Month: February 2017

Enlarge / White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer takes questions on February 7. His home address, phone and personal e-mail were discovered in the domain registration data for his now-defunct personal blog. (credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images)

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has gotten a lot of grief from some quarters for a variety of reasons. Among them are his problems with information security—including his apparent posting of passwords to his Twitter account. But the latest privacy problem Spicer has on the Internet is one that thousands of others who have embraced the Internet have had, and it's mostly the fault of the Internet's archaic address book—the Domain Name System.

In 2009, Spicer registered a domain for his personal blog—seanspicer.com. He updated his domain registration data in March of 2010, apparently after moving into his home in Alexandria, Virginia. And when he did, he used his own personal home address, phone number, and e-mail account. That information, as Mashable reported on February 6, is still publicly accessible through a whois lookup against the Domain Name Service, as published by his domain registrar GoDaddy. The phone number matches one associated with Spicer present in the DNC e-mail breach posted by WikiLeaks.

Spicer's Yahoo e-mail account—which was part of data exposed in the MySpace, Dropbox and LinkedIn "mega-breaches" discovered in 2016—is also associated with a number of other domains, including those bearing the name of family members. These sites have largely been taken down (as in the case of theelephanttrunk.org, a Republican-themed online tie store), are still essentially blank template sites (including stateoftherace.org), or are parked. The parked domains include:

Enlarge / The Android Wear 2.0 watch face, app drawer, and a notification.

It's launch day for Android Wear 2.0, Google's first major smartwatch update in, well, ever. Wear 2.0 is a total overhaul of Google's smartwatch platform with a whole new design, an on-watch Play Store, a new version of Google Fit, Android Pay, and in general, a move toward being more of a standalone computer rather than a smartwatch slave.

With LG's help, Google is launching a pair of devices for Wear 2.0, both of which will hit stores February 10th. The $349 LG Watch Sport is the most exciting, with LTE, NFC, GPS, and a heart rate sensor (we have a full review, here). Given that it is packing an LTE modem, the LG Watch Sport is headed for Verizon and AT&T stores in the US, along with the Google Store.

The LG Watch Style is a lot slimmer, but it lacks all the cool features of the Watch Sport (no LTE, NFC, GPS, or heart rate sensor). The Style runs $249 and is headed to the Google Store and Best Buy. Google also notes that both watches "will be available at carriers and retailers across Canada, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, UAE, and UK in the coming weeks."

Enlarge / Simulating the event horizon the old fashioned way, with computers. (credit: Andrew Hamilton; NSF )

Black holes are a problem for physics, and the physics community has never fully warmed to the idea of them. That's because, at the center of a black hole, the mathematics go haywire. More specifically, the equations of general relativity predict that the curvature of space should be infinite, and no one hates an infinity more than a physicist.

That was bad enough, but then it was discovered that black holes are not entirely black. At the very point of no return—where the pull of gravity is so strong that not even light can escape—light is emitted in the form of Hawking radiation. Exactly how Hawking radiation is generated doesn't really concern us here. For physicists, this is also a conundrum. The emission of Hawking radiation from a black hole violates the conservation of information. In an effort to resolve this idea through experiments, physicists are turning to the laboratory, where experiments can mimic black holes.

Where does the information go?

In quantum mechanics, a particle is described by a wave function—a mathematical device with no direct measurable physical meaning—that encapsulates all physical knowledge of that particle. I can chuck that particle into a black hole, bu the black hole's wave function does not appear to be altered by this event in a way that preserves the information. The Hawking radiation that is emitted later doesn't obviously contain information about the particle, either.

After more than two-and-a-half years on the market and many minor updates, Google's Android Wear platform is finally getting its first major overhaul: Android Wear 2.0. To celebrate, Google and LG have teamed up to create a pair of smartwatches, the LG Watch Sport and LG Watch Style, as the flagship Android Wear 2.0 devices. The Style is a $250 smartwatch that aims to be as thin as possible (so much so that it doesn't even have a heart rate sensor) but the bigger, more expensive LG Watch Sport is the more interesting of the two.

The $350 Sport packs almost every radio you'd find in a smartphone—LTE, NFC, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. LTE gives it independent access to the Internet, so messages and notifications arrive no matter where you are. NFC makes this the first watch to support Android Pay, so you can walk into a store without a smartphone or wallet, tap on the terminal, and be on your way. GPS means you can leave the house and still have access to Google Maps and run tracking, and with a pair of Bluetooth headphones, you can bring some music along on your jog.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Android Wear 2.0 is officially out and Google has welcomed the update into the world with two new smartwatches: the LG Sport Watch and the LG Style Watch. While Android Wear now has a bunch of new and improved features, I wanted to take a new look at Google Fit.

Shortly after Apple came out with the Health app and HealthKit framework, Google came out with Fit as its way of collecting and storing everyday activity data from multiple sources. Android Wear, along with third-party app integrations, allows you to use Google Fit more efficiently by tracking workouts with hardware that should be more accurate than the motion sensors inside your smartphone. Google Fit was updated last year, so I spent some time with LG's Style Watch and Google Fit to see how the fitness app has evolved, how well it interacts with one of the newest Android Wear devices, and if it will really be able to stand up to Apple's and Fitbit's programs going forward.

LG Style Watch overview

Ars' Ron Amadeo spent some time with the $349 LG Sport Watch, and I tested the $249 LG Style Watch. While the Style is certainly more svelte than its counterpart, that ultimately leads to it being a less-equipped a fitness device. Unlike the Sport, which has built-in GPS, an optical heart rate monitor, and barometer, the Style only has an accelerometer and gyroscope inside. That means this $250 device will tell you as much as the $79 Fitbit Flex 2 or $99 Fitbit Alta, if fitness is biggest reason why you're buying a smartwatch.

For the first time, tickets to the Electronic Entertainment Expo will be officially available to those who don't work in the game industry. Starting February 13 at noon Eastern time, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) will sell 15,000 "consumer passes" to the Los Angeles show through its official website. The show takes place June 13 to 15 this year.

The first 1,000 public tickets sold will be available for $149, and the remainder will go for $249. Traditional business and press passes will still be available to those in the industry, and those ticket-holders will get benefits such as "a dedicated entrance and VIP Business Lounge," according to Polygon.

The expansion of the game industry's most iconic trade show comes after last year's experimental "E3 Live," which offered a concurrent, miniature fan-focused conference for 20,000 public attendees just outside the LA Convention Center. In 2015, the show also extended invites to 5,000 "prosumers"—super-fans who received their tickets directly from exhibitors.