Month: January 2017

Offshore wind turbines in the Irish Sea, in calm weather (credit: Photograph by Andy Dingley/Wikimedia Commons)

The cost of offshore wind power in Britain has fallen to £97 ($121) per MWh. According to an industry report (PDF), this represents a 32 percent drop from £142 ($178) four years ago.

The Offshore Wind Programme Board (OWPB), a part of The Crown Estate, which manages the UK seabed, released its report on Tuesday. The report noted that cost reductions had come primarily through the development of advanced technology and the adoption of larger turbines, as well as increased competition and, to a lesser extent, decreased cost of capital. “7MW and 8MW turbines have become standard for new projects,” the report stated. That’s consistent with a paper published two months ago in Nature Energy showing that the cost of wind power could be reduced by 24 to 30 percent by 2030 due to the installation of bigger turbines.

The new numbers mean that offshore wind energy has reached a government target—beneath £100 per MWh by 2020—four years earlier than was expected.

Enlarge / Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, speaks at the Microsoft Annual Shareholders Meeting in Bellevue, Washington, on November 30, 2016. (credit: Jason Redmond, Getty Images)

An evenly split federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that it won't revisit its July decision that allowed Microsoft to squash a US court warrant for e-mail stored on its servers in Dublin, Ireland. The 4-4 vote by the 2^nd US Circuit Court of Appeals sets the stage for a potential Supreme Court showdown over the US government's demands that it be able to reach into the world's servers with the assistance of the tech sector.

A three-judge panel of the 2^nd Circuit had ruled that federal law, notably the Stored Communications Act, allows US authorities to seize content on US-based servers, but not on overseas servers. Because of how the federal appellate process works, the Justice Department asked the New York-based appeals court to revisit the case with a larger, en banc, panel—but the outcome fell one judge short.

Peter Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, said the agency was reviewing the decision and "considering our options." Those options include appealing to the Supreme Court or abiding by the ruling.

Enlarge / Owlet (credit: Owlet, Evan Griffin)

Amid the boom of wearables came the birth of devices for babies. Fretful, gadget-loving parents can now choose from a range of mini monitors that hide in tiny socks, strap to chubby little legs, snap onto diapers, or pin to onesies. The pastel gizmos promise peace of mind by effortlessly tracking an infants’ vital signs, movements, and sleep while parents take a breather.

Several companies dance around the idea that the monitors could even help prevent SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome. Of course, the reason for the footwork is because they have no basis to make such a claim; none of these consumer devices has been adequately tested and approved as medical devices by the Food and Drug Administration.

In fact, despite the makers’ assurances, the devices have no proven value and may actually cause harm in the way of false alarms and over-diagnoses, experts argue in an opinion piece published Tuesday in JAMA.

Data cap cash. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Cox is continuing the trend of bringing data caps and overage fees to customers in new cities.

Cox, the third largest cable company in the US after Comcast and Charter, has 6 million residential and business customers in 18 states. Much like Comcast, it has instituted a 1TB (1,024GB) monthly data cap and charges $10 for each additional 50GB block of data. Also like Comcast, Cox has been bringing the overage fees to a few cities at a time instead of deploying them to its entire territory all at once.

Cox brought the data caps first to Cleveland, Ohio, and then to Florida and Georgia in October 2016. This week, Cox expanded the overage fees to Arkansas; Connecticut; Kansas; Omaha, Nebraska; Iowa; and Sun Valley, Idaho. Customers can get data usage alerts from a browser, e-mail, text message, or automated phone call when they hit 85 percent, 100 percent, and 125 percent of their monthly data plans.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google Play, the official market for Android apps, was caught hosting a ransomware app that infected at least one real-world handset, security researchers said Tuesday.

The ransomware was dubbed Charger and was hidden inside an app called EnergyRescue, according to a blog post published by security firm Check Point Software. Once installed, Charger stole SMS contacts and prompted unsuspecting users to grant it all-powerful administrator rights. If users clicked OK, the malicious app locked the device and displayed the following message:

You need to pay for us, otherwise we will sell portion of your personal information on black market every 30 minutes. WE GIVE 100% GUARANTEE THAT ALL FILES WILL RESTORE AFTER WE RECEIVE PAYMENT. WE WILL UNLOCK THE MOBILE DEVICE AND DELETE ALL YOUR DATA FROM OUR SERVER! TURNING OFF YOUR PHONE IS MEANINGLESS, ALL YOUR DATA IS ALREADY STORED ON OUR SERVERS! WE STILL CAN SELLING IT FOR SPAM, FAKE, BANK CRIME etc… We collect and download all of your personal data. All information about your social networks, Bank accounts, Credit Cards. We collect all data about your friends and family.

The app sought 0.2 Bitcoin, currently worth about $180. In an e-mail, Check Point researchers said the app was available in Google Play for four days and had only a "handful" of downloads. "We believe the attackers only wanted to test the waters and not spread it yet," the researchers told Ars. The infection was detected by Check Point's mobile malware software, which the company sells to businesses. Google officials have since removed the app and have thanked Check Point for raising awareness of the issue.

Enlarge / "Domain: space. Subject: female energy clouds." (credit: Paramount)

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), the US Intelligence Community’s own science and technology research arm, has announced it is seeking contenders for a program to develop what amounts to the ultimate Google Translator. IARPA’s Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language (MATERIAL) program intends to provide researchers and analysts with a tool to search for documents in their field of concern in any of the more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide.

The specific goal, according to IARPA’s announcement, is an “‘English-in, English-out’ information retrieval system that, given a domain-sensitive English query, will retrieve relevant data from a large multilingual repository and display the retrieved information in English as query-biased summaries.” Users would be able to search vast numbers of documents with a two-part query: the first giving the “domain” of the search in terms of what sort of information they are seeking (for example, “Government,” “Science,” or “Health”) and the second an English word or phrase describing the information sought (the examples given in the announcement were “zika virus” and “Asperger's syndrome”).

So-called “low resource” languages have been an area of concern for the intelligence and defense communities for years. In 2014, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) launched its Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) project, an attempt to build a system that lets the military quickly collect critical data—such as “topics, names, events, sentiment, and relationships”—from sources in any language on short notice. The system would be used in situations like natural disasters or military interventions in remote locations where the military has little or no local language expertise.