Month: November 2017

(credit: Jessica Rabbit's Flickr)

Facebook is experimenting with a new way to prevent the posting of so-called revenge porn that involves a highly questionable requirement. Potential victims must send nude pictures of themselves though the social network's official messenger so the images can be viewed, in full, unedited form, by an employee of the social network.

A Facebook spokeswoman said the employee would be a member of the company's community operations team who has been trained to review such photos. If the employee determines the image violates site policies, it will be digitally fingerprinted to prevent it from being published on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram. An article posted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported said the service is still being tested with help from Australian government officials. To use it, potential victims will first complete this online form, and then send the images to themselves over Facebook Messenger.

The Facebook spokeswoman said she was unable to confirm details published earlier by The Daily Beast that said Facebook would continue to store blurred versions of the images for an unspecified amount of time after the hash was taken. The Facebook spokeswoman agreed to describe the new program on the condition the discussion be kept on background, an arrangement that prevents this post from naming or directly quoting the representative.

Enlarge / Riana Pfefferkorn is an expert in crypto and the law. She's an attorney and the Cryptography Fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. (credit: Riana Pfefferkorn)

With the DOJ recently bringing back the "Going Dark" debate and now calling for "responsible encryption," what does the Trump administration have to say about strong crypto? Do we know yet? Do they?

If there's anyone who might be able to figure that out, it's Riana Pfefferkorn. As an attorney and legal fellow, Pfefferkorn is at the forefront of trying to make sense of new technology, surveillance policy, and the thorny legal questions that emerge. She'll explain how this problem emerged and what the FBI has already done about it over the last decade.

Join Ars Technica editors Cyrus Farivar and Annalee Newitz in conversation with Riana Pfefferkorn at the next Ars Technica Live on November 15 at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland.

Enlarge (credit: Tesla)

On Tuesday, Tesla announced that it had purchased an automation and machining company called Perbix. Perbix has supplied Tesla with parts for its high-tech factories in Fremont, California, and Sparks, Nevada, for the past three years, according to CNBC. Although it’s unclear how much Tesla paid for Perbix, the company says it made an offer of cash and stock, and SEC filings show that Perbix owner James S. Dudley received 34,772 shares of Tesla stock, which reflects about $10.6 million at today’s share price of $305.59.

The purchase comes exactly a year after Tesla acquired German firm Grohmann Engineering, which then became Tesla Advanced Automation Germany. The Germany-based engineering department specializes in factory automation, much like Perbix does. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has stressed high-level automation as critical in boosting Tesla’s delivery numbers. Tesla struggled for years to make delivery quotas on the Model S and the Model X vehicles, and Musk told investors last year that his solution was to make each of his factories look like an “alien dreadnought.” An oft-repasted phrase from Tesla executives is that the company is focusing on factory automation to build “the machine that makes the machine.”

Although Tesla is largely making its quotas now with respect to the Models S and X, the electric vehicle maker had a very disappointing third quarter with respect to the Model 3. The “budget” vehicle aimed to bring long-range EVs to the market for a mere $35,000 by mid-2017. But after a debut event at the end of Q2, the company admitted it had only built 266 Teslas in Q3, claiming that bottlenecks in battery-pack construction were hindering its ability to churn out the pre-ordered cars.

Enlarge / Nine Merlin engines power the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. (credit: SpaceX)

A Merlin rocket engine exploded Sunday at SpaceX's test facilities in Central Texas. According to the company, no one was injured during the mishap, which damaged two bays in a Merlin engine test stand at the MacGregor facility.

"All safety protocols were followed during the time of this incident," said a company spokesman, John Taylor. "We are now conducting a thorough and fully transparent investigation of the root cause. SpaceX is committed to our current manifest, and we do not expect this to have any impact on our launch cadence.”

SpaceX feels confident in its launch manifest—the company plans to launch three or four more missions in 2017—because the Merlin engine lost Sunday is being developed for the Block 5 version of its Falcon 9 rocket. All of its launches this year (and during the first several months of 2018) are scheduled to fly on the Block 4 variant of the rocket, which uses an earlier Merlin engine.

Enlarge / On July 2, President Donald Trump tweeted a video of himself wrestling CNN. (credit: President Donald Trump)

The Trump administration is asking AT&T and Time Warner Inc. to sell off either CNN or DirecTV in order to win government approval of their merger, multiple news outlets reported today.

AT&T has owned DirecTV since 2015 and is now seeking federal approval to purchase Time Warner Inc., the owner of programming such as HBO, CNN, and Warner Bros.

AT&T could gain approval for the deal by having Time Warner sell Turner Broadcasting, the division that includes CNN, according to reports today by The New York Times and CNBC.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Writing and updating your résumé is a task that few of us enjoy. Microsoft is hoping to make it a little less painful with a new feature coming to Word called Resume Assistant.

Resume Assistant will detect that you're writing a résumé and offer insights and suggestions culled from LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a vast repository of both résumés and job openings and lets you see how other people describe their skillsets and which skills employers are looking for.

The feature will also show job openings that are suitable for your résumé directly within Word, putting résumé writers directly in contact with recruiters.

Enlarge / A more typical Type-IIp supernova. (credit: NASA SWIFT)

A supernova may be one of the most extraordinary events in the Universe, but the Universe is a very big place, and the extraordinary happens with great regularity. We've now observed a huge number of these events and have managed to break them down into categories based on patterns in the light they produce. Astrophysicists have built models of exploding stars that explain these properties, matching them to the mass of the original star and the process by which it exploded. We're at the point where, after just a few observations, we can understand exactly what we're looking at.

Except when we can't.

Today in Nature, a team of researchers is announcing observations of a supernova that it simply can't explain. In some ways, the event looks like a prosaic stellar explosion. Except it's stayed bright over six times longer than it should and experienced five periods of enhanced brightness that we can't explain. Different features of the supernova appear to be arising from physically distinct locations in space. And even the best model for what triggered this—something that involves a type of explosion we haven't definitively observed previously—doesn't account for all the observations.