Month: January 2018

Enlarge / The launch of Zuma was pretty, but the aftermath has been anything but. (credit: SpaceX)

On Wednesday, during a Pentagon briefing, spokeswoman Dana White was asked whether the US Department of Defense considered the Zuma mission—a high-value, highly secretive US government payload—a success or a failure. White declined substantive comment, saying, “I would have to refer you to SpaceX, who conducted the launch."

Alas, SpaceX isn't talking Zuma's success (or otherwise) either. The company has twice stated that its rocket, both the first and second stages, performed nominally during the launch on Sunday evening. However, SpaceX has stopped short of saying the Zuma payload was successfully deployed into orbit.

On Thursday, a day after the Pentagon said the news media should ask SpaceX about mission success, the company's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, appeared at a meeting of scientists and engineers in Houston called The Academy of Medicine, Engineering & Science of Texas. Dutifully asked about Zuma, Shotwell replied, "You know I can’t talk about that. It’s not my story to tell."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Getty)

As the industry continues to grapple with the Meltdown and Spectre attacks, operating system and browser developers in particular are continuing to develop and test schemes to protect against the problems. Simultaneously, microcode updates to alter processor behavior are also starting to ship.

Since news of these attacks first broke, it has been clear that resolving them is going to have some performance impact. Meltdown was presumed to have a substantial impact, at least for some workloads, but Spectre was more of an unknown due to its greater complexity. With patches and microcode now available (at least for some systems), that impact is now starting to become clearer. The situation is, as we should expect with these twin attacks, complex.

To recap: modern high-performance processors perform what is called speculative execution. They will make assumptions about which way branches in the code are taken and speculatively compute results accordingly. If they guess correctly, they win some extra performance; if they guess wrong, they throw away their speculatively calculated results. This is meant to be transparent to programs, but it turns out that this speculation slightly changes the state of the processor. These small changes can be measured, disclosing information about the data and instructions that were used speculatively.

Enlarge / Rhesus Macaques in a tree (credit: Getty | IndiaPictures )

In the 1930s and ‘40s, the captain of a glass-bottom boat released a dozen or so rhesus macaques on an island in Florida’s Silver River, which snakes through Marion county in the center of the state. The idea was that the monkeys, native to Asia, would be a laugh for tourists passing by. But it seems the monkeys may be the ones to get the last laugh.

For one thing, macaques are excellent swimmers and promptly got themselves off the island. In the decades since, their population has exploded to upward of 800 in the surrounding Silver Spring State Park and nearby Ocala National Forest. A new study, out in the February issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases, reveals that the population is also spreading a dangerous type of herpes. The virus—macacine herpesvirus 1 (McHV-1), aka herpes B or monkey B virus—is common and causes mild infections in macaques. But in humans, it can lead to severe, often lethal, illnesses.

The study authors, led by Samantha Wisely of the University of Florida, Gainesville, concluded that the monkeys must be considered a public health concern and "adequate public health measures should be taken."

Enlarge / Color enhanced images of the slopes, showing their distinctive blue tinge and layering.

Mars clearly had a watery past, and it's expected that much of the water is still on the planet. Figuring out where the ice is hiding could tell us a lot about the planet's climate history and something about Mars' current water cycle. It could also help direct future landers to sample the planet's water and possibly use it to support human landings.

While we've found plenty of ice near the pole during the Phoenix Lander mission, that's not a very convenient location for future landings (in part because the site ended up frozen over with dry ice during that pole's Martian winter). In today's issue of Science, researchers are reporting the likely presence of ice sheets in more temperate regions. The sheets are at least 100 meters thick and appear to preserve layers that may help us reconstruct how the water ended up frozen there.

MRO data

As with many things Martian, the work relies on data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It has a variety of instruments that can probe the chemical composition and subsurface structure of Mars, along with the best camera we've ever sent to another planet. Over the years, MRO has built up a comprehensive catalog of features on the Martian surface, many of them imaged from multiple angles.

Enlarge (credit: Skype)

Since its inception, Skype has been notable for its secretive, proprietary algorithm. It's also long had a complicated relationship with encryption: encryption is used by the Skype protocol, but the service has never been clear exactly how that encryption was implemented or exactly which privacy and security features it offers.

That changes today in a big way. The newest Skype preview now supports the Signal protocol: the end-to-end encrypted protocol already used by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Allo, and, of course, Signal. Skype Private Conversations will support text, audio calls, and file transfers, with end-to-end encryption that Microsoft, Signal, and, it's believed, law enforcement agencies cannot eavesdrop on.

Presently, Private Conversations are only available in the Insider builds of Skype. Naturally, the Universal Windows Platform version of the app—the preferred version on Windows 10—isn't yet supported. In contrast, the desktop version of the app, along with the iOS, Android, Linux, and macOS clients, all have compatible Insider builds. Private Conversations aren't the default and don't appear to yet support video calling. The latter limitation shouldn't be insurmountable (Signal's own app offers secure video calling). We hope to see the former change once updated clients are stable and widely deployed.

Enlarge / A man is seen calling on an iPhone on October 30, 2017. (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

When Reddit users and a Geekbench developer discovered and shared that Apple's approach to mitigating the aging of batteries is partly responsible for the gradual performance degradation that iPhone users have sometimes experienced, Apple made an effort to explain its choices. The company promised to add software features to give users "more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery" and offered a discounted battery replacement program: new batteries for affected devices will be just $29 through the end of 2018. That means users could reclaim some of that performance.

However, an Apple Store memo obtained by MacRumors suggests that owners of the iPhone 6 Plus in some regions (including the US) will have to wait until March or April to replace their batteries. According to MacRumors' report, Apple believes its supply of batteries for these devices will not meet demand in the beginning of the year.

Other models are not expected to see such significant delays. For example, the iPhone 6 and 6S Plus are expected to take around two weeks to become available to customers who purchase them, and batteries for all other affected iPhone models should have a quick turnaround time.