Month: July 2017

Exploring the Unbeaten Path

The Soviet Union's Buran space shuttle program stands as one of the saddest episodes in aerospace history. After NASA began working on its space shuttle program in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union conceived of its own orbiter program, the eerily similar looking Buran shuttle. Ultimately, the vehicle made just one flight, an uncrewed mission in 1988. The Soviet Union's collapsing economy doomed the program.

The Buran orbiter that made the initial three-hour flight was destroyed in 2002, when the roof of the hangar where it was stored in Kazakhstan collapsed. Like the United States, the Soviet Union didn't make just one Buran, they made several with the intention of eventually having a fleet of orbital vehicles. When the program was canceled, those vehicles, from mock-ups to nearly flight ready articles, were mothballed.

Enlarge / Elon Musk (C), the co-founder of luxury all-electric US car maker Tesla, speaks at the StartmeupHK Venture Forum in Hong Kong on January 26, 2016. (credit: PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images)

According to The Wall Street Journal, Hong Kong’s transportation department registered 2,939 new Teslas in March and zero in April after a new-car tax exemption for electric vehicles (EVs) was ended on April 1.

Hong Kong levies a new-car tax at the time of sale that can be quite hefty, in some cases as much as the car itself. The EV exception previously made Hong Kong one of Tesla’s most popular markets, but the autonomous territory decided to start imposing the tax on EVs again earlier this year as a way to combat traffic congestion. The WSJ says the decision is effective for one year, through March 2018, but the government has said it will review the policy before then.

Instead of waiving the new-car tax for EVs, Hong Kong is now offering a maximum deduction of HK$97,500 (a bit less than US$12,500) on the new-car tax.

Enlarge (credit: Rescuenav)

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico has sued the city of Albuquerque, seeking records by the city’s police department about its use of stingrays, also known as cell-site simulators.

In May 2017, the ACLU of New Mexico filed a public records request to the Albuquerque Police Department (which has been under federal monitoring for years), seeking a slew of information about stingrays. The requested info included confirmation on whether the police had stingrays, "policies and procedures," and contracts with the Harris Corporation, among other materials. Albuquerque denied many of these requests, citing a state law that allows some public records to be withheld on the grounds that they reveal "confidential sources, methods." So, last week, the ACLU of New Mexico sued.

As Ars has been reporting for years, stingrays are used by law enforcement to determine a mobile phone's location by spoofing a cell tower. In some cases, stingrays can intercept calls and text messages. Once deployed, the devices intercept data from a target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity. At times, police have falsely claimed the use of a confidential informant when they have actually deployed these particularly sweeping and intrusive surveillance tools. Often, they are used to locate criminal suspects.

A block diagram that is supposed to clarify what Azure Stack does and is. (credit: Microsoft)

After being announced in 2015, Microsoft's Azure Stack—which offers a wide range of Azure services for on private, on-premises hardware—is now available.

Azure Stack is positioned as a major part of Microsoft's hybrid cloud offering. It offers the same management tools, straightforward provisioning, and usage-based licensing as the public Azure cloud, but it runs on premises. This makes Stack suitable for organizations with security, privacy, regulatory compliance, or legacy integration constraints that preclude the use of the public cloud.

When announced, Microsoft's intent was to enable organizations to build private Azure clouds on any suitable hardware. It had an initial release date in 2016, and this would have made Azure Stack a direct competitor and alternative to OpenStack. Last July, those plans were changed as Microsoft switched to an appliance model and a 2017 release date. Rather than constructing their own infrastructure, Azure Stack customers must now buy specific hardware from select Microsoft hardware partners, with Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo all having systems available to order today. Later in the year, those companies will be joined by Cisco and Huawei. Shipments will start in September.

Enlarge (credit: https://www.legalleanstore.com/)

Over the weekend, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer called upon the Food and Drug Administration to investigate the new “snortable” chocolate powder product, Coco Loko, made by Orlando-based company Legal Lean.

The powder, released last month, contains cacao powder as well as ingredients often found in energy drinks, including taurine, guarana, and ginkgo biloba. Legal Lean says that Coco Loko offers “euphoric energy and motivation,” and safely generates a state “similar to the feeling of ecstasy.” Doctors, however, are unsure of the health effects, including potential harm to the nasal passage. And Schumer, who is no stranger to criticizing caffeine-based stimulants, called the powder “cocaine on training wheels” that presents dangers to children and should be ditched.

In a Sunday news conference, Schumer said: “This suspect product has no clear health value. I can’t think of a single parent who thinks it is a good idea for their children to be snorting over-the-counter stimulants up their noses.” In a letter sent Saturday, he urged the FDA to step in.

Enlarge (credit: Josh Hallett)

Only a handful of tech companies have earned the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s coveted five-star rating in its annual "Who Has Your Back?" scorecard, released on Monday.

The top-rated companies for 2017 include Adobe, Credo Mobile, Dropbox, Lyft, Pinterest, Sonic, Uber, Wickr, and WordPress. Notable names among the lowest-rated companies include Comcast, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Amazon, and WhatsApp.

The EFF's Who Has Your Back? report analyzes and evaluates how companies deal with user data when government entities come seeking it. "Third-party companies hold more and more of our personal data as technology and user practices evolve," the EFF writes in its initiative description. "The annual Who Has Your Back? report encourages companies to protect users from government requests for data and helps users make informed choices about their Internet use."