Month: December 2017

Enlarge / Cruise second-generation test vehicles, assembled at GM’s Lake Orion plant in Michigan. (credit: Cruise)

An autonomous vehicle owned by Cruise, the autonomous car startup that was acquired by GM last year, struck a motorcyclist on San Francisco streets earlier this year. According to a filing with the California DMV, the motorcyclist was able to walk away from the crash but reported shoulder pain and was taken to the hospital to receive medical care. Cruise says that the motorcyclist was determined to be at fault for the collision.

The Cruise vehicle was traveling in the middle lane of a three-lane, one-way street in San Francisco's Lower Haight neighborhood. It spotted a gap in traffic in the left lane and began changing lanes—but then the gap started to close as the vehicle ahead slowed down. So the Cruise car shifted back into the center lane.

Normally, that would be an unremarkable chain of events on San Francisco's busy streets. Unfortunately, Cruise says, "a motorcycle that had just lane-split between two vehicles in the center and right lanes moved into the center lane." The motorcycle "glanced the side of the Cruise AV, wobbled, and fell over."

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallagher)

When you're developing intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons while under some of the harshest economic sanctions the world has seen, every bit—and every bitcoin—apparently helps.

North Korea has been implicated in both the WannaCry cryptographic worm and its bitcoin ransom demands as well as stealing about $81 million in traditional money through fraudulent funds transfers from a Bangladeshi bank. And now it appears that North Korean hackers are responsible for bringing down the Youbit cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea.

The Wall Street Journal reports that South Korean officials suspect North Korean hackers in the digital theft from Youbit on December 19, making it the latest victim in a string of bitcoin repository hacks and frauds over the last six years. Attackers made off with 17 percent of the exchange's cryptocurrency assets, including an undisclosed amount of bitcoin. In the wake of the attack, Youbit has declared bankruptcy and is allowing customers to withdraw only 75 percent of their accounts; the remainder will be paid out after the company is liquidated.

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson)

Google built a little application that downloaded and installed Chrome, and the company submitted that application to the Microsoft Store. Because the Microsoft Store actually imposes minimal verification or validation of submitted applications, Microsoft's automated processes duly published the app. It was available for a few hours. Then Microsoft took notice of the installer and yanked it from the Store.

This is a sequence of events that's bad for both companies.

Google wrote its installer app to provide a safe way to install Chrome. Throughout its life, Microsoft's app store has been plagued with crap applications. Apps that leverage the branding and trademarks of other companies, purporting to be one thing but actually being another, have been endemic in the Store; even today, you can find apps that masquerade as Chrome or try to use Chrome's name and logos to separate people from their money.

Video shot and edited by Condé Nast Entertainment. Click here for transcript. (video link)

If you’re a frequent Ars reader, you’ve likely heard of Kerbal Space Program, the space flight/space crashing/space explosion simulator that lets you create your own vehicles, then fly them into orbit and perhaps even to other planets. Though silly and fun, KSP also works as a reasonably solid and wonderfully interactive demonstration of the vagaries of orbital mechanics—and that, dear readers, gave us an idea.

Astronaut Scott Kelly is most famous for spending an uncomfortably long time on the International Space Station, and he’s currently touring to promote his book about the experience. We got to talk to him briefly when he was at the office back in October, but I wanted to take things a little further. What if we could sit down with Scott—a real astronaut who has flown the space shuttle and everything—and get him to talk us through a (somewhat realistic, somewhat silly) launch in KSP?