Month: January 2017

Enlarge / SpaceX revealed its Dragon V2 spacecraft in May, 2014. It's still a ways from the launch pad. (credit: SpaceX)

This week Boeing made a public splash by debuting a new, blue spacesuit for astronauts to wear aboard its Starliner spacecraft. What the company did not dwell on as it rolled out “Boeing Blue,” however, was when the lighter, more modern-looking flight suits might be put into action with crewed flights into orbit.

That is because much work remains to integrate all of Starliner’s various systems, including qualifying them for flight, ensuring their compatibility, and writing and testing software that will make for smooth flying. And Boeing is not alone; its “commercial crew” competitor SpaceX also faces similar technical hurdles with the Dragon V2 spacecraft and the Falcon 9 rocket that will launch it into space.

Boeing has set a “no earlier than” date for its first crewed test flight of August 2018, and SpaceX has targeted May 2018. But those dates seem optimistic. Ars spoke to a handful of sources familiar with the commercial crew program this week, and all expressed pessimism about the public timelines the companies have for reaching the launch pad. According to this unofficial analysis, even a single crewed test flight in 2018 by either company now appears unlikely, as teams from both Boeing and SpaceX continue to work through significant technical issues.

Enlarge (credit: Thinkstock / Aurich Lawson)

Former Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan, now a free agent and safe from the PR tentacles of his corporate overlord, says that antivirus software is terrible, AV vendors are terrible, and that you should uninstall your antivirus software immediately—unless you use Microsoft's Windows Defender, which is apparently okay.

A couple of months back, Justin Schuh, Google Chrome's security chief, and indeed one of the world's top infosec bods, said that antivirus software is "my single biggest impediment to shipping a secure browser." Further down the thread he explains that meddling AV software delayed Win32 Flash sandboxing "for over a year" and that further sandboxing efforts are still on hold due to AV. The man-in-the-middle nature of antivirus also causes a stream of TLS (transport layer security) errors, says Schuh, which in turn breaks some elements of HTTPS/HSTS.

These are just two recent instances of browser makers being increasingly upset with antivirus software. Back in 2012, Nicholas Nethercote, another Mozillian working on Firefox's MemShrink project said that "McAfee is killing us." In that case, Nethercote was trying to reduce the memory footprint of Firefox, and found that gnarly browser add-ons like McAfee were consuming a huge amount of memory, amongst other things. If you venture off-piste into the browser mailing lists, anti-antivirus sentiment has bubbled away just below the surface for a very long time.

(credit: Steve Rhodes)

Apple is moving its international iTunes business assets from Luxembourg to Ireland at the start of next month.

From February 5, the non-US side of its business, including the iTunes Store, Apple Music, the App Store, and the iBooks Store, will operate from its European HQ in Cork, according to a note sent out to developers yesterday.

The move isn't coming as a total surprise; Apple first announced its intentions in September, and it transferred an estimated $9 billion (£7.2 billion) of iTunes assets at the same time, as well as moving all developer contracts to Apple Distribution International, one of its two main Irish companies.

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Rally cars are set up to oversteer at the slightest provocation. Oversteer, where the car turns more sharply than the wheel is spun, is inherently unstable—and in the hands of an inexperienced driver, fabulously dangerous. But in rally, it's what makes getting around a sheer 90-degree bend at speed safely not only possible, but remarkably entertaining for both driver and audience alike. In a controlled slide across a dirt road, a rally driver endures a mess of tiny brake, throttle, and steering adjustments—an all-yaw battle that allows for quick changes in direction on the unpredictable surfaces of a rally stage.

Learning how to oversteer like a pro—or even worse, perform the dreaded "Scandinavian flick"—can take years of dedicated practice; some people never manage to master it. Perhaps that's why, when faced with the prospect of driving a virtual rally car in "one of the hardest racing games" ever made, many chose to simply ignore Codemaster's Dirt Rally rather than battle it (myself included). How best, then, to win those people back—the same people that loved the bombast and "sim-lite" feel of Dirt 2—without losing the latest contingent of realism romantics that made Dirt Rally a huge critical and commercial success?

The answer is simply more of everything. Dirt 4 isn't just a direct sequel to the more gamer-friendly Dirt 3, nor does it just build on the sim-heavy handling of Dirt Rally. There is, Codemasters hopes, something for everyone. The handling, for instance, remains the same as in Dirt Rally, with a few extra tweaks and additions to make it even closer to the real thing. But if, like me, you'd prefer something a little less terrifying, there's a new mode that adds a layer of assists between the simulation engine and the controller in an effort to make things a little easier.