Month: December 2017

Enlarge / In space, no one can hear you stream. Because the latency would kill you. (credit: NASA)

When you're orbiting 400 kilometers above the Earth, getting to the movie-plex to watch the latest science fiction blockbuster is a bit of a drag. But the current crew of the International Space Station will still be able to watch Star Wars: The Last Jedi, according to a report from Inverse—and they'll do so while in orbit.

NASA Public Affairs Officer Dan Huot told Inverse that the ISS crew “will be able to watch it in orbit. Don’t have a definitive timeline yet."

This is at least partially thanks to the improvements made in the ISS's communications systems in 2013. Those updates were intended to improve the "scientific output" of the space station, which once had to essentially rely on dial-up speed connections. The High Rate Communications System (HRCS) gave the ISS a massive upgrade in its downlink and uplink speeds—increasing the bandwidth of uplink from the ground to 25 megabits per second, making it qualify as broadband under FCC guidelines. The downlink speeds—the rate at which ISS can send data to ground stations—is a blazing 300 megabits per second. The high-speed networking gear and accompanying Ethernet upgrades were executed by the ISS's commander at the time, Canadian astronaut and interstellar rock star Chris Hadfield, and Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn.

Enlarge / That's a lot of mouths to feed. (credit: NASA/Wendy Stenzel)

If you have an emotional attachment to our Solar System’s distinctions, you may want to look away. We’ve found another star system with eight planets, tying our own mark. Oh, and a Google machine-learning algorithm is responsible for the discovery.

This is one of two new exoplanets scraped from the massive archive of data from the Kepler space telescope by NASA’s Andrew Vanderburg and Christopher Shallue of the Google AI team. Planets detected by Kepler show up as slight dips in the brightness of a star—the result of the planet passing in front and blocking some of the light. Some planets are more obvious than others, and the goal here was to turn the algorithm loose on digging through past measurements for weak signals that had been missed.

Like all machine learning systems, this one was fed measurements from previously identified exoplanets to work out what differentiates real signals from coincidental blips. The researchers say the system emerged with the ability to correctly identify false positives about 96 percent of the time.

Enlarge / Artist concept of the Space Launch System. (credit: NASA/MSFC)

NASA has said that one of the strengths of its Space Launch System rocket is that the massive booster, in part, uses legacy hardware. These proven technologies, such as the space shuttle's main engines and the side-mounted rocket boosters, provide the agency with confidence that when it finally flies, the SLS will be reliable.

However, one problem with legacy hardware, built by traditional contractors such as Orbital ATK and Aerojet Rocketdyne, is that it's expensive. And while NASA has not released per-flight estimates of the expendable SLS rocket's cost, conservative estimates peg it at $1.5 to $2.5 billion per launch. The cost is so high that it effectively precludes more than one to two SLS launches per year.

The space agency recognizes this problem with its rocket, and in the past it has solicited ideas on how best to cut the production and operations costs for its SLS rocket. Now, the agency appears to be actively considering alternative hardware, including the use of potentially lower-cost engines from a new space rocket company, Blue Origin.

It's eight years since we first heard rumors of Microsoft's Courier, a kind of dual-screen tablet that folded in half like a book, designed for note-taking and sketching and similar tasks. Courier was never officially acknowledged, but in 2010 word got out that it was cancelled.

But as patent applications show, Microsoft is continuing to work on the dual screen, folding concept. In January, a trifold design with a flexible screen and multiple hinges was patented. Over the last week, yet more new patents have been granted, again showing devices with either multiple or folding screens, and in the very latest, complex hinging mechanisms. This time, the devices pictured have a single hinge and a two-part screen, much like the Courier concept.

Ron Amadeo

Now that Google's newest augmented reality project, ARCore, is out and functioning, the company is ready to admit that its old augmented reality project—Tango—is dead. Google took to Twitter today to announce that Tango support would be shut down on March 1, 2018.

Tango was Google's first big augmented reality push, and it solved the problem of position tracking with lots and lots of extra hardware. Tango devices basically packed the entirety of an Xbox Kinect—an IR projector, a time-of-flight camera, and a fisheye motion camera—into the back of a smartphone. The extra sensors allowed the phone to see in full 3D, which was mostly used to bring consumers a small handful of augmented reality games. The first Project Tango device, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, was an expensive, slow, massive device with ugly looks and poor battery life. The second and last Tango phone to ever be released, the Asus ZenFone AR, improved on the hardware a bit, but by then the platform seemed dead.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is quietly forcing some Windows 10 computers to install a password manager that contains a critical vulnerability almost identical to one disclosed 16 months ago that allows websites to steal passwords, a researcher said Friday.

Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy said in a blog post that the Keeper Password Manager came pre-installed on a newly built Windows 10 system derived directly from the Microsoft Developer Network. When he tested the unwanted app, he soon found it contained a bug that represents "a complete compromise of Keeper security, allowing any website to steal any password." He said he uncovered a flaw in the non-bundled version of the Keeper browser plugin 16 months ago that posed the same threat.

With only basic changes to "selectors," the old proof-of-concept exploit worked on the version installed without notice or permission on his Windows 10 system. Ormandy's post linked to this publicly available proof-of-concept exploit, which steals an end user's Twitter password if it's stored in the Keeper app. After this post went live, a Keeper spokesman said the bug was different than the one Ormandy reported 16 months ago. He said it affected only version 11 of the app, which was released a few weeks ago. The developer has fixed the flaw in the just-released version 11.4 by removing the vulnerable "add to existing" functionality.

Enlarge / Left: Google Maps Transit directions with the new "start" button." Center and right: The new transit navigation notification. You can tap on the arrows to cycle through steps.

Google Maps is an awesome app for getting you where you need to go, but the app has always treated transit directions like a second-class citizen. For years, driving, walking, and biking directions have had a "navigation" mode, which shows you live map and gives you turn-by-turn directions. Transit has never had a "navigate" mode, though—it only ever had a flat list of directions.

Today, Google is finally adding an actionable navigation mode to transit directions. Now when you pick out a transit route, you'll see a new "start" button at the bottom of the screen, along with the familiar navigation icon. This brings a number of improvements transit directions.

When you hit the start button, the next step in your journey becomes a stickied, ongoing notification. The old transit mode was just a list inside the Maps app, which made multi-tasking on your phone very annoying. While sitting on the bus or subway, I would rather be reading a website, texting, or playing a game, but the anxiety of possibly missing my stop would have me constantly opening Google Maps again to check on my progress. With the notification, I can now easily see where I am without leaving the current app.

The third quarter of 2017 has been an unusually slow one for the solar industry, according to a report from GTM Research released on Thursday. US solar installations fell to their lowest overall level since 2015, and residential and utility-scale solar projects fell quarter over quarter.

The only silver lining has been non-residential (largely commercial and community) solar installations, driven by developers in California, New York, and Massachusetts rushing to take advantage of state-level incentives, as well as installations in Minnesota boosted by Xcel Energy's "community solar" program.

Overall, solar panel installations in Q3 decreased 51 percent from Q3 in 2016, says GTM Research.