Month: September 2017

Enlarge / Donald Trump (left) and Howard Stern (right) as seen at a November 4, 2005 New York Knicks game. (credit: James Devaney / Getty Images News)

A Washington, DC, startup that recently posted an unprecedented audio archive of years’ worth of Howard Stern’s interviews with Donald Trump, all before he was elected president, has been hit with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice and a cease-and-desist letter.

On Wednesday afternoon, roughly 48 hours after it was put up, the audio trove has been removed from YouTube and SoundCloud. For now, the transcripts remain on Factba.se, a website created by the startup FactSquared.

Factba.se published a total of around 15 hours worth of audio—exclusively of the minutes when Trump was on The Howard Stern Show—gathered from nearly 25 years of shows, starting in 1993 and ending in 2015.

Enlarge / The towering primary mirror of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope stands inside a cleanroom at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. (credit: NASA)

Under development for two decades, the James Webb Space Telescope isn't quite ready to go into space yet. On Thursday, NASA announced that the next-generation space telescope would not be ready for launch in October 2018 and would have to slip into 2019.

“The change in launch timing is not indicative of hardware or technical performance concerns,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at Headquarters in Washington. “Rather, the integration of the various spacecraft elements is taking longer than expected.” Engineers have determined that integration activities, such as the installation of more than 100 sunshield membrane release devices, will require more time.

The agency said its existing budget reserves would accommodate the launch delay. Now, NASA is targeting a launch between March and June 2019 from French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket. In the NASA news release, Zurbuchen said taking a little more time to ensure that the Webb telescope can properly deploy in space is a wise investment. The instrument will still be able to complete a full science program—observing everything from exoplanet atmospheres to the earliest galaxies in the universe.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is highlighted by discounts on a number of Dell laptops, desktops, and monitors. We've also got savings on Amazon's latest Echo and Fire TV devices, Luma's mesh Wi-Fi system, TVs, and more.

You can find the rest of the deals below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Enlarge / What the Deep Space Gateway might look like based on NASA concept drawings. (credit: NASA)

Editor’s note: NASA’s proposed Deep Space Gateway has been in the news recently due to a joint statement of support for the project from US and Russian officials. However, as former space shuttle pilot and International Space Station commander Terry Virts writes in an op-ed below, there is little agreement in US space policy circles about the need for the gateway.

Consider the following proposal for a human spaceflight program. First, a multinational consortium comes together to build a space station, with each nation responsible for specific pieces of the station or capabilities, such as module or robotic arm. Second, the station relies on existing rockets and vehicles to launch cargo and crew, effectively providing these programs a raison d’etre for many years to come. Third, the consortium develops an “assembly sequence” of missions to put the station’s modules together in orbit, one by one. Then, once the space station is built, astronauts use it to perform experiments and prepare for eventual missions deeper into the Solar System.

Does this program sound familiar? You may think this is the International Space Station—but it is not. Rather, this is NASA’s recent proposal for something called “Deep Space Gateway.” But there are several key differences between this new program and the ISS. Most notably, the gateway would be built in orbit around the Moon. Also, it will not use the Space Shuttle for assembly but instead rely on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, vehicles that should be operational by the mid-2020s.

Enlarge / TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot (left) and Ikea CEO Jesper Brodin (right). (credit: IKEA)

Ikea, the Swedish furniture retail giant, has bought TaskRabbit, a San Francisco startup that lets people hire workers to do short-term odd jobs—like setting up Ikea furniture, fixing a leaky faucet, or setting up for a party.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Recode, which first reported the acquisition, noted that "previous acquisitions by Ikea have ranged in price from $20 million to $90 million."

"As urbanization and digital transformation continue to challenge retail concepts, we need to develop the business faster and in a more flexible way," Ikea CEO Jesper Brodin said in a statement. "An acquisition of TaskRabbit would be an exciting leap in this transformation and allows us to move forward with an even greater focus on innovation and development to meet changing customer needs."

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai on Thursday issued a public statement requesting that Apple activate the disabled FM radio chips within its iPhones.

Pai made his appeal in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, which have wreaked havoc on communities across the US and beyond in recent weeks. The FCC chief’s framed the activation of the FM radio chip as a boon to public safety, since FM radio signals are generally easier to receive in times of emergency when compared to Internet-based services provided over a cellular network.

Though it may not be obvious at first blush, most smartphones have the ability to stream local FM radio stations directly. Chipmakers like Qualcomm and Intel have long baked FM radio tuners into the chips that enable Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity in iPhones and other handsets.

Parts of 18 states in AT&T's 21-state wireline footprint are getting a wireless home Internet option. (credit: AT&T)

AT&T has brought wireless home Internet to nine more states, offering rural and underserved customers a slightly faster replacement for old DSL lines.

"Our Fixed Wireless Internet service delivers a home Internet connection with download speeds of at least 10Mbps and upload speeds of at least 1Mbps," AT&T said in an announcement yesterday. "The connection comes from a wireless tower to a fixed antenna on customers’ homes or businesses. This is an efficient way to deliver high-quality, high-speed Internet to customers living in underserved rural areas."

The service is newly available in parts of Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin. The wireless Internet had already become available earlier this year in parts of nine other states, namely Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. These account for 18 of the 21 states in AT&T's wireline territory.