Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Warm, moist air flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico may dominate the Great Plains' response to climate change. (credit: NOAA)

By increasing the energy stored in our atmosphere, climate change is expected to generate more severe storms and heat waves. Severe storms and heat waves, however, also happen naturally. As a result, it's tough to figure out whether any given event is a product of climate change.

A corollary to that is that detecting a signal of climate change using weather events is a serious challenge. Are three nor'easters in quick succession, as the East Coast is now experiencing, a sign of a changing climate? Or is it simply a matter of natural variability?

A team of researchers has now looked at heat waves in the US, trying to determine when a warming-driven signal will stand out above the natural variability. And the answer is that it depends. In the West, the answer is "soon," with climate-driven heat waves becoming the majority in the 2020s. But for the Great Plains, the researchers show that a specific weather pattern will push back the appearance of a warming signal until the 2070s.

(credit: Cole Marshall)

New York government officials have threatened to terminate Charter Communications' franchise agreements with New York City, saying the cable company failed to meet broadband construction requirements and may not have paid all of its required franchise fees.

The NY Public Service Commission said Charter should pay a $1 million fine for missing a deadline to expand its broadband network statewide and is questioning Charter over declines in franchise fees paid to New York City.

"It is critically important that regulated companies strictly adhere to the state's rules and regulations," PSC Chairman John Rhodes said in an announcement yesterday. "If a regulated entity like Charter's cable business decides to violate or ignore the rules, we will take swift action and hold [it] accountable to the full extent of the law."

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list brings the usual smorgasbord of laptop and desktop sales, including a number of discounts on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops.

Note that most of the ThinkPads here use last year's 7th-gen Core processors, so they're not as powerful as notebooks with Intel's quad-core 8th-gen chips, but you can still get a work-friendly machine like the ThinkPad T470s or 5th-gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon for much less than their newer counterparts. (The latter shouldn't be affected by any overheating issues at this point, either.)

If you have no interest there, we also have deals on numerous Dell laptops and desktops, Nintendo's Switch Pro Controller, and the HTC Vive, plus a sitewide eBay sale.

(credit: Ubisoft)

Ubisoft's protracted financial battle with French media company Vivendi ended on Tuesday with a surprise announcement: effective immediately, Vivendi is out of Ubisoft's financial picture. In order to retain its corporate structure, Vivendi's shares in the company have been bought up—and one of the biggest buyers, as it turns out, is major Chinese gaming publisher Tencent.

The other buyers involved include Ubisoft itself, which has bought up the majority of Vivendi's former shares, along with the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. Vivendi, which formerly owned a whopping 27.3 percent stake in Ubisoft, has additionally pledged not to buy any Ubisoft stock for the next five years.

Tuesday's news ends a 2.5-year attempt by Vivendi to brute-force its way to owning a majority of Ubisoft through stock acquisition. That hostile takeover attempt, in part, forced Ubisoft co-founder Michel Guillemot to resign from Ubisoft-affiliated mobile-game publisher Gameloft in 2016.

(credit: JD Lasica)

Update: Cambridge Analytica has suspended CEO Alexander Nix. In addition to controversy over unauthorized access to private Facebook data, Nix is also facing a scandal over comments captured by hidden cameras. In those videos, Nix boasts about using dirty tricks—including staged bribery attempts and sending prostitutes to seduce political opponents—to win elections.

Facebook is reeling from a series of revelations about private user data being leaked to Cambridge Analytica, a shadowy political consulting firm that did work for the Donald Trump campaign.

Last Friday, reporters from The New York Times and The Observer of London told Facebook that Cambridge had retained copies of private data for about 50 million Facebook users. Facebook says Cambridge promised in 2015 that the data would be deleted. Facebook responded to the new revelations by banning Cambridge and several of its associates from Facebook.

Enlarge / Should you bother installing this? Just hit the "try now" button!

The annual Game Developers Conference is happening this week, and Google is celebrating by bringing its "Instant apps" feature to games on the Play Store. You'll be able to instantly try a very small number of Android games before installing them, via a "Try Now" button listed in the Play Store. This is the same "Instant Apps" technology that has been around for apps, but now Google is launching it for games, too, as "Google Play Instant."

The idea behind the program is that installing an app is a big barrier to entry to users, and removing this barrier will result in more people trying more apps and games. An "Instant Apps" program is something Google has been experimenting with for some time. In 2015, the company launched its first swing at such a project, called "Streaming Apps." This feature would run an Android app on Google's servers, stream a live video feed to the user, and stream clicks back to the Google server.

In 2016, Streaming Apps was scrapped and replaced with today's "Instant Apps" technology. Instant Apps streams the actual app code to a device and runs it in an ephemeral sandbox. For instant apps to work, developers need to modularize apps using the Android SDK, which can help break the app down into 10MB chunks that can easily be streamed to the user. The result is an app or game that can start up instantly, but the small size often means you are limited to certain features. It's usually enough to try out the app or game, and if users venture outside the features of the instant version of the app, an install box will pop up, allowing them to easily get the full version.

Lauri Love in 2016. (credit: blackplans)

Lauri Love, a British man charged by the US Justice Department with multiple counts of hacking US military and government computer systems, has finally won a protracted battle against extradition. Today, the UK's High Court declined to certify a motion by the Crown Prosecution Service to overturn Love's successful February 2017 appeal of the extradition on human rights grounds, effectively ending the extradition effort permanently.

Love was originally arrested in the UK in October of 2013 after using an automated scanner to locate servers within a large range of IP addresses for SQL injection and ColdFusion vulnerabilities and then breaching vulnerable systems and installing Web shells to give him remote administrative-level access. He allegedly managed to compromise servers belonging to the US Missile Defense Agency, the US Army, the Federal Reserve, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Love's attorneys fought the extradition on the grounds that Love—who has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, severe depression, and antibiotic-resistant eczema—would not get appropriate medical attention in a US prison and would be at risk of suicide if he faced the potential 99-year prison term associated with the charges.

There was precedent for this sort of appeal, but not in the courts. In 2012, Theresa May—then Home Secretary—decided to halt the extradition of Gary McKinnon to the US to face trial for a similar hacking campaign, citing concerns that he would commit suicide in US custody. McKinnon was accused of scanning tens of thousands of US government computers for vulnerabilities and then gaining access to a total of 97 military and NASA computers, which McKinnon said he did to find evidence that the US government had obtained extraterrestrial technology. May made that decision based on input from medical experts, who determined he was likely to commit suicide if he faced life in a US prison.