Month: July 2017

Enlarge / The view of a landed Falcon 9 first stage booster in June, 2017, in Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

During the last decade, NASA has invested billions of dollars into programs with private companies to carry cargo and, eventually, astronauts to the International Space Station. These commercial services were powered by new kinds of contracts for the agency, because they offered a "fixed price" for services and required companies to put in their own funding to develop new spacecraft and rockets.

But the space agency has established a Maginot line of sorts around the planet when it comes to deep space exploration. For example, less than a year ago NASA's then administrator, Charles Bolden, said he's "not a big fan" of commercial companies building large, heavy lift rockets that will enable private companies to venture beyond low Earth orbit. For Bolden, the lines were clear: we'll support you near Earth, but leave deep space to the professionals. "We believe our responsibility to the nation is to take care of things that normal people cannot do, or don’t want to do, like large launch vehicles," Bolden said of NASA.

Nevertheless, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other companies have pressed forward with their plans to develop large rockets capable of deep space exploration. And they're making progress. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy booster, which has 90 percent the lift capability to low Earth orbit as the initial version of NASA's Space Launch System, is likely to fly in 2017—up two year years before NASA's own big rocket.

You can check out any time you'd like, but you can never... well, you know the song. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Amie Stepanovich‏ has been shuttling back and forth between Washington, DC and Ohio, where her father is "very sick and currently in the hospital and unable to speak for himself," she wrote in a series of tweets yesterday. Stepanovich has power of attorney for her father and wants to reduce his Comcast bill, which costs "quite a lot" of money each month.

But when she called Comcast last weekend, a company rep "told me they couldn't handle [the] request on [the] phone because I wasn't authorized," she wrote.

Stepanovich says she was instructed to take her father's identification and hospital bills to a Comcast service center in order to get the Comcast bill reduced. She tried to call the nearest service center "to verify what I was told before I drove, but you can't call service centers directly—only published number is [the] main line that I'd already called."

Enlarge (credit: kelly sweeney)

On Wednesday, the Samba Team released new security updates to fix a vulnerability in "all versions of Samba from 4.0.0 onward using embedded Heimdal Kerberos," according to an announcement from the United States-Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT).

The upgrade comes in response to an invasive piece of malware which virally spread ransomware known as "WannaCry," "WCry," or "WannaCrypt." As Ars reported in May 2017, within hours of the attack, computer systems around the world were crippled, prompting hospitals to turn away patients while telecoms, banks, and companies such as FedEx were forced to turn off computers for the weekend.

Because of WannaCry, Microsoft took the rare step of issuing patches for three discontinued versions of Windows that hadn’t been updated in years. In a blog post released at the time, Microsoft believed that the ransomware worked due to a SMB protocol exploit.

On the Web, Google Drive is mostly used as a competitor to Microsoft Office. You get apps for word processing, spreadsheets, and slides. On a desktop computer, the Drive app takes on a different form—it's a Dropbox competitor, syncing your files to the cloud from a special folder. This week, Google announced the Drive desktop app is changing; it's not even called "Drive" anymore. Now this app is called "Google Backup and Sync," and it gains a few new features while merging with the Google Photos Syncing app.

While it isn't happening by default yet, it looks like Google is planning on automatically upgrading users of the Drive and Photos syncing apps to the new unified app. It's clearly the new version of the Drive app (just version 3.x instead of 2.x), and running the installer will do an in-place upgrade of the prior app. On the first launch, a dialog box explains a bit about the transition.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Shipping and Transit LLC, a company that claims to have patented both the tracking of vehicles and the packages they deliver, has been hit with an order (PDF) to pay $36,317.50 in attorney's fees.

US Magistrate Judge Dave Lee Brannon, who published the order yesterday, is the second federal judge to hit Shipping and Transit with fees in less than a week. It could be the beginning of the end for the patent-holding company, which has filed several hundred patent infringement lawsuits over the course of about a decade.

Shipping and Transit's lawsuit against Lensdiscounters.com, an online contact-lens store, followed a familiar pattern. The patent-holding company sent a demand letter to LensDiscounters in March, saying that its use of "Shipping Tracking Alerts" infringed several of its patents. Those alerts are nothing more than e-mails to customers allowing them to access package-tracking software that's made not by LensDiscounters but by UPS, FedEx, and the US Postal Service.