’s most famous wine-producing regions, on the northern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area. The three candidates—Juliana Inman, Mark van Gorder, and Mark Luce—would all have liked to come in first, but they really didn't want to be third. That's because only the two top vote-getters in the primary would proceed to the runoff election in November; number three was out.

Enlarge / The Madison County courthouse has been shut down since last week by ransomware. (credit: Nyttend)

Madison County, Indiana, suffered a widespread ransomware attack that shut down virtually all county services last week. Over the weekend, the county government leadership decided to pay the ransom demands of the ring running the malware, which has not yet been identified publicly.

“We’re following the directions of our insurance carrier,” Madison County Commissioner John Richwine told the Herald-Bulletin this morning. He did not reveal the amount of the ransom but said that it was not as much as residents might have thought it would be—and is being covered by the county's cyber-insurance with Travelers, minus a deductible.

While the ransomware did not apparently affect emergency services or voting systems, an Indiana State Police captain told a local television station that the rest of the county's business had been knocked out. Courts and some county offices were closed, and employees were given the option of taking personal or vacation time in other offices where no work was possible.