Month: June 2017

Enlarge (credit: John Timmer)

Chief Engineer Gary McGrath made us an offer we couldn't refuse. Pulling aside a yellow cord that blocked off access to the lower reaches of the research vessel Neil Armstrong, he offered a look at the ship's engines and the very bottom of the ship, where sonar arrays are plugged in to the hull. It wasn't part of the planned tour, and it would require squeezing down a narrow ladder, but how could we say no?

In the fleet

Fleet Week, an annual event in New York City, generally features naval vessels from the US and other nations. So it was a bit of a surprise to get an offer to visit the Armstrong in the first place. But, while the ship is operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), it was built and owned by the US Navy. So, while it was poorly armed compared to the vessels that accompanied it up the Hudson, the Armstrong was right at home.

The US Navy has a long history of ocean research. The Office of Naval Research dates back more than 70 years, and Navy seafloor maps revealed the mid-ocean ridges, helping usher plate tectonics into widespread acceptance. And, in recent decades, the Navy has followed a model where it builds research vessels and then has academic institutions operate them. Those institutions accept applications from individual researchers to spend time pursing projects onboard.

Enlarge / Proponents of net neutrality protest against Federal Communication Commission Chairman Ajit Pai outside the American Enterprise Institute on May 5, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla)

Amazon, Reddit, Mozilla, and other Internet companies are joining net neutrality activists next month for an "Internet-wide day of action to save net neutrality."

"The FCC wants to destroy net neutrality and give big cable companies control over what we see and do online," activist groups Fight for the Future, Free Press, and Demand Progress said in an announcement today. "If they get their way, they’ll allow widespread throttling, blocking, censorship, and extra fees. On July 12th, the Internet will come together to stop them."

On that day, websites who sign up for the protest will "sound the alarm about the FCC’s attack on net neutrality." While the announcement referred to previous protests such as the SOPA blackout in 2012 and Internet Slowdown Day in 2014, it's not clear yet exactly what the websites involved in the new protest will be doing on July 12.

Back when Microsoft first unveiled the Xbox One in May of 2013, the company took a lot of flak for focusing on TV and other media streaming uses for the box instead of talking primarily about games. An in-depth Ars Technica analysis of Xbox Live users, though, shows just how much time Xbox owners are spending watching video on their consoles, potentially explaining why Microsoft thought video was so important out of the gate.

Netflix is by far the most-used individual app in the Xbox ecosystem, according to our data, making up about 19 percent of all usage time we could measure across both the Xbox One and Xbox 360 during our September 2016 through February 2017 sampling period (read the introductory piece for details and caveats about our data collection methods). YouTube is also a favorite for Xbox owners, representing a further 7.6 percent of all usage. All told, these two apps account for more than a quarter of all the Xbox time we could measure.

Andrew Cunningham

No one was allowed to touch the single iMac Pro that Apple had in its hands-on area following the WWDC keynote today. Big and dark and imposing, the computer is the first step toward making good on Apple's promises to recommit to its desktop users. It's not a new Mac Pro (a computer that's still coming, I've been assured), but it is a more concrete commitment to high-end desktops than the (nice, but straightforward) standard iMac refresh we got Tuesday.

Apple has made some cool tweaks to the iMac to earn it that "pro" moniker, specs aside. The cooling system and the vents have been entirely redesigned. A regular iMac has a single fan plus one vent in back, above the power cord and below where the stand meets the body of the computer. The Pro has two fans inside plus what appears to be a pair of long horizontal vents across the bottom, visible in the photos above. It also adds four Thunderbolt 3 ports to the normal USB 3.0 ports, plus a 10 gigabit Ethernet port. The neat black keyboard, mouse, and trackpad (sadly unavailable for purchase separately) are a nice touch, too.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

When reporters at The Intercept approached the National Security Agency on June 1 to confirm a document that had been anonymously leaked to the publication in May, they handed over a copy of the document to the NSA to verify its authenticity. When they did so, the Intercept team inadvertently exposed its source because the copy showed fold marks that indicated it had been printed—and it included encoded watermarking that revealed exactly when it had been printed and on what printer.

The watermarks, shown in the image above—an enhancement of the scanned document The Intercept published yesterday—were from a Xerox Docucolor printer. Researchers working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation have reverse-engineered the grid pattern employed by this class of printer; using the tool, Ars (and others, including security researcher Robert Graham) determined that the document passed to The Intercept was printed on May 9, 2017 at 6:20am from a printer with the serial number 535218 or 29535218.