Month: April 2017

Enlarge / The Surface Pro 4 with its kickstand out. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The Surface Pro 4 was released about a year-and-a-half ago, and even though new processors are available, it didn't make an appearance along with the Surface Studio and other hardware updates in October of 2016. Longtime Microsoft pundit Paul Thurrott has some news about the Surface Pro 5, an update he says will change "nothing dramatic" about the convertible.

According to Thurrott, the Surface Pro 5 will keep its proprietary Surface Connect power connector instead of switching to USB-C charging, though it's worth noting that there are already computers out there that include a proprietary power jack and support for USB-C charging if you have an adapter. He also says that the tablet will use new Kaby Lake processors from Intel, though this isn't much of a surprise.

Surface Pro 5 will not change the Surface Connect power connector, I was just told. Kaby Lake, nothing dramatic.

— Paul Thurrott (@thurrott) April 6, 2017

Thurrott has no news to share on the tablet's design, ports, or release date. Rumors have suggested that Microsoft is planning some sort of hardware event for the spring, but a minor Surface Pro bump may not be able to carry an event like this on its own. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley says a Surface Book 2 isn't in the cards (though the "Performance Base" that was released a few months ago serves as a midstream refresh of sorts); the Lumia phone lineup has been discontinued, ostensibly in favor of a "Surface Phone" that may never see the light of day; the Surface Studio is still fresh; and the Microsoft Band has been canceled altogether.

Rensenware's warning screen asks for a high score, rather than the usual pay off, to decrypt your files.

At this point, Ars readers have heard countless tales of computer users being forced to pay significant sums to unlock files encrypted with malicious ransomware. So we were a bit surprised when word started to trickle out about a new bit of ransomware that doesn't ask for money. Instead, "Rensenware" forces players to get a high score in a difficult PC shoot-em-up to decrypt their files.

As Malware Hunter Team noted yesterday, users on systems infected with Rensenware are faced with the usual ransomware-style warning that "your precious data like documents, musics, pictures, and some kinda project files" have been "encrypted with highly strong encryption algorithm." The only way to break the encryption lock, according to the warning, is to "score 0.2 billion in LUNATIC level" on TH12 ~ Undefined Fantastic Object. That's easier said than done, as this gameplay video of the "bullet hell" style Japanese shooter shows.

As you may have guessed from the specifics here, the Rensenware bug was created more in the spirit of fun than maliciousness. After Rensenware was publicized on Twitter, its creator, who goes by Tvple Eraser on Twitter and often posts in Korean, released an apology for releasing what he admitted was "a kind of highly-fatal malware."

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaks during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on March 8, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai reportedly met with broadband industry lobby groups this week to discuss his plans for eliminating net neutrality rules.

Instead of the FCC continuing to enforce net neutrality rules, Pai “wants Internet service providers to voluntarily agree to maintain an open Internet,” Reuters reported yesterday, citing three sources briefing on the meeting.

Pai wants to shift enforcement of net neutrality from the FCC to the Federal Trade Commission, according to The Wall Street Journal, which also talked to people familiar with the meeting.

Are we on the cusp of the consumer biotech age, when lab-grown meat will be just as common as farmed meat? Recently, a company called Memphis Meats started selling in-vitro meat (IVM) that apparently tastes just like delicious chicken and duck. But if we want the price on an IVM burger to get below $1,000, we need consumers to buy lots of the stuff. That's why two Australian researchers from the University of Queensland decided to study what the US public currently thinks about eating IVM.

Psychologist Matti Wilks and veterinary scientist Clive Phillips surveyed 673 people via Mechanical Turk, asking a wide range of questions about their backgrounds and attitudes toward meat eating. What they found is that roughly two-thirds of their subjects would be willing to try IVM, and a third thought it might become a regular part of their diets. Wilks and Phillips suggest that this means people are open to eating IVM, but don't think it would replace farmed meat.

That said, none of these subjects had ever eaten IVM before. Given that 79 percent of them were concerned that IVM would lack flavor or aesthetic appeal, it's possible they might change their minds if it tasted exactly like farmed meat. Many people were also dissuaded by the idea of paying more for IVM than farmed meat. Presumably these subjects might become regular consumers if IVM were tasty and affordable.

(credit: Schultz, et. al., Science)

Viruses tend to have stripped-down genomes, carrying just enough genes to take over a cell and make lots more copies. Ebola, for example, carries a total of just seven genes, allowing new copies to be made with little fuss. There are a few exceptions—viruses like herpes with complex life cycles—but even the biggest of the viruses we knew about had only a few hundred genes.

All that changed a bit more than a decade ago, when researchers discovered the Mimivirus, which had a genome bigger than some bacteria and carried many genes for functions that are normally provided by host proteins. The huge genomes and strange behavior of the viruses led their discoverers to propose that they weren't just odd offshoots that preyed upon life—rather, they might have played a critical role in boosting life's complexity.

Now, researchers have discovered a new family of giant viruses, related to the Mimiviruses but distinct in a number of ways. And a careful analysis of their genes suggests they, and all other giant viruses, have been put together through relatively recent evolution. The work argues very strongly against these viruses playing a key role in life's diversification.

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos speaking at the unveiling of the Blue Origin New Shepard system during the Space Symposium on Wednesday, April 5, 2017. (credit: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Between November 2015, and October 2016, the reusable New Shepard rocket and spacecraft made five suborbital flights, surviving some pretty harsh scenarios. But during the last six months, Blue Origin, the semi-secretive rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, has not flown any new vehicles. So what has it been up to?

This week, the company brought the rocket that made those five flights to the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado and displayed it along with a mockup of the spacecraft that will eventually begin carrying customers on 11-minute suborbital flights. Bezos said he was not ready to disclose a price yet or sell tickets, but these consumer flights remain on track for sometime in 2018.

The original rocket has been retired and will likely go on a road show before ending up in a museum. To find out what has been happening behind the scenes with the second iteration of the New Shepard rocket, Ars spoke with Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson. He said the company's engineers have learned a lot of "little lessons" from the test flights of the New Shepard module in late 2015 and early 2016.