Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Billionaire Terry Gou, chairman of Foxconn Technology Group, holds a "FOXCONN" Wisconsin license plate during an event in Racine, Wisconsin, U.S., on Friday, Nov. 10, 2017. The agreement grants the electronics giant $3 billion in tax incentives for a massive manufacturing campus in southeastern Wisconsin. (credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Foxconn, the famed Taiwan-based manufacturer behind approximately 40 percent of all consumer electronics (including the iPhone), has agreed to purchase Belkin for $866 million in cash.

"FIT is excited to acquire Belkin and its capabilities in the premium consumer products space," said Sidney Lu, CEO of Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT), in a statement released late Monday evening. "Integrating Belkin’s best-in-class capabilities and solutions into FIT, we expect to enrich our portfolio of premium consumer products and accelerate our penetration into the smart home."

Belkin, which owns the Linksys, Phyn, and Wemo brands, will continue to operate as a Foxconn subsidiary. The California-based company is best known for its Wi-Fi gear, among various newer smart home-related products.

Enlarge (credit: Uber)

Uber was told on Monday evening to suspend its autonomous car-testing program in Arizona. The move follows the death of Elaine Herzberg, a pedestrian who was struck and killed by one of the company's self-driving vehicles on March 18. According to the Associated Press, Governor Doug Ducey told Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi that public safety should be a top priority, and that "[t]he incident that took place... is an unquestionable failure to comply with this expectation."

In recent months, Arizona has become a hotbed of autonomous-vehicle testing. In contrast to California, the state has very little in the way of oversight, and both Waymo and Uber have been testing extensively, along with other, smaller self-driving programs. Beyond carrying liability insurance, autonomous vehicles are free to drive and aren't subject to the crash or disengagement reports required by Arizona's neighbor to the west.

Herzberg's death has shone a spotlight on a state which was already unfriendly to pedestrians—in the same week as this fatal crash, nine other pedestrians were killed by vehicles. But humans are generally more accepting of the risk from other human drivers than they are machines, and now Uber has the distinction of being responsible for the first self-driving fatality. Even though the company voluntarily suspended its testing program in Arizona and elsewhere, Ducey's action presumably means it can't start up again without official permission.

Enlarge (credit: Uber)

Uber was told on Monday evening to suspend its autonomous car-testing program in Arizona. The move follows the death of Elaine Herzberg, a pedestrian who was struck and killed by one of the company's self-driving vehicles on March 18. According to the Associated Press, Governor Doug Ducey told Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi that public safety should be a top priority, and that "[t]he incident that took place... is an unquestionable failure to comply with this expectation."

In recent months, Arizona has become a hotbed of autonomous-vehicle testing. In contrast to California, the state has very little in the way of oversight, and both Waymo and Uber have been testing extensively, along with other, smaller self-driving programs. Beyond carrying liability insurance, autonomous vehicles are free to drive and aren't subject to the crash or disengagement reports required by Arizona's neighbor to the west.

Herzberg's death has shone a spotlight on a state which was already unfriendly to pedestrians—in the same week as this fatal crash, nine other pedestrians were killed by vehicles. But humans are generally more accepting of the risk from other human drivers than they are machines, and now Uber has the distinction of being responsible for the first self-driving fatality. Even though the company voluntarily suspended its testing program in Arizona and elsewhere, Ducey's action presumably means it can't start up again without official permission.

Enlarge (credit: Ed Dunens)

Researchers from the College of William and Mary, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California Riverside, and Binghamton University have described a security attack that uses the speculative execution features of modern processors to leak sensitive information and undermine the security boundaries that operating systems and software erect to protect important data.

That probably sounds familiar.

The Spectre attacks, published earlier this year, take advantage of the speculative execution features of modern processors to leak sensitive information. The new attack, named BranchScope by the researchers, shares some similarity with variant 2 of the Spectre attack, as both BranchScope and Spectre 2 take advantage of the behavior of the processor's branch predictor.

Enlarge / Lots of proteins sit in the membrane or extend completely across it. (credit: National Institute of General Medical Sciences)

A group of bacteria called "gram negative" have an outer membrane that is a pretty serious barrier to antibiotics. But the membrane is also a barrier to bacteria themselves, making it difficult for them to insert proteins into the membrane and interact with the outside world. Now, researchers that were attempting to study how proteins get inserted into this membrane have inadvertently created an antibody that kills the bacteria.

The antibody isn't therapeutic on its own since it only works in an experimental system. But it could help us design drugs that target the same things it does.

While membranes are made of fatty molecules, there are proteins strewn throughout the membrane that allow the passage of everything from water molecules to entire proteins. Many of these take on a barrel-like configuration, with the central area of the barrel allowing molecules to cross the membrane.

Enlarge / William Gerstenmaier, chief of human spaceflight for NASA, speaks on the first day of Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium in 2017. (credit: NASA)

Since the launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket in February, NASA has faced some uncomfortable questions about the affordability of its own Space Launch System rocket. By some estimates, NASA could afford 17 to 27 Falcon Heavy launches a year for what it is paying annually to develop the SLS rocket, which won't fly before 2020. Even President Trump has mused about the high costs of NASA's rocket.

On Monday, during a committee meeting of NASA's Advisory Council, former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale raised this issue. Following a presentation by Bill Gerstenmaier, chief of human spaceflight for NASA, Hale asked whether the space agency wouldn't be better off going with the cheaper commercial rocket.

"Now that the Falcon Heavy has flown and been demonstrated, the advertised cost for that is quite low," Hale said. "So there are a lot of folks who ask why don't we just buy four or five or six of those and do what we need to do without building this big, heavy rocket and assemble things like we did with the space station?"

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Similar to last week's Logitech promotion, Amazon is running another "Gold Box" sale for PC peripherals on Monday. This one encompasses more manufacturers and product types, but per usual, Amazon is advertising the sale as being for today only.

To be clear, most items in the sale aren't brand new. Components like Intel's Core i7-7700K processor and AMD's Ryzen 5 1600 chip are at least a year old. But if you don't need the absolute latest gear for your setup, most of the items are at least at or near their lowest prices on Amazon to date. And gadgets like Logitech's G610 keyboard and ViewSonic's XG2701 monitor hold up a bit better regardless of age. We've highlighted a few other notable selections below.

If you're not interested in adding to your desktop, though, we've also got discounts on the August Smart Lock, Amazon Echo Show, Amazon Fire TV Stick, HTC Vive, and more. Have a look for yourself after the jump.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Similar to last week's Logitech promotion, Amazon is running another "Gold Box" sale for PC peripherals on Monday. This one encompasses more manufacturers and product types, but per usual, Amazon is advertising the sale as being for today only.

To be clear, most items in the sale aren't brand new. Components like Intel's Core i7-7700K processor and AMD's Ryzen 5 1600 chip are at least a year old. But if you don't need the absolute latest gear for your setup, most of the items are at least at or near their lowest prices on Amazon to date. And gadgets like Logitech's G610 keyboard and ViewSonic's XG2701 monitor hold up a bit better regardless of age. We've highlighted a few other notable selections below.

If you're not interested in adding to your desktop, though, we've also got discounts on the August Smart Lock, Amazon Echo Show, Amazon Fire TV Stick, HTC Vive, and more. Have a look for yourself after the jump.