Month: March 2017

(credit: Travis Olbrich)

The US-UK ban on electronic devices larger than a mobile phone for some flights from Africa and the Middle East stems, in part, from the discovery of a terror plot to use an iPad to blow up an airliner.

The Guardian, citing an anonymous "security source," said Monday that the uncovered plot involved explosives hidden in a fake iPad "that appeared to be as good as the real thing." The Guardian's source did not provide other details, like when and where the threat was discovered and who was behind it.

Discovery of the plot confirmed the fears of the intelligence agencies that Islamist groups had found a novel way to smuggle explosives into the cabin area in carry-on luggage after failed attempts with shoe bombs and explosives hidden in underwear. An explosion in a cabin (where a terrorist can position the explosive against a door or window) can have much more impact than one in the hold (where the terrorist has no control over the position of the explosive, which could be in the middle of luggage, away from the skin of the aircraft), given passengers and crew could be sucked out of any subsequent hole.

Security concerns over weaponized electronics on airlines have some merit. For starters, electronics are ubiquitous. And last year, for example, a bomb in a laptop punctured a hole in the passenger area on a Somalia-bound flight.

Enlarge / Uber is hitting the big red "Stop" button after a crash in Tempe, Ariz., left one of its self-driving Volvos beached on its side. (credit: ANGELO MERENDINO/AFP/Getty Images)

Update:That didn't take very long—according to Engadget Uber resumed autonomous testing on Monday morning.
Uber is having a tough time lately. Its CEO went viral arguing with a driver, and its president has just thrown in the towel. In the past few weeks, the ride-hailing service has been mired in sexual abuse scandals, subject to a consumer boycott, and accused of stealing self-driving secrets. Uber probably wishes the last of those items was the complete extent of its self-induced self-driving headache. But now, a crash on the streets of Tempe, Arizona left an autonomous test vehicle on its side and Uber's self-driving program suspended.

BREAKING: Self-driving Uber vehicle on it’s side after a collision in Tempe, AZ.

Photos by @fresconews user Mark Beach pic.twitter.com/5NCF2KG0rW

— Fresco News (@fresconews) March 25, 2017

The vehicle—a Volvo XC90—was driving autonomously with a pair of Uber engineers up front but no passengers, when another vehicle failed to yield. No one was seriously injured, and the incident occurred on a stretch of road that locals say "isn't very safe."

Although it doesn't appear that this crash was caused by the self-driving vehicle, Uber grounding its research fleet is probably a wise move, even if it feels out of character. This is, of course, the company that got into a fight with California regulators over whether or not it needed permission to play with autonomous vehicles on public streets (it did) and was also caught actively dodging regulations in the US and around the world.

Enlarge / Artist's impression of a progenitor of galaxies like the Milky Way, seen when the Universe was only 1.5 billion years old. New observations reveal that these galaxies are surrounded by massive halos of hydrogen gas. (credit: A. Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF))

The early Universe can be studied by looking at light coming from distant galaxies. The farther away the galaxy is, the longer its light takes to reach us, so we can see extremely distant galaxies as they were billions of years ago. However, the further back in time we look through this method, the more difficult it becomes to clearly resolve any features about the galaxies we’re looking at.

An easier task, and one researchers have been doing for decades, is to study the gas surrounding early galaxies. When light passes through this gas, certain wavelengths of light are absorbed, while others aren’t. The result is that there are certain gaps, or lines, in this light. But until now, that’s as far as researchers could go for the most part: they couldn’t learn much about the galaxies themselves.

In a new study, researchers have directly imaged two Milky Way-like galaxies through observations from ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array). The galaxies seem to have the properties of massive, star-forming galaxies.

(credit: Orin Zebest / Flickr)

We're now approaching the four-year anniversary of Microsoft's rollout (and subsequent reversal) of a controversial plan to let game publishers limit resale of used, disc-based games. Looking back on that time recently, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Windows and Devices Yusuf Mehdi acknowledged how that rollout fell flat and discussed how hard it was for the firm to change course even in light of fan complaints at the time.

In a blog post on LinkedIn posted last weekend, Mehdi writes:

"With our initial announcement of Xbox One and our desire to deliver breakthroughs in gaming and entertainment, the team made a few key decisions regarding connectivity requirements and how games would be purchased that didn’t land well with fans. While the intent was good – we imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing and new ways to try and buy games, we didn’t deliver what our fans wanted.

We heard their feedback, and while it required great technical work, we changed Xbox One to work the same way as Xbox 360 for how our customers could play, share, lend, and resell games. This experience was such a powerful reminder that we must always do the right thing for our customers, and since we’ve made that commitment to our Xbox fans, we’ve never looked back."

It's an interesting reflection in light of an interview Mehdi gave to Ars Technica at E3 2013, when the executive defended Microsoft's announced plans for Xbox One game licensing. Mehdi, then serving as Xbox chief marketing and strategy officer, stressed at the time that "this is a big change, consumers don't always love change, and there's a lot of education we have to provide to make sure that people understand... We're trying to do something pretty big in terms of moving the industry forward for console gaming into the digital world. We believe the digital world is the future, and we believe digital is better."

Enlarge / Old-school wiretapping gear

A former county prosecutor in New York was indicted Monday on federal charges of illegally wiretapping two phones. Tara Lenich is set to be arraigned before a federal magistrate on Monday afternoon in Brooklyn.

Lenich first faced state charges last fall, when she was accused of orchestrating the surveillance of an unnamed male police detective and one of Lenich’s own female colleagues, in what the New York Times characterized last year as a "love triangle gone wrong." The new federal charges likely will supersede those state charges.

In a Monday statement, federal prosecutors allege that for nearly 16 months, between June 2015 and November 2016, Lenich created fake judicial orders and forged judge’s signatures to authorize the wiretaps and authorize fraudulent search warrants in order to get texts from the target phones. Specifically the indictment alleges that Lenich "physically cut a copy of each such judge's signature from a legitimate document and taped the signature onto the fraudulent documents she had created."