Month: August 2017

Enlarge (credit: Casey Fiesler)

A federal appeals court has upheld a legal process that invalidated the so-called “podcasting patent.” That process was held by a company called Personal Audio, which had threatened numerous podcasts with lawsuits in recent years.

On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the April 2015 inter partes review (IPR) ruling—a process that allows anyone to challenge a patent's validity at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

“We’re glad that the IPR process worked here, that we were allowed to go in and defend the public interest,” Vera Ranieri, an EFF attorney who worked on the case, told Ars. (She told Ars that her favorite podcast is Lexicon Valley.) There had been a question as to whether EFF had standing during the appellate phase of the case.

Enlarge / Faraday Future’s rendering of the refurbished Hanford factory. (credit: Faraday Future)

Faraday Future announced on Monday that it has signed a lease on a turn-key manufacturing facility in Hanford, California, south of Fresno. The company has been hyping its plans to build a luxury electric vehicle called the FF 91 that would compete with high-end Teslas, but it has struggled with funding and production. Faraday recently pulled out of plans to build a massive factory north of Las Vegas as well as plans to negotiate a deal for another new factory location in Vallejo, California.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Faraday Future received an emergency loan from an investment firm to the tune of $13.75 million, using a claim to the company’s Gardena, California, headquarters as collateral. The company will need to raise millions more to deliver market-ready FF 91s by the end of next year, as it has promised to do. Stefan Krause, Faraday Future’s Chief Operating Officer, told the Times that having an assembly line will attract additional investors, as it “makes it more real” for them.

The warehouse being leased was originally a tire factory, first built by Armstrong Rubber Co. in 1962 and purchased by Italian tire maker Pirelli in 1985. Pirelli shut the factory down in 2001 for economic reasons, and tenants have been various since then, most recently a potential pot-growing operation.

Enlarge (credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla is testing a new service that makes it dead simple and quick for people to semi-securely share files with anyone on the Internet.

Send, as the service is called, allows senders to encrypt any 1-gigabyte or less file and upload it to a Mozilla server. The service then creates a link with a long, complex string of letters in it that's required to download and decrypt the file. Mozilla will automatically delete the encrypted file as soon as it's downloaded or within 24 hours of being uploaded, even if no one has downloaded it.

Send offers reasonable security and privacy assurances. The service uses an algorithm known as AES-GCM-128 to encrypt and authenticate data on the sender's computer before uploading it to Mozilla servers. And it also uses the Web crypto programming interface, which is one of the better-tested ways Internet applications can perform cryptographic operations without having access to decryption keys. Still, Send shouldn't be trusted with the most sensitive types of data, such as files that might land a dissident or whistleblower in prison.

Enlarge / A Viking merchant ship carries trade goods far from home, including a special freeze-dried cod called stockfish. (credit: Wikimedia)

More than a millennium ago, people in the Viking Age city of Haithabu dined on a dish of freeze-dried cod and tossed the bones aside. It was a relatively unremarkable meal, except for one thing. The DNA in those bones was preserved into the present day, and scientists in Norway have just sequenced it. What they found has confirmed the truth of stories from the Icelandic sagas about Vikings sailing exceptionally long routes to trade with other groups.

Today, the coastal city of Haithabu is an archaeological site in Germany on the Baltic Sea. But the people who munched on that dried cod roughly 1,000 years ago were living under Danish rule in a cosmopolitan port city. Haithabu was a key stop on a lively sea trade route that brought tasty treats and trinkets like walrus tusks from distant lands. Though there is ample evidence of this kind of trade 800 years ago, University of Oslo environmental biologist Bastiaan Star and his colleagues have pushed that date back at least 200 years, and possibly 400, just by sequencing cod DNA. This dramatically changes our understanding of long-distance trade in Northern Europe during the Viking Age.

In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Star and his team describe how they used DNA analysis to trace the origins of 15 different cod eaten centuries ago in Germany, Norway, and the UK. The group has been studying ancient cod DNA to better understand the way humans have affected the migration routes and populations of this staple fish over time. This new discovery, however, has shed light on international trade. By comparing DNA sequences from ancient cod with modern ones, the researchers found that certain populations of fish have stuck to the same breeding grounds and migration routes for at least 1,200 years. Small mutations in the cod genome reveal which population the individual comes from, and that in turn reveals where they spawned.

Enlarge / Of all the games hinted at here, I'm probably most excited for the cyber-golfer one. (credit: Derek Yu)

The creator of the video game Spelunky, Derek Yu, has laid incredibly low since his title transformed the "randomly generated" gaming genre in 2008 (and again with an "HD" version in 2012). Would his long-awaited return also involve randomly generated dungeons, or some other procedurally generated gimmick?

Not even close. Yu announced a completely different kind of game on Monday, slated to launch in 2018. I bring this admittedly early news to you because we may need an entire year to parse what exactly the game, titled UFO 50, will truly offer. UFO 50, as its title suggests, isn't just one game. It's fifty of 'em.

Enlarge / This is the way we used to find our way around. (credit: National Air and Space Museum)

Way back in the 1980s, when I was a young naval officer, the Global Positioning System was still in its experimental stage. If you were in the middle of the ocean on a cloudy night, there was pretty much only one reliable way to know where you were: Loran-C, the hyperbolic low-frequency radio navigation system. Using a global network of terrestrial radio beacons, Loran-C gave navigators aboard ships and aircraft the ability to get a fix on their location within a few hundred feet by using the difference in the timing of two or more beacon signals.

An evolution of World War II technology (LORAN was an acronym for long-range navigation), Loran-C was considered obsolete by many once GPS was widely available. In 2010, after the US Coast Guard declared that it was no longer required, the US and Canada shut down their Loran-C beacons. Between 2010 and 2015, nearly everyone else shut down their radio beacons, too. The trial of an enhanced Loran service called eLoran that was accurate within 20 meters (65 feet) also wrapped up during this time.

But now there's increasing concern about over-reliance in the navigational realm on GPS. Since GPS signals from satellites are relatively weak, they are prone to interference, accidental or deliberate. And GPS can be jammed or spoofed—portable equipment can easily drown them out or broadcast fake signals that can make GPS receivers give incorrect position data. The same is true of the Russian-built GLONASS system.