Month: November 2017

Enlarge / Do not mess with Burnham, you Klingon supremacist scum. (credit: CBS)

A white-knuckle cliffhanger ended the first half of Star Trek: Discovery's first season. Frenetic, fascinating, and sometimes shocking, "Into the Forest I Go" raised more questions than it answered. There are conspiracies wrapped in conspiracies, and we've got the entire mid-season break to mull them over.

Spoilers ahead! Yes, I mean it! If you read past these sentences and complain about spoilers in the comments, you will be turned into a newt.

Algorithms in spaaaaaaaaace!

I'm starting to feel like every episode of DISCO has to have a Fringe-like element of mad science. Last week we had the Avatar-esque sparkleplanet, with the (sentient?) antenna rising inexplicably out of its inexplicable ecosystem. This week, we got a mission to build an algorithm that will allow Star Fleet to calculate the location of cloaked Klingon vessels.

Enlarge / Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, gestures from the balcony of Ecuador's embassy in London. (credit: Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

As part of its investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, Congress received a cache of Twitter direct messages between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks—at least some of those messages have now been leaked to The Atlantic.

When Ars asked Twitter whether some users' DMs had been turned over to Congressional investigators or the Office of Special Counsel, which is also investigating possible Russian government efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, Emily Horne, a Twitter spokeswoman, declined comment.

In July 2016, WikiLeaks published 20,000 internal e-mails from the Democratic National Committee, a hack that likely originated from Russia.

Enlarge / Members of the Texas Army National Guard move through flooded Houston streets as floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey continue to rise on August 28, 2017. More than 12,000 members of the Texas National Guard have been called out to support local authorities in response to the storm. (credit: Zachary Wes)

Hurricanes strike the US with regularity, but there's nothing on record that is at all like Hurricane Harvey's pummeling of Houston. Understanding the risk of that kind of wind and rainfall happening again is critical if we intend to rebuild infrastructure that's going to survive to its expected expiration date. But freakish storms like Harvey make risk calculations challenging. These storms have no historic precedent, so we have no idea how often they occur; and the underlying probability of these events is shifting as our planet grows warmer.

An MIT professor named Kerry Emanuel, however, has helped develop a system that analyzes hurricane frequency in a warming world. Using it, he has found that Harvey-sized rainfall could go from being extremely rare to having an 18-percent chance of happening in any given year by the end of this century.

“Biblical” rainfall

Rainfall experiences a lot of local variations, and sites within a few miles of each other can often see very different numbers. To get a clearer picture of a storm's damage, the research community has settled on a figure called the "area integrated rainfall." By that measure, Harvey is the largest storm on record, having dumped 850 millimeters on the Houston area. That's extreme, but there are other storms of similar magnitude. Texas saw more than 500mm of rain from the remnants of hurricane Patricia just two years earlier.

Enlarge / DFJ Partner Steve Jurvetson speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017 at Pier 48 on September 18, 2017 in San Francisco, California. (credit: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Steve Jurvetson, a partner at a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm that bears his name—Draper Fisher Jurvetson—has left the company amid accusations of sexual harassment. However, he is still listed as a "partner" on the DFJ website.

Jurvetson currently serves on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX, but he has taken a leave as a result of these allegations, according to CNBC.

In a tweet on Monday afternoon, Jurvetson wrote that he would be pursuing "legal action," but he did not respond to Ars' query as to when or where such action would be taking place.

Enlarge (credit: Andrzej Barabasz)

A new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Gold is now live on the Internet. It aims to correct what its backers see as a serious flaw in the design of the original Bitcoin.

There are hundreds of cryptocurrencies on the Internet, and many of them are derived from Bitcoin in one way or another. But Bitcoin Gold—like Bitcoin Cash, another Bitcoin spinoff that was created in August—is different in two important ways.

Bitcoin Cash is branding itself as a version of Bitcoin rather than merely new platforms derived from Bitcoin's source code. It has also chosen to retain Bitcoin's transaction history, which means that, if you owned bitcoins before the fork, you now own an equal amount of "gold" bitcoins.

Enlarge (credit: Google Play Store)

Google is cracking down on apps that use Android's accessibility API. Even though the APIs have been around for years without any kind of rules about usage, Google has now started telling developers that using the accessibility API for anything other than helping users with disabilities will result in a ban from the Play Store.

As first reported by Android Police, a number of app developers have receiving an email from Google in regards to their accessibility app. According to the email, Google's new rules require that "Apps requesting accessibility services should only be used to help users with disabilities use Android devices and apps." The email says that developers "must explain to users how your app is using the 'android.permission.BIND_ACCESSIBILITY_SERVICE' to help users with disabilities use Android devices and apps." Google says that if developers don't comply with the new policy within 30 days, their app will be removed from the Play Store.

Google's new policy will hurt a large swath of power-user apps. Android accessibility APIs are meant for alternative input devices and alternative output methods, but they are also a powerful set of controls that have been co-opted by the Android tweaking community to give users more control over their devices. If you want to write a powerful Android app and don't want to modify your phone for root access, tapping into the accessibility API is the next best thing.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai being interviewed at Fox Studios on November 10, 2017 in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | John Lamparski)

Two Democratic lawmakers today called for an investigation into whether Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai "has taken actions to improperly benefit Sinclair Broadcast Group."

The FCC has made several decision that benefit Sinclair, a broadcast station owner with a right-wing tilt. Among other things, the FCC rolled back broadcast TV station ownership limits, which could help Sinclair complete an acquisition of Tribune Media Company and, in the process, reach 72 percent of TV-owning households in the US.

According to two representatives, Pai hasn't sufficiently answered questions about his relationship with Sinclair. Those congressmen are Energy and Commerce ranking member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) and Oversight and Government Reform ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-MD.), who said as much in a letter to FCC Inspector General David Hunt.

Enlarge / These two wander around for a long time. (credit: New Line Cinema)

Amazon has acquired the global television rights to The Lord of the Rings, and the Internet giant has already committed to a multi-season TV series rooted in author J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth setting.

Both Amazon's own press release title ("Amazon to Adapt J.R.R. Tolkien's Globally Renowned Fantasy Novels... ") and earlier rumors suggested that the series would be a direct adaptation of the books, but that is now confirmed not to be the case. Rather, the series will introduce new stories that are set before The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book in the trilogy.

Tolkien estate and HarperCollins representative Matt Galsor said the series will "bring to the screen previously unexplored stories based on J.R.R. Tolkien's original writings." To Tolkien fans, it's unclear what that means exactly. Will characters and situations be based on unpublished Tolkien works? Many of those exist, but the author's son Christopher Tolkien has been editing and completing key works in those categories as published books for several years now. It's unclear what remains.