Month: December 2016

Enlarge (credit: AT&T)

Barely two weeks after AT&T launched DirecTV Now, the online streaming service's customers have already been hit by multiple outages, unexpected blackouts of live local sports games, and missing channels.

There was an outage of about three hours last night and a two-hour outage Friday night, TVPredictions reported today. "DirecTV Now's customers said they couldn't log onto the streaming service, or they were suddenly met with a blank screen if already watching," the report said.

Ars Technica Senior Editor David Kravets was affected by yesterday's outage, being met by this error message when he tried to watch DirecTV Now:

Enlarge (credit: Sean Rayford/Getty Images / Aurich)

“Through our e-mails and our social media accounts we get death threats all the time,” said Janisha Gabriel. “For anyone who’s involved in this type of work, you know that you take certain risks.”

These aren’t the words of a politician or a prison guard but of a Web designer. Gabriel owns Haki Creatives, a design firm that specialises in building websites for social activist groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM)–and for that work strangers want to kill her.

When these people aren’t hurling threats at the site’s designer, they’re hurling attacks at the BLM site itself–on 117 separate occasions in the past six months, to be precise. They’re renting servers and wielding botnets, putting attack calls out on social media, and trialling different attack methods to see what sticks. In fact, it’s not even clear whether ‘they’ are the people publicly claiming to perform the attacks.

Enlarge / John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco, on a visit to France earlier this year. (credit: Chesnot/Getty Images)

For the second time this year, two technology giants have clashed in a no-holds-barred legal contest, and the outcome is now in the hands of a Bay Area jury.

Cisco Systems claims that Arista Networks has infringed its intellectual property by engaging in "slavish copying" of its Command Line Interface (CLI), a system of prompts and displays that Cisco uses for controlling its routers and switches. Arista says it's protected by the doctrine of fair use.

The case has more than a passing similarity to the Oracle v. Google trial that took place in May. During that trial, Oracle tried to paint Google as an IP scofflaw for using parts of its Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. It didn't work out, though, when the jury decided that Google's use of the APIs was justified by fair use.

Enlarge (credit: Uber)

Update: California's DMV has ordered Uber to stop testing its self-driving hardware and software on California roads until the company gets from proper permitting from the state, according to a letter seen by the Associated Press. Ars Technica has reached out to Uber for comment but has yet to receive a response.

Original story: Uber has started testing self-driving functions on roads in San Francisco after a few months of testing its sensor suite and hardware on the streets of Pittsburgh.

The ride-hailing company has three Volvo XC90s, each equipped with Uber’s hardware and software. (Although Volvo has made strides in self-driving functions, Uber is using its own system.) When a passenger requests a ride, Uber lets the passenger know a car with self-driving functions will be picking them up, and the passenger can accept or decline the ride. An Uber engineer rides in the front seat at all times.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Fairfax Media)

All living creatures need water to survive. Unfortunately, due to climate and human activity, the location of water on the earth’s surface constantly changes, as water bodies form, shift, and empty. The results can prompt species migrations and threaten societal growth and productivity. So keeping track of this liquid situation is critical.

Although there are several global datasets documenting surface water location and seasonality, scientists have struggled to measure long-term changes at high resolution. Now, a team of scientists has used more than 3 million satellite images to evaluate changes in global surface water over the past three decades. What they found are some big changes: almost 90,000 km² of surface water—roughly equivalent to the area of Lake Superior—have completely vanished, mostly from the Middle East and Central Asia. Yet, 184,000 km² of permanent water area formed elsewhere in the world.

The findings, published in Nature, offer a striking look at past surface water movements. Yet, the researchers hope that the data will improve predictions of future movements as human activity and climate change continue.

When trying to beat back a patient's cancer, doctors struggle to sic chemical treatments on cancer cells while mostly leaving healthy cells alone and safe. This critical feat would be much easier if doctors could spot a common difference between invasive cancerous cells and healthy ones.

Now, researchers suggest they’ve found such a tell for certain metastatic cancers: a fatty acid receptor protein called CD36. In a new study published in Nature, researchers show that interfering with that protein almost completely inhibits the development and spread of cancer in mouse models of human oral cancer—and causes zero side-effects. Though the study was only done in mice, researchers are hopeful that the technique could be a promising new strategy to treat cancer in human patients in the future.

The study, led by researchers at the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), involved cultured cells from human oral carcinomas. These human cancer cells were injected into the mouths of healthy mice. As expected, the mice developed oral cancer. Among the types of cancer cells contributing to the rodent’s tumors was a particular type of cell referred to as CD44bright cells, which are known culprits behind oral cancers in humans.