Month: February 2017

Enlarge (credit: Uber)

According to internal documents seen by The New York Times, Uber’s self-driving cars ran six red lights in the short span of time that the company was shuttling customers around in autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, California.

The autonomous vehicle pilot program was announced suddenly in December and quickly drew controversy as the media noted that Uber wasn’t registered on the California DMV’s list of companies approved to test self-driving cars.

Documents obtained by The Verge through a public records request also showed that the California DMV had warned Uber for months prior to the launch of its pilot program that it would need an autonomous testing permit to drive on California’s roads.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of a Falcon Heavy launch. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX announced Monday that it plans to send two private individuals around the Moon by the end of 2018, a highly ambitious flight that would mark the first human return to deep space in nearly 50 years. During a teleconference with reporters, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the two people would fly an approximately week-long mission in a “long loop” around the Moon, to about 400,000 miles from Earth, before returning home.

Musk said the company would launch its Dragon 2 spacecraft on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket and that the two passengers would be flying solo, without the assistance of professional astronauts. Dragon 2, he said, is designed as an autonomous vehicle. The paying customers would not be blind to the risks, he added. "I think they are entering this with their eyes open, knowing there is some risk here," Musk said. "They’re not naive. We’re going to do everything we can do to minimize our risk, but the risk is not zero."

Competition with NASA

The announcement comes shortly after NASA has revealed that it is considering launching a crew of two astronauts on the maiden flight of its Space Launch System rocket in 2019. This flight, Exploration Mission-1, would have a similar profile in that it would send the Orion spacecraft out past the Moon, in a free-return trajectory, before returning to Earth after about a week.

Don't cross the streams! Two streams run through the facility in parallel, created simply by dropping the stream onto a prism-shaped divider. (credit: John Timmer)

Plastics do not readily break down naturally, so there has been no great way to dispose these materials in an environmentally friendly manner. Advances such as the development of recycling streams have improved plastic waste management, but it's not always easy to find uses for the recycled material.

One weakness of the current recycling infrastructure is the reliance on separate recycling streams for different materials. This careful sorting of materials is necessary due to differences in chemical structures of polymers that make them poorly compatible. For example, if we were to combine two of the most ubiquitous plastics in the world, they wouldn't even mix when in a liquid phase. Recently, however, an interdisciplinary team of researchers has developed an additive that enables these two polymers to be recycled together.

The plastics in question are polyethylene (PE) and isotactic polypropylene (iPP). Materials produced from a mix of these polymers exhibit two distinct phases; at the interface of the phases, the polymers adhere poorly to one another, resulting in materials that are mechanically weak compared to the individual components. General municipal waste typically has a 70/30 ratio of PE to iPP, so there's a significant amount of material to separate out.

Enlarge (credit: Ccetsnakebite)

A member of Google's Project Zero security research team has disclosed a high-severity vulnerability in Microsoft's Edge and Internet Explorer browsers that reportedly allows attackers to execute malicious code in some instances.

The vulnerability stems from what's known as a type-confusion bug in Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge, Project Zero researcher Ivan Fratric said in a report that he sent to Microsoft on November 25 and publicly disclosed on Monday. The disclosure is in line with Google's policy of publishing vulnerability details 90 days after being privately reported. A proof-of-concept exploit Fratric developed points to data stored in memory that he said "can be controlled by an attacker (with some limitations)." Asked by a commenter how easy it would be to bypass security measures designed to prevent code execution, Fratric wrote: "I will not make any further comments on exploitability, at least not until the bug is fixed. The report has too much info on that as it is (I really didn't expect this one to miss the deadline)."

Meanwhile, the National Vulnerability Database entry for the bug, which is indexed as CVE-2017-0037, warned that it "allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via vectors involving a crafted Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) token sequence and crafted JavaScript code that operates on a [table-header] element."

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we're back with a new batch of deals. Now we have a number of laptops on sale for less than $550 each. Among them is an Asus notebook with a Kaby Lake Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD, as well as a Dell Inspiron 15 5000 with a Core i7 processor, a 4GB AMD Radeon R5 GPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB HDD. Those sales won't last, so grab them while you can!

You can check out the rest of the deals below, too.

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Enlarge (credit: Vitor Mikaelson)

The latest Windows 10 Insider Preview build doesn't add much in the way of features—it's mostly just bug fixes—but one small new feature has been spotted, and it could be contentious. Vitor Mikaelson noticed that the latest build lets you restrict the installation of applications built using the Win32 API.

The Settings app has three positions: allow apps from anywhere (the default), allow apps from anywhere but prefer apps from the Store, and only allow apps from the Store. Put in its most restrictive third position, this setting will block the installation of traditional Win32 applications; only those shipped through the Store using the Project Centennial technology will work. Interestingly, the switch only appears to govern installation. Changing the setting to "Store apps only" will allow existing Win32 applications to work, only preventing new ones from being installed.

@JezCorden @itsmichaelwest just this finally working pic.twitter.com/V8jBa61Tg5

— Vitor Mikaelson (@vitorgrs) February 26, 2017

Microsoft is late to offer this option; macOS has had a similar toggle as part of its Gatekeeper system since 2012.