Month: February 2018

Enlarge / Sculpture-like solar panels near the Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, South Australia, SA, Australia. (credit: Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Just a few months after Tesla completed the world's biggest lithium-ion battery installation outside of the Hornsdale wind farm in South Australia, the Australian state and the electric vehicle-slash-energy company look like they're ready to partner again.

This time, South Australia wants to build a 250MW virtual power plant. The plant will consist of thousands of solar panels and batteries running software that decides when the batteries charge and discharge to maximize efficiency and value to the grid.

The buildout will start with 1,100 public housing properties. Residents sign up if they're interested in the program, and a Tesla contractor comes out to the home and tries to outfit a solar and battery storage solution to the house in question.

Enlarge (credit: Trevor Mahlmann for Ars Technica)

LAUNCH COMPLEX 39A, FLORIDA—Elon Musk stepped confidently from a black Lincoln Navigator on Monday afternoon, and his mouth spread into a wide grin as he surveyed the nearby launchpad. Just a quarter of mile away, his Falcon Heavy rocket loomed high in the sky, with sunlight glinting off its three white boosters.

“It’s small, don’t you think?” he quipped. “I think we need to step up our game.”

So began our interview with the founder of SpaceX on the eve of the launch of the most powerful rocket on Earth. During our time at the launchpad, we were most interested in the risks involved in such a test flight, with a brand new rocket packing the equivalent of four million tons of TNT. And Musk was happy to oblige.

Enlarge / New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy. (credit: State of New Jersey)

New Jersey is enforcing net neutrality with a new executive order that requires ISPs to follow neutrality rules if they sell Internet service to state agencies.

The executive order announced today by Governor Phil Murphy is similar to ones previously signed by the governors of New York and Montana. States are taking action because the Federal Communications Commission repealed federal net neutrality rules.

The executive order says that New Jersey state agencies may only buy Internet service from ISPs that adhere to net neutrality principles. But the net neutrality protections will cover ordinary residents as well as government officials. That's because the order says that "adherence to 'net neutrality' principles means that an ISP shall not [violate the rules] with respect to any consumers in New Jersey (including but not limited to State entities)."

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaks to the media after the vote to repeal net neutrality rules on December 14, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong )

Ajit Pai had a dilemma when overseeing the creation of the Federal Communications Commission's new Broadband Deployment Report.

Anyone who is familiar with the FCC chairman's rhetoric over the past few years could make two safe predictions about this report. The report would conclude that broadband deployment in the US is going just fine and that the repeal of net neutrality rules is largely responsible for any new broadband deployment.

But the FCC's actual data—based on the extensive Form 477 data submissions Internet service providers must make on a regular basis—only covers broadband deployments through December 2016. Pai wasn't elevated from commissioner to chairman until January 2017, and he didn't lead the vote to repeal the net neutrality rules until December 2017. And, technically, those rules are still on the books because the repeal won't take effect for at least another two months.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

With the next big update to Windows 10, version 1803, Microsoft is making some big changes to how it sells the software to OEMs. The biggest casualty? Windows 10 S—the restricted version of Windows that can only run apps from the Store—is going away.

Currently, Windows 10 S is a unique edition of Windows 10. It's based on Windows 10 Pro; Windows 10 Pro has various facilities that enable system administrators to restrict which software can be run, and Windows 10 S is essentially a preconfigured version of those facilities. In addition to locking out arbitrary downloaded programs, it also prevents the use of certain built-in Windows features such as the command-line, PowerShell, and Windows Subsystem for Linux.

For those who can't abide by the constraints that S imposes, you can upgrade 10 S to the full 10 Pro. This upgrade is a one-shot deal: there's no way of re-enabling the S limitations after upgrading to Pro. It's also a paid upgrade: while Microsoft offered it as a free upgrade for a limited time for its Surface Laptop, the regular price is $49.

Enlarge / Reforesting would help, but we're still deforesting. (credit: Mikko Muinonen)

The analysis is well known to everyone who has paid even a little attention: the world hasn’t yet done enough to lessen the impacts of climate change. The last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report included greenhouse gas emissions scenarios that could limit global warming to two degrees Celsius or less, but we’re not even close to a trajectory that would achieve any of them.

But there’s something about those two-degrees scenarios you may not know, which climate scientists have been talking a lot about recently. Those scenarios involved a substantial deployment of technologies to actively remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. Without those technologies, we’re even further from sufficient emissions cuts.

That leaves us with a crucial question: can carbon dioxide removal techniques be scaled up to the necessary level in time? A new European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) report—reviewed and endorsed by the national academies of more than two dozen countries—evaluates the outlook for carbon dioxide removal. And it’s not optimistic.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

A fast-moving botnet that appeared over the weekend has already infected thousands of Android devices with potentially destructive malware that mines digital coins on behalf of the unknown attackers, researchers said.

The previously unseen malware driving the botnet has worm-like capabilities that allow it to spread with little or no user interaction required, researchers with Chinese security firm Netlab wrote in a blog post published Sunday. Once infected, Android phones and TV boxes scan networks for other devices that have Internet port 5555 open. Port 5555 is normally closed, but a developer tool known as the Android Debug Bridge opens the port to perform a series of diagnostic tests. Netlab's laboratory was scanned by infected devices from 2,750 unique IPs in the first 24 hours the botnet became active, a figure that led researchers to conclude that the malware is extremely fast moving.

"Overall, we think there is a new and active worm targeting Android systems' ADB debug interface spreading, and this worm has probably infected more than 5,000 devices in just 24 hours," Netlab researchers wrote. "Those infected devices are actively trying to spread malicious code."

Enlarge / The handle of a digging stick from Pogetti Vecchi. (credit: PNAS)

A collection of broken wooden tools unearthed in southern Italy offers new evidence that Neanderthals used fire to shape wooden tools as early as the Middle Paleocene, about 171,000 years ago. The find sheds important new light on the earliest use of fire, and it reveals how sophisticated Neanderthal technology was. The tools, called digging sticks, are still in use today.

If you’re a hunter-gatherer, the digging stick is your version of the Swiss Army knife for foraging: about a meter long, with one end rounded to offer a handle and the other tapered into a blunt almost-point. They’re useful for digging up roots and tubers, hunting burrowing animals, or pounding and grinding herbs. And the Neanderthals of Middle Pleistocene Italy created and used digging sticks that would be perfectly familiar to modern members of the Australian Bindibu people, the Hadza people of Tanzania, and the San people of southern Africa.

Broken Tools

Wood is a popular material for tools in modern hunter-gatherer societies, mostly because it’s available and relatively easy to work with. Archaeologists assume early humans, including Neanderthals, must have used it as well.

Enlarge / Uber also showed this internal email from Google to show that it was well aware of the potential competition that it faced from Uber. (credit: Uber)

SAN FRANCISCO—Top corporate lawyers representing Waymo and Uber each gave nearly hour-long presentations to bolster their arguments today. The newly public slides arrive on the first court date for the high-profile trial, which centers on whether Uber effectively stole Waymo's secret sauce when the ridesharing company hired away a top engineer named Anthony Levandowski. Levandowski had taken 14,000 internal files without authorization before leaving Waymo, but Uber maintains it did nothing wrong when it hired the engineer in August 2016 and paid an eye-popping $680 million for his startup, Otto, which had only existed for a few months.

Uber argues that it hasn't improperly benefited from what Levandowski took, and the company has, in fact, fired Levandowski since the case began because he would not comply with subpoenas. Waymo will attempt to prove that what Uber acquired was indeed a trade secret and that it was misappropriated going forward.

Ars has published both slide decks from Waymo and Uber in full, but below are some selected highlights.