Month: July 2017

Enlarge / And you thought that sulfuric acid clouds were weird. (credit: ISAS/JAXA)

Venus' atmosphere is rightfully famous for a combination of being stunningly hot and containing sulfuric acid. Those conditions, not surprisingly, have ensured that every bit of hardware we've sent through said atmosphere has had an extremely short lifespan.

But at least one of those pieces of hardware—the Soviet Union's VeGa-2 probe—sent back some data that's hard to explain, a hint of an unstable atmosphere. Now, a pair of scientists is suggesting that the oddity can be explained by an equally odd feature of the atmosphere: it's a supercritical fluid where different chemicals partially separate at different altitudes.

The sulfuric acid and a surface temperature of 464 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to melt lead, would seem to be more than sufficiently unusual for a planet. Yet Venus' oddities don't stop there. Its atmosphere is so dense and reflective that its surface gets less sunlight than the Earth does, even though Venus is closer to the Sun.

(credit: Minnesota.gov)

Numbers from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reflect the extent of renewable energy development in the US over the past several years. Construction costs per kilowatt for solar, wind, biomass, and hydroelectric projects have fallen, in some cases steeply, since 2013, and natural gas generators are also getting cheaper to build despite getting more expensive year-over-year from 2013 to 2014. Only petroleum liquid generators have shown an increase in cost per kilowatt between 2013 and 2015.

The falling cost of building these renewable plants likely contributed to a peculiarity of the US energy makeup during the months of March and April, as well.

According to the EIA, electricity generation from utility-scale renewable plants surpassed nuclear generation for the first time since 1984 in those two months. The EIA explains that this is a seasonal result as well as a trend outcome—not only is solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and biomass electricity produced more than ever before, but nuclear energy also tends to be curtailed in spring and fall. During those seasons, plants are scheduled for maintenance more often because energy demand is lower. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported that “an average of 14 gigawatts and 21 gigawatts of nuclear capacity were offline during March and April, respectively, representing about 14 percent and 21 percent of total nuclear capacity in the United States,” the EIA wrote.

Enlarge / Older Halo games are coming to Xbox One... again. Is this good news or bad news for Master Chief Collection owners? (credit: 343 Industries)

By the end of this year, the Xbox One's backwards compatibility program will finally include all of the Halo games released on the Xbox 360. Microsoft announced this news as part of its "Halo Summer Celebration" news update on Thursday, and while it's good news for owners of those games, a similar slew of classic-Halo fans have been left scratching their heads.

The series' remaining back-compat holdouts (Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo 4, and Halo CE: Anniversary) will land "later this year" on Xbox One. In an intriguing twist, anybody who owns those games either digitally or on disc will be able to play either online or via LAN against players on Xbox 360 consoles—which is rare for games in the Xbox back-compat program.

However, the news update includes zero updates about the Halo: Master Chief Collection, a 2014 game whose matchmaking bugs and woes have proven to be legendary. As of press time, users continue to flood the series' official forums with bug reports and complaints about lengthy matchmaking times.

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OneDrive users around the world have been upset to discover that with its latest update, Microsoft's cloud file syncing and storage system no longer works with anything other than disks formatted with the NTFS file system. Both older file systems, such as FAT32 and exFAT, and newer ones, such as ReFS, will now provoke an error message when OneDrive starts up.

To continue to use the software, files will have to be stored on an NTFS volume. While FAT disks can be converted, ReFS volumes must be reformatted and wiped. This has left various OneDrive users unhappy. While NTFS is the default file system in Windows, people using SD cards to extend the storage on small laptops and tablets will typically use exFAT. Similarly, people using Storage Spaces to manage large, redundant storage volumes will often use ReFS. The new policy doesn't change anything for most Windows users, but those at the margins will feel hard done by.

In a rather odd statement made to OnMSFT, Microsoft said that it "discovered a warning message that should have existed was missing when a user attempted to store their OneDrive folder on a non-NTFS filesystem—which was immediately remedied." The company's position, apparently, is that OneDrive should always have warned about these usage scenarios and that it's only a bug or an oversight that allowed non-NTFS volumes to work.

Enlarge / There they are! PS4 games, ready for your paid-streaming pleasure.

Sony's paid game-streaming service, PlayStation Now, launched a significant update on Thursday with support for current-gen PlayStation 4 games. The feature is live for anybody who pays for an ongoing PS Now subscription, either on PS4 consoles or Windows PCs, and it adds 20 PS4 games to the service's hundreds of PS3 games.

PlayStation Now, which launched for a variety of devices in 2014, delivers playable games in streaming fashion—meaning, they're rendered on a server farm and gameplay is streamed to your system of choice. The service recently stopped receiving updates on most of its originally supported platforms, however. Only PS4 consoles and Windows PCs will be able to access the service starting August 15.

Today's update adds a scant few PlayStation-exclusive games: Resogun, God of War III Remastered, Exist Archive, and Killzone Shadow Fall. The rest of today's PS4 roster consists of deeply discounted triple-A games (Tropico V, Darksiders II, Saints Row IV), ho-hum games (MX vs. ATV Supercross Encore, Evolve), indies (Nidhogg, Broken Age, Super Mega Baseball), and more.

Enlarge / Free locks coming for all those HTTP web servers in January.

Let's Encrypt, the free and open certificate authority (CA) launched as a public service by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), says it will begin providing free "wildcard" certificates for Internet domains in January 2018. Wildcard certificates allow anyone operating a domain to link a single certificate to multiple subdomains and host names within a domain. That means a single free certificate could be used to provide HTTP Secure (HTTPS) encryption of pages on multiple servers or subdomains hosted on a single server, significantly lowering the barrier for adoption of HTTPS on personal and small business websites.

In its current form, which requires registration of a certificate for each individual Web address, Let's Encrypt is used for HTTPS on more than 46 million websites. The organization issued its 100 millionth certificate on June 29.

Currently, about 58 percent of webpage visits are encrypted via HTTPS based on browser metrics. When Let’s Encrypt launched in August of 2016, only 39.5 percent of pages loaded were encrypted with HTTPS. While Let's Encrypt has certainly played a role in the shift, Google has, too. In August of 2014, Google announced that the company's ranking algorithm for websites would include whether the page was encrypted with HTTPS as a "ranking signal." As a result, HTTPS became a much higher priority for sites competing for search engine visibility.