Month: May 2017

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Samsung revamped one of its 2016 hybrids while simultaneously creating a challenger to Microsoft's Surface family. Last year's Galaxy TabPro S was a thin-and-light tablet powered by a Skylake Core M processor and featuring an OLED display. While stunning, the OLED display raised questions about the longevity of the device, and the tablet itself was lacking in connectivity options.

The new Galaxy Book tries to fix some of that while keeping the good parts intact: it's a slim Windows tablet, accompanied by a folio keyboard case and S Pen stylus, that's vying to replace your regular laptop by enticing you with Ultrabook-grade internals. The Galaxy Book comes in 10- and 12-inch models, but both are very different, not just in their screen size, but in internal quality as well. While Samsung managed to right some of the wrongs of the TabPro S, it's hard to make a case for the Galaxy Book replacing your everyday work device.

(credit: US Army)

At last week's Pentagon Lab Day in Washington, DC, the Army's Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) and Army Research Lab demonstrated a prototype of technology straight out of first-person shooter games—an "augmented reality" heads-up display that could help soldiers tap into sensors and other data.

Called Tactical Augmented Reality (TAR), the technology is the latest evolution of the Army's effort to network soldiers together and give them "situational awareness" on the battlefield—where they are, where their friends are, where the adversary is, and everything else they need to know for their mission, tied into tactical communications. Over the past few years, CERDEC, ARL, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have been working on the core technologies to make augmented reality work on the battlefield, including the development of a platform called the Heads Up Navigation, Tracking and Reporting (HUNTR) system.

While HUNTR is relatively recent, it's built on nearly three decades of efforts by the Army to digitally enhance the foot soldier. Up until recently, those efforts ran up hard against the limitations of wearable computing. Even as the technology finally matures, it's probably years away from seeing service in the field.

Rocket Lab

On Thursday, shortly after midnight on the US East Coast, a New Zealand-based rocket company launched an orbital-class rocket from a private launch site for the first time. While relatively small, Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle stands at the vanguard of a new class of launchers designed to place increasingly tiny satellites into space. Among competitors such as Virgin Orbit and Vector Space Systems, which are late in the development stage, it is the first small satellite launch company to put a full-size rocket into space.

“We’re one of a few companies to ever develop a rocket from scratch and we did it in under four years," said Peter Beck, chief executive and founder of Rocket Lab. "We’ve worked tirelessly to get to this point. We’ve developed everything in house, built the world’s first private orbital launch range, and we’ve done it with a small team."

Enlarge (credit: Guido Sorarù)

Maintainers of the Samba networking utility just patched a critical code-execution vulnerability that could pose a severe threat to users until the fix is widely installed.

The seven-year-old flaw, indexed as CVE-2017-7494, can be reliably exploited with just one line of code to execute malicious code, as long as a few conditions are met. Those requirements include vulnerable computers that (a) make file- and printer-sharing port 445 reachable on the Internet, (b) configure shared files to have write privileges, and (c) use known or guessable server paths for those files. When those conditions are satisfied, remote attackers can upload any code of their choosing and cause the server to execute it, possibly with unfettered root privileges depending on the vulnerable platform.

"All versions of Samba from 3.5.0 onwards are vulnerable to a remote code execution vulnerability, allowing a malicious client to upload a shared library to a writable share, and then cause the server to load and execute it," Samba maintainers wrote in an advisory published Wednesday. They urged anyone using a vulnerable version to install a patch as soon as possible.

Enlarge / It was either this or yet another picture of some lightning. (credit: Airwolfhound)

We're big fans of Thunderbolt 3 here at Ars, attracted by its enormous versatility, high performance, and the promise of being a single port and a single cable that can do it all. While the technology is becoming increasingly common on high-end portables, it's still far from ubiquitous. Intel has announced a couple of measures that should go a long way toward boosting Thunderbolt 3's adoption.

The first step is straightforward and, in our view, a long time coming: the company is going to finally integrate Thunderbolt 3 into its processors. Although the first Thunderbolt 3 chips, codenamed "Alpine Ridge," were released in the third quarter of 2015, last year's Kaby Lake chipsets, including the high-end Z270, didn't include any native Thunderbolt 3 support. Instead, vendors had to add Alpine Ridge chips separately, with many of them opting not to do so, preferring to avoid both the extra expense and extra complexity.

Alpine Ridge also includes support for USB 3.1 generation 2, which offers speeds of 10 gigabits per second, doubling generation 1's 5 gigabits per second, but while many desktop motherboards do include generation 2 support, they've almost invariably done so using chipsets other than Alpine Ridge, again to avoid that expense and complexity.