Month: December 2016

Amazon has just gotten a patent for an "airborne fulfillment center utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles for item delivery." Though the patent was granted in April 2016, the plans for it have just gone public on the US Patent and Trade Office website. What they describe sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel.

Here's how it works. First, get a very large airship and float it above a city. Then attach a giant warehouse full of Amazon items to the bottom (actually, you should probably attach this before the floating, but the patent is vague on this point). This warehouse is constantly restocked by smaller airships, which bring personnel and supplies from the ground, as well as carrying away waste. People on the ground use their computers to browse items currently floating over their heads, and order whatever they want. Then drones grab the items, hurl themselves out of the airship, and engage their rotors as they approach the ground. The human receives his or her item from the drone, and the drone ascends back up to its floating palace of boxes and workers.

Enlarge / The iPhone 6S Plus and 7 Plus. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple sells iPhones all over the world, but it builds them in China with the help of manufacturing companies like Foxconn and Pegatron. A particular Foxconn facility in the city of Zhengzhou, China, is the subject of a lengthy report in The New York Times today. The report details the complex series of tax breaks, subsidies, and other incentives that makes the Zhengzhou facility so uniquely suited to Foxconn's and Apple's needs.

Confidential government records obtained by the Times reveal, among other things, that the city of Zhengzhou helped finance the construction of Foxconn's factory and housing for its workers; that it provides discounted energy and constructed power generators and other infrastructure to support the facility; that it has waived and deeply cut corporate and value-added taxes; that it helps Foxconn hire and train workers; that it put its factory inside a "bonded zone" that made selling devices within China easier; and that it spent a total of $10 billion to upgrade an airport to make exporting products from China quicker and easier for Apple and other companies.

The report also highlights just how important Foxconn is to Apple and vice-versa. Apple relies on Foxconn to keep its costs down and profit margins up, and Foxconn relies on orders from Apple to maintain the size and clout that makes it possible for Foxconn to cut such favorable deals in the first place. The Zhengzhou plant can build as many as 500,000 iPhones in a day. While Foxconn also manufactures electronics for other companies, the bulk of the work is being done on Apple's behalf.

Enlarge / Obama just left Donald Trump a nice little inauguration present—a fresh pack of sanctions against Russia and evidence of Russian interference in the presidential election. (credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

In an executive order issued today, President Barack Obama used his emergency powers to impose sanctions on a number of Russian military and intelligence officials and also to eject 35 Russians labeled by the administration as intelligence operatives. The order was issued as a response to the breach of the Democratic National Committee's network and the targeted intrusion into e-mail accounts belonging to members of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Obama made the sanctions an extension of an April 2015 executive order "to take additional steps to deal with the national emergency with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities."

The order is being accompanied by the publication of data from US intelligence communities bolstering findings that the breaches were part of an information operation to manipulate the results of the US presidential election. The data, released by the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation as a Joint Analysis Report (JAR), contains "declassified technical information on Russian civilian and military intelligence services’ malicious cyber activity, to better help network defenders in the United States and abroad identify, detect, and disrupt Russia’s global campaign of malicious cyber activities," according to an Obama administration statement. "The JAR includes information on computers around the world that Russian intelligence services have co-opted without the knowledge of their owners in order to conduct their malicious activity in a way that makes it difficult to trace back to Russia." Some of the data had been previously published by cyber-security firms, but in some cases the data is newly declassified government data.

Way back in February 2016, I had a crazy idea. Like many crazy ideas, it was partly the fault of Ars staffer Cyrus Farivar. We were hosting an Ars meetup at Longitude, a fantastic tiki bar in Oakland, California, when the event turned into an impromptu interview with Nick Farmer, the creator of the futuristic Creole language spoken by Belters in The Expanse series on Syfy. We had so much fun, I thought to myself: why don't we do this again sometime? Cyrus was easily persuaded to join in the madness. And so Ars Technica Live was born.

On the third Wednesday of every month, we returned to Longitude to interview interesting people who work at the intersection of technology, science, and culture. We talked to law professor Elizabeth Joh about the future of surveillance, and we talked to anthropologist Krish Seetah about the history of meat eating in human culture. Computer security researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire told us about defending journalists against state hackers, and space activist Ariel Waldman explained her role on the National Academy of Sciences Human Spaceflight Committee. We recorded everything (you can see video of the 2016 season here) thanks to videographer Chris Schodt and Ars' intrepid producer Jennifer Hahn. Ars editors Joe Mullin and Dan Goodin pitched in, too, bringing their expertise to discussions of patent reform and security. And luckily, Longitude bar owner Suzanne Long kept letting us come back. She seems to have a weak spot for nerds.

Now we're celebrating the end of 2016 and the dawning of our 2017 season by releasing all our interviews as podcasts. If you ever subscribed to the Ars Technicast, you may have already gotten these episodes in your feed. If not, now's the time.

Enlarge (credit: mathieukor / Getty Images News)

Federal prosecutors in Ohio and Illinois have come to an agreement with the red light camera company Redflex. Earlier this year, the former chief executive of the embattled Australian company pleaded guilty to corruption charges in those states.

The "non-prosecution agreement" establishes a deal whereby the Department of Justice won’t prosecute Redflex in exchange for restitution and damages. Redflex will pay Chicago an amount to be determined and will also hand over $100,000 in restitution to the City of Columbus. The government praised Redflex, citing "extensive and thorough cooperation over recent years."

The DOJ statement, which was published Tuesday by the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois, continues:

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Enlarge / Will Barack Obama order a major cyber-reprisal against Russia for election hacks before he leaves office? A CNN report suggests the response will be a softball. (credit: Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images)

[Update 2:20 PM ET: The Obama administration has announced sanctions against Russia, including the ejection of 35 Russian operatives from the US, and legal and financial sanctions against Russia's GRU and FSB intelligence services and top military officers. More details will follow in a separate story.]

According to a CNN report, officials within the Obama administration have said that retaliatory measures against Russia for interference in the US election will happen very soon—perhaps as early as today. But the response is expected to be "proportional" and include diplomatic measures and sanctions. It's not clear whether there will be any sort of response in kind against the Russian leadership's computer systems and data.

A proportional response, however, likely won't do anything to deter future efforts to use hacking and information campaigns to affect US politics or other aspects of government. That's according to Dave Aitel, the founder of the security firm Immunity and a former NSA research scientist. In a recent interview with Ars, Aitel said he believed that the US would take some sort of retaliatory action in the final weeks of Obama's presidency. "We're in a unique position where [President Barack] Obama can lay a haymaker down," he said, "and then Trump has to stand up. And Obama has nothing to restrain him."