Month: October 2017

NASA

NASA has tried Bigelow's expandable habitat on its International Space Station, and the agency likes it. Installed now for more than a year on the station, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module has passed key structural tests, and engineers now believe it will be capable of surviving in low Earth orbit for a longer period of time.

So this week, NASA announced that it intends to extend the lifetime of the station's new, expandable room. Initially, the module was to be attached to the station for two years, but NASA says it wants to extend the lifetime for three years from now, with two additional one-year options. The Bigelow habitat, therefore, could remain on-station well into the early 2020s.

Enlarge / Hey guys, long time no see!

Here at Ars, we often have the sad duty report on online gameplay servers being shut down by publishers once the games themselves have become too old or unprofitable. So it's nice to be able to write about a game seeing online support reinstated after years in the offline wilderness.

Today, that game is Star Wars: Battlefront 2, the 2005 PC/console third-person shooter that should in no way be confused with Star Wars Battlefront II, the PC/console first/third-person shooter EA is releasing next month. In 2014, the older Battlefront 2's online gameplay was one of many victims of the Gamespy server shutdown, which affected dozens of PC titles as well as every game on Nintendo's Wii and DS consoles. Battlefront 2 players could still connect for online matches through third-party services like GameRanger, but these lacked true integration with the game's own online infrastructure.

This week, though, has seen joint announcements on GOG and Steam that "the multiplayer function of [Battlefront 2] has now been restored AND with added Crossplay support between GOG Galaxy and Steam to boot." Up to 64 players can play through player-hosted servers on the newly updated version of the game, which is currently available for just $4 in a GOG sale (or $10 on Steam).

Enlarge (credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) have allowed an increasing number of devices to be controlled by mobile devices. But as Ars has reported in the past, BLE devices also can be a privacy and security risk. And as Alex Lomas of Pentest Partners found recently, some of these vulnerable devices are of a very personal nature. Lomas discovered that he could relatively easily search for and hijack BLE-enabled sex toys—a pursuit he named "screwdriving" (after the Wi-Fi network finding practice of "wardriving").

Lomas performed a security analysis on a number of BLE-enabled sex toys, including the Lovesense Hush—a BLE-connected butt plug designed to allow control by the owner's smartphone or remotely from a partner's phone via the device's mobile application. Using a Bluetooth "dongle" and antenna, Lomas was able to intercept and capture the BLE transmissions between the devices and their associated applications.

As it turns out, reverse-engineering the control messages between apps and a number of devices was not terribly difficult—the communications between the apps and the toys were not encrypted and could easily be recorded with a packet capture tool. They could also be replayed by an attacker, since the devices accepted pairing requests without a PIN code—allowing anyone to take over control of them.

Enlarge (credit: Walmart)

Walmart is trying to beat Amazon at its own game, and the company's latest acquisition will boost that effort, at least in the New York City area. Walmart announced that it has acquired Parcel, a Brooklyn-based delivery company that specializes in scheduled and same-day package delivery of traditional items as well as groceries, meal kits, and other perishables. The acquisition price has not been disclosed by Walmart or Parcel, but a Recode report suggests that the deal closed at less than $10 million.

Parcel launched in 2013 to help city dwellers get their packages at convenient times. Signing up for Parcel meant you could schedule a two-hour window in which your package would be delivered. In metro areas like New York, it's not unheard of for packages to be lost or stolen if delivered when the recipient is not around to accept it. Amazon's apartment Hubs are the most recent attempted fix for this problem, but Parcel gives recipients more control over when their packages arrive. Parcel also sends live package updates via text message to the merchant and recipient, informing them of the location of the package through the last mile of delivery.

According to Walmart's blog, Parcel will continue to serve its existing customers in the New York City area. Walmart will use Parcel's infrastructure and knowledge of the New York metro area to help its same-day delivery efforts. Walmart purchased Jet about a year ago for $3 billion and now offers free, same-day delivery through Jet in some areas. Parcel will help Jet complete same-day deliveries in the New York City area soon, while also allowing Walmart to lower operating costs even while experimenting with new delivery methods. Walmart and Jet plan to deliver both regular merchandise and perishable groceries with Parcel's help in the future.

Enlarge / Former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski, at right, at a transportation conference in 2016. (credit: John Sommers II for Transport Topics)

A report that has long been fought over by lawyers at Waymo and Uber has been made public. Levandowski's lawyers fought to keep the Stroz Friedberg "due diligence" report on Uber acquiring his startup secret, but it was ultimately acquired by Waymo attorneys, who filed it as an exhibit late yesterday.

Acquiring the report could be a turning point in the Waymo v. Uber lawsuit, which was filed in February. Waymo accused the head of Uber's self-driving car project, an ex-Googler named Anthony Levandowski, of stealing 14,000 files just before he left Google. Levandowski, who is not a defendant in the lawsuit, has pleaded the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about the allegations. Uber doesn't deny that the downloads took place but says none of the alleged trade secrets ever made it to its servers.

A jury trial is scheduled to begin on October 10, although Waymo has asked for a delay, due to the overwhelming amount of information it has acquired in recent discovery.

Enlarge (credit: Photo by Sergei KonkovTASS via Getty Images)

Monday, Facebook handed over some 3,000 ads, which it believes were bought by Russia, to congressional investigators. While they haven't been made public, more information is coming out about the ads, accounts, and pages that were said to be controlled by a Russian "troll farm" called the Internet Research Agency.

Many of the ads weren't supporting specific candidates, but rather seem meant to stoke division around flash points in American society, particularly around immigration and race relations. 470 different pages and profiles were linked to the Internet Research Agency, according to Facebook.

The Washington Post reported that one of the ads featured pictures of a black woman "dry firing" a rifle with no ammunition in it. It isn't clear what the ad was promoting. The New York Times found a wide variety of groups, including a fiery "Defend the 2nd" gun-rights group, a gay rights group called "LGBT United," and even an animal lovers' page with pictures of puppies.