Month: July 2017

Enlarge (credit: Candy Lab)

A judge on Thursday declared as unconstitutional a local Wisconsin ordinance mandating that the makers of augmented reality games get special use permits if their mobile apps were to be played in county parks. The law—the nation's first of its kind—was challenged on First Amendment grounds amid concerns it amounted to a prior restraint of a game maker's speech. What's more, the law was seemingly impossible to comply with.

The federal lawsuit was brought by a Southern California company named Candy Lab. The maker of Texas Rope 'Em—an augmented reality game with features like Pokemon Go—sued Milwaukee County after it adopted an AR ordinance in February in the wake of the Pokemon Go craze. Because some of its parks were overrun by a deluge of players, the county began requiring AR makers to get a permit before their apps could be used in county parks.

The permitting process also demanded that developers perform the impossible: estimate crowd size, event dates, and the times when mobile gamers would be playing inside county parks. The permits, which cost as much as $1,000, also required that developers describe plans for garbage collection, bathroom use, on-site security, and medical services. Without meeting those requirements, augmented reality publishers would be in violation of the ordinance if they published games that included playtime in Milwaukee County parks.

(credit: Michael Rosenstein)

Last August, after being alerted by GitHub's security team that the certificate authority WoSign had errantly issued a certificate for a GitHub domain to someone other than GitHub, Google began an investigation in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation and a group of security professionals into the company's certificate issuance practices. The investigation uncovered a pattern of bad practices at WoSign and its subsidiary StartCom dating back to the spring of 2015. As a result, Google moved last October to begin distrusting new certificates issued by the two companies, stating "Google has determined that two CAs, WoSign and StartCom, have not maintained the high standards expected of CAs and will no longer be trusted by Google Chrome."

WoSign (based in Shenzen, China) and StartCom (based in Eliat, Israel) are among the few low-cost certificate providers who've offered wildcard certificates. StartCom's StartSSL offers free Class 1 certificates, and $60-per-year wildcard certificates—allowing the use of a single certificate on multiple subdomains with a single confirmation. This made the service wildly popular. But bugs in WoSign's software allowed a number of misregistrations of certificates. One bug allowed someone with control of a subdomain to claim control of the whole root domain for certificates. The investigation also found that WoSign was backdating the SSL certificates it issued to get around the deadline set for certificate authorities to stop issuing SHA-1 SSL certificates by January 1, 2016. WoSign continued to issue the less secure SHA-1 SSL certificates well into 2016.

Initially, Google only revoked trust for certificates issued after October 21, 2016. But over the past six months, Google has walked that revocation back further, only whitelisting certificates for domains from a list based on Alexa's top one million sites. But today, Google announced that it would phase out trust for all WoSign and StartCom certificates with the release of Chrome 61. That release, about to be released for beta testing, will be fully released in September.

Enlarge / Sam Clovis, then newly appointed national co-chairman of the Trump campaign, speaks during a news conference with Donald Trump. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images)

Yesterday, the Trump administration formally named its candidate for the Department of Agriculture's undersecretary of research, education, and economics, a post that serves as the agency's chief scientist. Its choice? Sam Clovis, who has no scientific background but is notable primarily for having been a conservative talk-radio host. If approved by the Senate, the US' attempts to understand climate change's impact on agriculture will be led by someone who called climate research "junk science."

Clovis, who has also taught economics and management at an Iowa liberal arts college, was an early supporter of Trump's candidacy. He's been working at the USDA as a White House advisor since shortly after Trump's inauguration. Suggestions that he'd be nominated to this position have been circulating for a while, but his official nomination only came yesterday.

While the USDA doesn't have as prominent a role in science as, say, the Department of Energy, its Agricultural Research Service (ARS!) has over 1,000 permanent scientists and over 100 research facilities. It and other components of the research, education, and economics group are responsible for research in areas like nutrition, agricultural productivity, pathogens that affect agricultural animals, and non-food agriculture, such as forestry.

Demonstration of how the robot grows, reaching a maximum speed of 10 meters per second (22 miles per hour). (video link)

A group of mechanical engineers at Stanford has created a transparent robot that looks and behaves like a worm, elongating its body in order to move. Using a pneumatic control system, an operator can make the bot turn corners and even squeeze itself through a narrow crack between two pieces of sticky flypaper. In the crowded field of soft robotics, this strange creature is one of the most intriguing.

Mechanical-engineering researcher Elliot Hawkes and his team designed the robot for a variety of applications, including search and rescue. In a recent issue of Science Robotics, they explain that the bot could also be used to create instant 3-D structures like a spiral-shaped antenna.

Enlarge / A phased-array antenna used for radio astronomy. (credit: NRAO)

In my younger days—about the time that Erik the Red was making a name for himself—I was really into electronics. Countless never-quite-working-as-expected circuits should have taught me the futility of telling electrons what to do. Yet my interest in electronics peaked with the construction of an electronically steerable phased-array antenna. This is where, by varying the timing slightly, numerous small antennas create a signal that can be sent in specific directions without moving any hardware.

Yes, my set-up did actually work, though not as well as I'd hoped. Anyway, what excited me about phased-array antennas is that you could shape and steer an antenna's radiation pattern by individually controlling the phase and amplitude of a string of individual emitters. It just seemed so cool. Later, when I moved on to optics, controlling the phases and amplitudes of individual lasers and combining them into a single, steerable laser beam... well, it was technically possible, but there was a vast gulf between our ideals and any practical implementation.

But recently, researchers have shown that phase control is possible in a device that is smaller than the wavelength of the light being controlled. Although a rather technical development, this is one key step along the road to high-capacity optical communications that don't involve any fibers. Think mobile communications beyond 5G, or home Wi-Fi that actually doesn't suck.

Enlarge / Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.). (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The evidence for repealing net neutrality rules isn't good enough, Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) told Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai yesterday.

Pai claims that the rules issued in 2015 are reducing investment in broadband networks, but Markey pointed out during a Senate hearing that ISPs have not reported any dramatic problems to their investors.

Markey said:

(credit: Newspaper Club / flickr)

An appeals court will soon decide whether the US government can unmask anonymous users of Glassdoor—and the entire proceeding is set to happen in secret.

The 9th Circuit case was flagged yesterday by Public Citizen attorney Paul Levy, who intends to submit an amicus brief in the case. In Levy's view, the case involves "a significant free speech issue bearing on the rights of anonymous Internet users."

Federal investigators sent a subpoena asking for the identities of more than 100 anonymous users of the business-review site Glassdoor, who apparently posted reviews of a company that's under investigation for potential fraud related to its contracting practices. The government later scaled back its demand to just eight users. Prosecutors believe these eight Glassdoor users are "third-party witnesses to certain business practices relevant to [the] investigation." The name of the company under investigation is redacted from all public briefs.