Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, the Dealmaster is back with a bunch of new deals to share. Amazon has a great deal ending soon: sign up for a 30-day free trial of Amazon Music and you get a $10 Amazon promo credit. We also have a number of deals on Seagate hard drives, Dell and Asus laptops, and more.

Check out the full list of deals below.

Featured

Enlarge / Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has pointed out a particular problem with Senate IT security: Senate staffers' ID cards are essentially fake smartcards, useless for two-factor authentication. (credit: Getty Images/Justin Sullivan)

When Congress held hearings following the breach of the systems of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2015, one of the issues that caused great consternation among lawmakers was that the OPM had failed to implement two-factor authentication for employees, particularly when using virtual private networks. Federal information security standards in place at the time called for strong user authentication for any federal information system, but the OPM hadn't figured out how to implement two-factor authentication principles—something users know (a password), plus something they have (which, in government, is typically a "smartcard" ID with digital authentication keys programmed onto a chip).

The OPM wasn't alone. While the Department of Defense began issuing Common Access Cards in 2008 to be used for two-factor authentication on DOD systems and to control physical access to DOD facilities, most of the civilian agencies of the US federal government still hadn't implemented their own smartcard (Personal Identity Verification, or PIV) systems at the time of the OPM breach.

What a real smartcard ID looks like: the DOD's Common Access Card. (credit: Department of Defense)

The Government Accountability Office repeatedly warned of gaps in federal information security, including the lack of two-factor authentication on critical federal systems like those at OPM. And during President Barack Obama's "cyber-sprint," many more agencies did roll out smartcards for authentication.

Enlarge (credit: Brett Gundlock)

A mysterious kidney disease is striking down labourers across the world and climate change is making it worse. For Mosaic, Jane Palmer meets the doctors who are trying to understand it and stop it. The story is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

By 10am in the sugarcane fields outside the town of Tierra Blanca in El Salvador, the mercury is already pushing 31°C. The workers arrived at dawn: men and women, young and old, wearing thick jeans, long-sleeved shirts and face scarves to prevent being scorched by the sun’s rays. They are moving quickly between rows of cane, bending, reaching, clipping and trimming in preparation for harvesting the crop in the weeks to come. In the scant shade, old Pepsi and Fanta bottles full of water swing from tree branches, untouched. Gulping only the thick air, the workers won’t stop until noon, when their shift is over.

Among them is 25-year-old Jesús Linares. His dream, he explains in English, was to be a language teacher, but like many Salvadoran children he went to work to help support his parents and siblings. Aged eight, he learned to hide in the towering canes whenever the police sought out underage workers; since then, he’s tended sugarcane from dawn to noon and then pigs until dusk. In the evenings, he tries to listen to English audio programmes or read a language book, but for the last year he’s been too tired to concentrate. So tired, in fact, that a few months ago he visited the Tierra Blanca clinic. Blood tests revealed that Linares was in the early stages of chronic kidney disease.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaks during the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas on April 25, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Ethan Miller )

The Federal Communications Commission will vote next month to start the process of reversing the commission's 2015 net neutrality order, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced in a speech today.

Earlier today, Pai shared with his fellow commissioners a plan to "reverse the mistake of Title II and return to the light-touch regulatory framework that served our nation so well during the Clinton administration, Bush administration, and the first six years of the Obama administration," he said.

Pai's net neutrality rollback targets the FCC's February 2015 reclassification of fixed and mobile Internet providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. Title II provides the regulatory authority the FCC used to prohibit ISPs from blocking or throttling traffic, and from giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment. The FCC used Title II to impose the net neutrality rules after a previous court decision struck down rules issued without the step of reclassifying ISPs as common carriers.

Nature

In 1992, a group of archaeologists found something extraordinary buried below a sound berm next to the San Diego freeway in Southern California. They had been called in during a freeway renovation to do some excavation because the fossil-laced earth of the California coast often yields scientific treasures. After digging about three meters below the construction area, Center for American Paleolithic Research archaeologist Steve Holen was deep into a pristine layer of soil that hadn't been disturbed for millennia. There, he found what appeared to be an abandoned campsite, where humans had left stone tools and hammered mastodon bones behind. This wasn't too unusual; it's fairly well-established that humans were hunting mastodons in the Americas as early as 15,000 years ago.

But when Holen's colleagues used several techniques to discover the age of the bones, the numbers sounded crazy. Test after test showed that the bones had been buried more than 100,000 years ago. The result flew in the face of everything we think we know about the spread of humanity across the globe. It took 24 years before Holen and his fellow researchers were certain enough to publish their findings in Nature. Now, based on a reliable dating method using Uranium decay rates and years of repeated tests, the researchers say that an unknown type of early human lived in California roughly 130,000 years ago. If true, it completely changes the story of how humans reached the Americas.

Enlarge / This scientist in her steampunk laboratory and time machine in the background brings to mind BioShock Infinite's Elizabeth. It's a shame this is just a tech demo and not a real game. (credit: Windows Central)

While Microsoft's initial reveal of Project Scorpio placed heavy emphasis on 4K gaming, the huge GPU upgrade relative to the Xbox One is going to bring a big visual upgrade for the majority of us still using 1080p, too.

Windows Central has some exclusive screenshots showing Scorpio both at 4K and 1080p. The pictures aren't of real games, but rather tech demos constructed to demonstrate just what the console can handle. They were shown at a private Microsoft event.

The first demo shows a steampunk scientist in her lab and is intended to show what developers can do with minimal effort; the shaders, textures, and models are the same on both Xbox One and Project Scorpio, with only the rendering resolution improved.