Month: February 2017

Enlarge (credit: Nathan Pryor)

Nathan Pryor is a 41-year-old software project manager in Vancouver, WA. This post first appeared on Medium and is reprinted here with permission.

Ars asked Pryor if his code could easily be altered to donate to other organizations. His response: "It depends on one's threshold of 'easy.' It's coded specifically for the ACLU donation form. Re-doing it for another charity would require taking a look at the source code for their donation page, then changing the name of the fields that I call out in the code."

You may have heard of Amazon’s Dash Button, the physical “Buy Now” button for your home. With no interface other than a logo and a large round button, each Dash is a product-specific wi-fi device. Tapping it automatically places an order to have that product delivered into your waiting arms.

Stick one on your washing machine, and when you run low on detergent, tap! A box of Tide shows up two days later. Stick a few in your cupboard, and tap! Tap! Tap! Goldfish crackers, Cheez-Its, Doritos, on their way! Hundreds of Dash buttons are available to deliver the instant gratification of consumerism at its finest—or at its worst, depending on your perspective.

Despite its length, there's not much substance to the first trailer for Iron Fist, the tale of a ninja whose charge shot is a chi-amped punch. Iron Fist, aka Danny Rand, is the final member of superhero team The Defenders to come to Netflix. The Defenders will join forces for an eponymous Netflix series later this year featuring Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage. While the shows devoted to the other members of this Netflix hero quartet are all groundbreaking and stylistically distinct, Iron Fist doesn't feel unique.

Danny Rand is the lone survivor of a plane crash that killed his parents. After being raised by the mystical martial artists of K'un L'un, Danny returns to take back his father's company from bad guys. In the comics, Iron Fist teamed up with Luke Cage and eventually fell in love with Harlem police officer Misty Knight. We probably won't see much of that in this show—Neflix is likely saving crossover stuff for The Defenders series—but we do get to meet Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), Iron Fist's formidable fighting buddy. The bad guys running Rand Corporation seem to have ties to spiritual evil, so this isn't just about Danny making sure he can keep all of daddy's money for himself. The fighting is definitely fun.

What's odd is how generic the Iron Fist trailer feels. It's sort of like Arrow meets Batman Begins meets Doctor Strange meets "why am I watching this?" I kept waiting for some stylistic equivalent to the nihilistic intensity of Jessica Jones or the hip-hop philosophy of Luke Cage. But Danny Rand (Game of Thrones' Finn Jones) is a pretty bland hero, with his glowing fist power and unambiguous motivations. I don't get the feeling I'll be watching something that grabs me by the lapels and makes me want to binge.

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At last month's Shmoocon security conference in Washington, I was looking for gear for the Ars Tech Lab's hostile network environment. As I was browsing, I ran across a table manned by Gene Bransfield, the founder and CEO of WarCollar Industries LLC. People were gathering to look into little black boxes with the sort of delight you only find at security conferences.

Enlarge (credit: Florian Gaertner/Getty Images)

A Kentucky man was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison for being the global moderator of Playpen, the infamous darknet, child porn site.

David Lynn Browning, 47, was also ordered to serve a lifetime of post-prison supervision. This is punishment for his role as moderator of the Tor-hidden site. As moderator, he made sure that Playpen contained nothing but child porn and discussions of it.

According to the government, Browning

Enlarge (credit: Logitech)

At last, Logitech has announced a new webcam that brings easy 1080p60 and 4K30 capture to PCs.

The consumer-oriented 4K Pro,and the business-oriented Brio (yes, the consumer one has the "Pro" branding and the business one the consumer-friendly "Brio" name; don't ask us why) are identical USB webcams. Both webcams offer 4K video, dual microphones, and infrared depth sensing for $199. The only difference between the model names? The cable they come with; the camera end is USB Type-C, the other end varies.

Webcam technology has been stagnant for many, many years. A few integrated cameras have offered high resolution stills, especially those in tablets. But for the most part, they've been stuck at 1920×1080—at a measly 30 frames a second—with even five-year-old cameras being "state of the art." This sorry state of affairs has existed even while small cameras themselves have become substantially better, thanks to the front and rear cameras installed into every smartphone.

Enlarge / WASHINGTON - APRIL 28: Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases testifies before the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on the public health response to Swine Flu April 28, 2009 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Chip Somodevilla )

WASHINGTON, DC—In an early Tuesday morning talk at the American Society for Microbiology’s Biothreats conference, Dr. Anthony Fauci revealed what he said in his first meeting with the Trump Administration. Of course, he couldn’t resist dropping decades of knowledge about disease outbreaks at the same time.

Like all incoming administrations, the Trump Administration called on Dr. Fauci for a briefing on what to expect and how it should prepare for inevitable outbreaks during its time in office. Fauci is uniquely qualified to fill this role.

Dr. Fauci is not only an infectious disease expert and researcher; he’s been the director of the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. He’s helped oversee US research on and responses to everything from the emergence of HIV/AIDS, to bird flu, SARS, chikungunya, drug-resistant microbes, and Zika. When American healthcare workers came down with Ebola in 2014 and 2015, he was personally involved in their treatment at the NIH—he suited up and attended their bedsides.

Enlarge / Mars at the boundary between night and day. Gale Crater is the crater with a mound inside it near the center of the image, beginning to catch morning light. Northward is to the left. This view was created using three-dimensional information from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, which flew on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Even though Mars is currently too cold and has too little pressure to prevent water from freezing, the planet had liquid water on its surface in the distant past. That could happen if the ancient Martian atmosphere, thicker than its present-day counterpart, had enough greenhouse gasses to keep the planet warm and the water liquid. So over the past decades of our observations and robotic visitations of Mars, researchers have been looking for evidence for Mars' past carbon dioxide levels.

The evidence we've gathered indicates there was some CO₂ present but not nearly enough to keep water liquid, especially given that the early Sun was less active than it is at present. So far, these estimates contained large uncertainties, so it remained possible that there was enough carbon in the atmosphere to allow the ancient water to flow.

A team of researchers has created a new estimate of Mars' ancient carbon levels using data collected by the Curiosity rover. They've also concluded that there was nowhere near enough CO₂ to warm the planet to the point where water on the surface would remain liquid.

Enlarge / From our recent look at residential solar, here's a look at one Ars reader's setup. (credit: Nik White)

A solar advocacy group called the Solar Foundation released a report this week showing that the solar power industry in the US employs 260,077 workers that spend half or more of their time on solar industry-related projects—representing a growth of 24.5 percent from last year. The numbers were gleaned from an annual census that the foundation takes, this year involving more than 500,000 phone calls and 60,000 e-mails to “known and potential energy establishments across the United States.”

The Solar Foundation admitted that next year is unlikely to see as much dramatic growth, although total employment in the solar industry is still expected to increase by 10 percent to approximately 286,000 solar workers.

The employment numbers from the Solar Foundation were recently included in a January 2017 Department of Energy (DOE) report (PDF) on energy-related jobs. The DOE noted in its report that it's sometimes difficult to count solar industry jobs because people employed installing residential and commercial solar systems are counted differently from, say, people who work at a utility, operating utility-grade solar panels. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, utilities only employed 2,800 workers on solar-specific generation, but that figure hides construction and maintenance jobs on projects that are “financed, owned, or directed by utilities.” The DOE wrote that it estimates only 20.6 percent of people employed in the solar industry work on utility-level projects—another 54.6 percent work in residential solar, and the remaining 24.7 percent work on commercially-focused solar installations.

(credit: Free Press)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai today defended a new decision that prevents nine ISPs from using a federal program to sell subsidized broadband to poor people.

In a blog post titled "Setting the Record Straight on the Digital Divide," Pai said that Friday's decision regarding the Lifeline program doesn't mean he is abandoning his promise to close the gap between people who have access to "cutting-edge communications services and those who do not."

Journalists "sensationalized this story" and gave the impression that the FCC was ending Lifeline broadband subsidies entirely, Pai argued. "Our action only impacted 9 of the over 900 providers participating in the Lifeline program," Pai wrote. "In other words, 99 percent of the companies participating in the program are not affected at all."