Month: June 2017

CastAR's first prototype. Subsequent revisions brought the glasses' size down and fidelity up, so that its mounted projectors would better convey the feeling that virtual objects appeared on a mat (also known as "augmented reality" or "mixed reality"). However, the project's future is now in doubt. (credit: CastAR)

The future of CastAR, an ambitious augmented reality system that began life in Valve's hardware labs five years ago, is now in serious doubt. A bleak Monday Tweet from a former CastAR staffer was followed by Polygon's Brian Crecente reporting a full company shutdown.

Citing unnamed "former employees," Polygon reported that the hardware maker's primary finance group pulled all funding last week. This was allegedly followed by a full staff layoff and an announcement that the company's remaining assets would be liquidated.

As of press time, neither CastAR nor its affiliated developer, Eat Sleep Play, have posted any confirmation of shut downs or liquidation. Ars Technica has reached out to CastAR co-founders Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson. We will update this report with any response.

(credit: McMansionHell)

An architecture blogger has temporarily disabled her website, McMansionHell.com, after receiving a demand letter from Zillow and posting it on Twitter.

On Monday, Zillow threatened to sue Kate Wagner, saying that that she was violating its terms of use, copyright law, and possibly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because she took images from the company's website without permission. However, on each of her posts, she acknowledged that the images came from Zillow and were posted under the fair use doctrine, as she was providing (often humorous) commentary on various architectural styles. Her website was featured on the design podcast 99% Invisible in October 2016.

Confusingly, Zillow does not even own the images in question. Instead, Zillow licenses them from the rights holders. As such, it remains unclear why the company would have standing to bring a lawsuit against Wagner.

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft recently patched a critical vulnerability in its ubiquitous built-in antivirus engine. The vulnerability could have allowed attackers to execute malicious code by luring users to a booby-trapped website or attaching a booby-trapped file to an e-mail or instant message.

A targeted user who had real-time protection turned on wasn't required to click on the booby-trapped file or take any other action other than visit the malicious website or receive the malicious e-mail or instant message. Even when real-time protection was off, malicious files would be executed shortly after a scheduled scan started. The ease was the result of the vulnerable x86 emulator not being protected by a security sandbox and being remotely accessible to attackers by design. That's according to Tavis Ormandy, the Google Project Zero researcher who discovered the vulnerability and explained it in a report published Friday.

Ormandy said he identified the flaw almost immediately after developing a fuzzer for the Windows Defender component. Fuzzing is a software testing technique that locates bugs by subjecting an application to corrupted data and other types of malformed or otherwise unexpected input.

Enlarge / BROOKLYN, NY - Monday, June 26, 2017: Martin Shkreli arrives at Brooklyn Federal Court on the first day of his securities fraud trial. (credit: Getty | Kevin Hagen)

Martin Shkreli appeared in a New York federal court Monday for the start of his securities fraud trial—and was quickly declared guilty of price gouging by potential jurors.

Shkreli is facing eight counts of securities and wire fraud in connection to an alleged Ponzi-like scheme involving one of his old pharmaceutical companies, Retrophin. But the ex-CEO is infamous for something completely different: raising the price of a life-saving medication given to infants and people with HIV/AIDS by more than 5,000 percent overnight as CEO and founder of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Outrage over that unrelated move spilled into the courtroom today and stands to slow progress of the fraud trial.

In interviews with Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, potential jurors called Shkreli “evil,” and “the face of corporate greed in America,” CNBC reports. One potential juror said: “he’s a snake.” Another admitted: “I have total disdain for the man." One potential juror blamed Shkreli for the skyrocketing price of EpiPens, which are made by Mylan, a pharmaceutical company that has no connection with Shkreli.

Enlarge / Would you get your Internet from this van? (credit: Bobotech - Know Your Meme)

We've learned something from the investigation into whether Russia meddled in the US election that has nothing to do with politics. Humans are more vulnerable than ever to propaganda, and we have no clue what to do about it.

Social media as weapon

A new report in The Washington Post reveals that the Obama administration and intelligence community knew about Russian attempts to disrupt the 2016 election months in advance. But they did virtually nothing, mostly because they didn't anticipate attacks from weaponized memes and propaganda bots.

Former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told the Post that the members of the intelligence community focused on more traditional digital threats like network penetration. They wanted to prevent e-mail leaks, and they also worried about Russian operatives messing with voting machines. "In many ways... we dealt with this as a cyberthreat and focused on protecting our infrastructure," he said. "Meanwhile, the Russians were playing this much bigger game, which included elements like released hacked materials, political propaganda, and propagating fake news, which they'd pursued in other countries."

Enlarge / A young Charles Darwin, before evolution had caused any public controversy. (credit: National Library of Medicine)

In the US, opponents of evolution have tried to undercut instruction on the topic by suggesting schools should "teach the controversy." The national education authorities in Turkey, however, have decided that teachers should avoid any hint of controversy in the classroom. In service of that goal, the country is pulling evolution out of its high school curriculum entirely. The change will be implemented during the upcoming school year, 2017-2018.

In Turkey, the curriculum for state-run schools is set by the national government. The move against education in biology came as the state education authorities were undertaking a review of the national curriculum. Reports indicate that the review largely resulted in an emphasis on religious themes and Turkish culture and history, at the expense of information on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his role in the founding of the modern Turkish state.

But science got caught up in the process somehow. According to the head of the national board of education, Alpaslan Durmus, the problem is that Turkish students aren't given the necessary scientific background to separate the theory from the controversy that it has generated in some communities:

Enlarge / Cranes stand at the construction site for Southern Co.’s Kemper County power plant near Meridian, Mississippi, U.S., on Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2014. Photographer: Gary Tramontina/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty Images)

A coal gasification plant in development in Mississippi is more than $4 billion over budget and years past deadline—and now it may have to rethink plans to burn gasified coal in favor of cheaper natural gas after a recommendation from state regulators.

The recommendation was made to prevent potential rate increases as the Kemper County plant continues to face cost overruns. Kemper was supposed to be up and running by 2014, for less than $3 billion. But the plant has now run up a $7.5 billion tab and may need redesigns on a critical part, a process that could take up to two years to complete, according to E&E News. No official decision has been made yet, but the Mississippi Public Service Commission made it clear last week that burning cheaper natural gas instead of gasified coal may be a long-term solution for the facility.

Kemper already burns natural gas at its facility, but Southern Company, which owns Kemper, has poured billions into building “transport integrated gasification” (TRIG) technology. TRIG converts lignite coal into synthesis gas using a two-round process to convert a higher percentage of lignite into gas at a low temperature. Syngas made from lignite coal burns cleaner than burning the pulverized coal itself, and, with the addition of a carbon capture unit, Kemper expects to reduce greenhouse gas and particulate pollution by 65 percent. The syngas production process for lignite coal was developed by Southern with the help of the Department of Energy at the National Carbon Capture Center in Wilsonville, Alabama.

Enlarge / A Kaby Lake desktop CPU, not that you can tell the difference in a press shot. (credit: Intel)

Under certain conditions, systems with Skylake or Kaby Lake processors can crash due to a bug that occurs when hyperthreading is enabled. Intel has fixed the bug in a microcode update, but until and unless you install the update, the recommendation is that hyperthreading be disabled in the system firmware.

All Skylake and Kaby Lake processors appear to be affected, with one exception. While the brand-new Skylake-X chips still contain the flaw, their Kaby Lake X counterparts are listed by Intel as being fixed and unaffected.

Systems with the bad hardware will need the microcode fix. The fix appears to have been published back in May, but, as is common with such fixes, there was little to no fanfare around the release. The nature of the flaw and the fact that it has been addressed only came to light this weekend courtesy of a notification from the Debian Linux distribution. This lack of publicity is in spite of all the bug reports pointing to the issue—albeit weird, hard-to-pin-down bug reports, with code that doesn't crash every single time.