Month: May 2017

Enlarge / Lexmark printer cartridges in a Staple's store in New York. (credit: Photo by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The US Supreme Court voted 7-1 to place more limits on the rights of patent-holders, striking down a decision by the nation's top patent court for the second time in two weeks.

In Impression Products v. Lexmark International, the justices' opinion (PDF) made crystal clear that once a patented item has been sold once, the patent is "exhausted" and can no longer be enforced. That's true even if the sale happened abroad and the item was later imported. Lexmark had two different strategies for trying to control how its cartridges get re-used; the high court struck down both of them and paid scant regard to various industry briefs pleading to maintain the pricing structures used by Lexmark and others to maintain profits.

Lexmark had been trying to use patent laws to impose restrictions on companies like Impression Products, which are known as "remanufacturers." These companies acquire Lexmark cartridges, then re-fill and re-sell them. A strong 10-2 majority of judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears all patent appeals, took Lexmark's side and found that the patent-related restrictions were justified.

Enlarge / The large Barren Ridge solar panel array near Mojave, California. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) has released numbers on US electricity generation for the first quarter of 2017, and renewable energy numbers are coming in big.

According to the EIA, renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and geothermal power accounted for 10.68 percent of total electricity generation in the first quarter of 2017. If you include electricity from conventional hydroelectric plants, renewables made up nearly a fifth of total electricity generation—as much as 19.35 percent.

The striking part about that number is that the EIA, a statistical department within the Department of Energy, couldn’t foresee how dramatically renewables’ share of the electricity mix would increase just five years ago. In 2012, the administration predicted (PDF, page 87) that electricity generation from renewable sources would increase “from 10 percent in 2010 to 15 percent in 2035.” Even by 2015, the administration predicted (PDF, page ES-6) that “The renewable share of total generation grows from 13 percent in 2013 to 18 percent in 2040.”

Enlarge / First you see it, then you don't. (credit: NASA, ESA, and C. Kochanek)

The rules for a stellar death seem pretty simple. If the star isn't that massive, it burns out into a carbon-rich remnant called a white dwarf. If it's big enough, the star ends in a bang, exploding in a supernova that can leave behind a neutron star or a black hole. But a number of simulations have suggested that there's another option: big stars that go out not with a bang but a whimper.

The idea is that, rather than exploding, much of the mass of the star falls inward to the core, forming a larger black hole. While some of the outer layers of the star are shed and it brightens briefly, there's no catastrophic explosion. Now, researchers about to publish in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society have identified one of these collapses in the form of a star that seems to have vanished.

No bang

While supernovae are often called explosions, they're actually a bit more complicated than that. Deep within the soon-to-be supernova, all the lighter elements have been fused, leaving the core to undergo reactions that absorb energy. Without any excess energy to push back against gravity, the interior of the star collapses, forming a black hole or neutron star. It's only the outer layers that are jettisoned, creating an outburst of light and material.

Starz

For the weirdest episode of American Gods so far this season, I was delighted to have on our podcast a guest whose job is to translate Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. Jackson Crawford teaches Old Norse at UC Berkeley and University of Colorado at Boulder, and he explains Norse culture and language delightfully on his YouTube channel. He joined us to discuss some of the myths behind the gods in this show.

Spoilers ahead and in the podcast! Also: my profound apologies for the sound in this episode. There were about a zillion technical problems on my end as I recorded this on the road, and our engineer Jennifer Hahn worked heroically to fix it. But it still sounds kind of echoey in places.

Enlarge / Gambling. (credit: Jamie Adams)

The mysterious group that over the past nine months has leaked millions of dollars' worth of advanced hacking tools developed by the National Security Agency said Tuesday it will release a new batch of tools to individuals who pay a $21,000 subscription fee. The plans, announced in a cryptographically signed post published Tuesday morning, are generating an intense moral dilemma for security professionals around the world.

On the one hand, the Shadow Brokers, as the person or group calls itself, has in the past released potent hacking tools into the wild, including two that were used to deliver the WCry ransomware worm that infected more than 200,000 computers in 150 countries. If the group releases similarly catastrophic exploits for Windows 10 or mainstream browsers, security professionals are arguably obligated to have access to them as soon as possible to ensure patches and exploit signatures are in place to prevent similar outbreaks. On the other hand, there's something highly unsavory and arguably unethical about whitehats paying blackhats with a track record as dark as that of the Shadow Brokers.

"It certainly creates a moral issue for me," Matthew Hickey, cofounder of security firm Hacker House, told Ars. "Endorsing criminal conduct by paying would be the wrong message to send. Equally, I think $21k is a small price to pay to avoid another WannaCry situation, and I am sure many of its victims would agree with that sentiment."

Enlarge / Anthony Levandowski, VP of engineering at Uber, speaking to reporters at the Uber Advanced Technologies Center on September 13, 2016 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (credit: ANGELO MERENDINO/AFP/Getty Images)

The Uber engineer at the center of the company's litigation with Waymo, Anthony Levandowski, has been fired.

Levandowski's termination was made clear in an internal e-mail and reported earlier today by The New York Times. An Uber spokesperson confirmed the news to Ars Technica.

Google's self-driving car division, Waymo, sued Uber in February, claiming that Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 files while he was a Google employee, including trade secrets. Uber has not denied that Levandowski may have taken files but maintains that its self-driving car technology was built independently from the ground up. The company says Google's files didn't make their way to Uber.