Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: LAT Images / Formula E via Getty Images)

Now in its third season, Formula E has yet to shake some of its detractors. Sure, the batteries in each car aren't sufficient to complete an entire race distance, but the series is packed with talent, and the racing is pretty good. It's now also getting a lot of interest from OEMs and electric vehicle startups. Even though the budgets are a fraction of those in Formula 1 or the World Endurance Championship, the series is still able to provide a test bed for EV innovation and technology transfer to our future road cars.

BMW is the latest manufacturer to commit to the series, and it will join the grid in 2018 by partnering with the Andretti team. We recently spoke with the team and another one of their technical partners—TE Connectivity—to get a better idea of the kind of engineering demands involved in the sport. TE provides Andretti with connectors, sensors, and cabling, and it even embeds engineers in the team on six-month rotations, something that helps expose the rest of the company to lessons one learns in the high-pressure world of racing.

It has been a fruitful partnership for both sides. Andretti originally only knew of the company for its connectors when the two started working together in 2015, and Andretti's director of motorsport development, Roger Griffiths, told us that the team was surprised by just how much TE did and how the design of its cars could benefit from those capabilities.

(credit: Elliott Brown)

You can now start filing public comments on the Federal Communications Commission plan to eliminate net neutrality rules.

The FCC today opened the docket, titled "Restoring Internet Freedom." Clicking "New Filing" takes you to a form for uploading documents, while an "Express" filing lets you write a brief comment without uploading a document. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai also released the draft text of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that will be voted on at the May 18 FCC meeting. There will be another three months for public comments after that preliminary vote, and the FCC will make a final decision sometime after that.

It's already pretty clear where this is going, though: Pai intends to overturn the 2015 net neutrality order, and the only question is whether anything will replace it. While previous FCC leaders decided that home Internet providers and mobile carriers shouldn't be allowed to throttle websites and online services, Pai's proposal suggests that the current ban on throttling hurts customers.

Enlarge / A map that visualizes network changes being announced by Rostelecom. (credit: BGPmon)

On Wednesday, large chunks of network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services companies were briefly routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom under unexplained circumstances that renew lingering questions about the trust and reliability of some of the most sensitive Internet communications.

Anomalies in the border gateway protocol—which routes large-scale amounts of traffic among Internet backbones, ISPs, and other large networks—are common and usually the result of human error. While it's possible Wednesday's five- to seven-minute hijack of 36 large network blocks may also have been inadvertent, the high concentration of technology and financial services companies affected made the incident "curious" to engineers at network monitoring service BGPmon. What's more, the way some of the affected networks were redirected indicated their underlying prefixes had been manually inserted into BGP tables, most likely by someone at Rostelecom, the Russian government-controlled telecom that improperly announced ownership of the blocks.

"Quite suspicious"

"I would classify this as quite suspicious," Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at network management firm Dyn, told Ars. "Typically accidental leaks appear more voluminous and indiscriminate. This would appear to be targeted to financial institutions. A typical cause of these errors [is] in some sort of internal traffic engineering, but it would seem strange that someone would limit their traffic engineering to mostly financial networks."

Enlarge / Artist's impression of the hobbit. (credit: Katrina Kenny, SA Museum)

The story of how modern humans got to be where we are is constantly changing as new evidence is found. This often forces us to confront the idea that we aren’t as unique as we thought, as we find evidence of behaviors like tool use further and further back in our family tree. New evidence hints that our ancestors may have left Africa—and gone farther from it—than we had thought previously.

A paper currently in press at the Journal of Human Evolution takes a look at how Homo floresiensis, the diminutive “hobbit” species, fits into this picture. Its findings suggest that the hobbit lies further down on the family tree than previously thought, something that would only be possible if our ancestors had migrated out of Africa much earlier than any other data suggested.

Homebodies or wanderers

Our genus Homo may seem to have been pretty determined to get out of Africa. But Homo is a diverse group, a similar level of grouping to the one that places dogs, wolves, foxes, and jackals together in Canis. Across the genus, the migratory history is mixed. Our own species obviously left, probably in more than one wave of migration. But going much further back in time, our cousins Homo erectus, who lived between 2 million years and approximately 70,000 years ago, also left Africa and spread throughout Asia. Other members of our genus appear to have remained on their native continent.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

NEW YORK—Acer's big press conference last year brought new Chromebooks for work, a new Aspire laptop, and a tablet for the elderly. This year, the company focused on machines that appeal to every level of gamer as well as those of us who want a laptop that won't break the bank. Acer announced additions to the Swift and Switch laptop families, all of which are more budget-friendly than their predecessors. The company also unveiled a whole new line of gaming laptops geared toward casual gamers plus a few new devices for the hardcore gamer that requires portability as well as power.

A swift gear switch

A big theme of this year’s event was building: Acer debuted a few high-end notebooks last year including the Swift 7 ultrabook and the Aspire Switch 12. This year, the company built on those laptop families with more accessible models—the Swift 7 now has siblings with the Swift 1 and 3 notebooks. The Swift 1 models will likely be good options for the back to school season with their all-metal design, 14.95mm profile, and 13.3-inch FHD displays. Acer estimates the Swift 1 notebooks will get up to 10 hours of battery life, and considering they don’t have many bells and whistles (no high-end GPUs, no biometrics), the devices should last at least all day.

Unlike the Swift 1, the Switch 3 models support the latest Intel processors, Intel HD or Nvidia graphics, up to 512GB SSDs or 1TB HDDs, and up to 8GB of RAM. The Swift 3 is certainly the more versatile of the two affordable laptops, but both models keep a budget price tag. Both can be upgraded to include a Windows Hello-ready fingerprint sensor, and they both come with Skype for Business certifications and Acer's Blue Light Shield which helps prevent eye-strain during long periods of PC use.