Month: November 2017

Enlarge / A man walks up the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court on January 31, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Supreme Court justices on Wednesday wrestled with how to apply Fourth Amendment privacy protections to cell phone location records.

Cell phones produce "minute-by-minute account of a person's locations and movements and associations over a long period regardless of what the person is doing at any given moment," the ACLU's Nathan Freed Wessler pointed out in an argument before the Supreme Court. The ACLU is urging the Supreme Court to rule the government can't access these records without a warrant.

But the government pointed to a 1979 Supreme Court ruling called Smith v. Maryland. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the government doesn't need to get a warrant to obtain a customer's dialing history because they are merely the business records of the phone company. The government argues that the same principle, known as the third-party doctrine, applies here: data about which cell phone towers a customer's phone has talked to are merely the cell phone company's business records, and should be available to the government without a warrant.

Enlarge / Bigger weapons and clearer XP gains are coming to Destiny 2, along with private competitive matches.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, intrepid player-investigators caught Bungie misleading players about how much experience they were actually getting for repeated quests in the game. In the wake of that embarrassing revelation, Bungie last night posted a lengthy "State of Destiny 2" development post promising to be "more open" about the game's systems and offering a detailed roadmap of upcoming changes.

"Our team has been reading feedback and working on updates to improve the game," design director Luke Smith and game director Christopher Barrett wrote in the post. "We’ve also been reading some tough criticism about our lack of communication, and we agree we need to be more open... We know it’s frustrating when there isn’t enough of a dialog with the development team. You have our commitment that we’re going to do a better job going forward."

Addressing the XP system complaints specifically, Bungie explained that the hidden scaling for repeated missions was intended to "keep slower-paced activities as rewarding as high-intensity grinding without confusing variations in displayed XP values." That said, Bungie acknowledged "the silent nature of the mechanic betrayed the expectation of transparency that you have for Destiny 2."

Enlarge (credit: YouTube, AliveCor)

Plenty of studies boast about the medical possibilities of the Apple Watch, but Apple's wearable is a consumer device, not a medical one. However, the FDA just announced the approval of the first medical Apple Watch accessory, AliveCor's KardiaBand, which uses the wearable's heart rate technology and an attached sensor to provide EKG readings on the fly. An Apple Watch paired with a KardiaBand could provide users an EKG reading in 30 seconds, detecting abnormal heart rhythm and atrial fibrillation and sending that information to a doctor for further analysis.

The $199 device is an unassuming black band that attaches to the Apple Watch like other band accessories. On the band right below the Apple Watch module is the KardiaBand's silver sensor where users place their finger to take a reading. The Apple Watch's display shows the reading's data using a line graph that's similar to how the Apple Watch shows other heart rate data, and informs the user if their heart rate is normal or abnormal.

AliveCor's new SmartRhythm technology takes a more personalized approach to the prevention technology the Apple Watch already has. Currently, Apple's wearable can alert you when your heart rate spikes, but SmartRhythm uses AliveCor's deep neural network and your history of heart rate data to determine a healthy and normal heart rate range for you in relation to your activity levels. If an abnormality is detected during the Apple Watch's continuous measurement of your heart rate, AliveCor and KardiaBand's app will prompt you to take an EKG reading. The Watch's display will then show the normal heart rate range that KardiaBand's technology estimated for you, the abnormal heart rate detected, and where the EKG reading falls in relation to that data.

Enlarge / A Soyuz 2.1b rocket booster carrying the Meteor M2-1 meteorological satellite and 18 small satellites launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome on Tuesday. (credit: Yuri SmityukTASS via Getty Images)

On Tuesday morning, a Russian rocket failed to properly deploy the 19 satellites it was carrying into orbit. Instead of boosting its payload, the Soyuz 2.1b rocket's Fregat upper stage fired in the wrong direction, sending the statellites on a suborbital trajectory instead, burning them up in Earth's atmosphere.

Now, we may know why. According to normally reliable Russian Space Web, a programming error caused the Fregat upper stage, which is the spacecraft on top of the rocket that deploys satellites, to be unable to orient itself. Specifically, the site reports, the Fregat's flight control system did not have the correct settings for a mission launching from the country's new Vostochny cosmodrome. It evidently was still programmed for Baikonur, or one of Russia's other spaceports capable of launching the workhorse Soyuz vehicle.

Essentially, then, after the Fregat vehicle separated from the Soyuz rocket, it was unable to find its correct orientation. Therefore, when the Fregat first fired its engines to boost the satellites into orbit, it was still trying to correct this orientation—and was in fact aimed downward toward Earth. This set the spacecraft on its fatal trajectory into the planet's atmosphere.