Month: March 2018

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Today, Apple released iOS 11.3 to all supported devices, including the iPad Air and later, the iPad mini 2 and later, the iPhone 5S and later, and the sixth-generation iPod touch. The update is available for download now in supported regions.

With several new features, it's arguably the biggest update to iOS since iOS 11 first released. iOS 11.3 addresses battery-based performance throttling on older devices, adds significant new capabilities for augmented reality, adds the ability to chat with customer support reps from companies in Messages, and lets users access their personal health records in the Health app.

Apple also released smaller updates for tvOS (tvOS 11.3) on the Apple TV and watchOS (watchOS 4.3). Let's dive into what each of these updates adds for users.

Enlarge / NEW YORK: Scott Pruitt, administrator of US EPA speaks at the 2017 Concordia Annual Summit at Grand Hyatt New York. (credit: Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit)

On Wednesday, an internal Environmental Protection Agency memo was leaked to the Huffington Post. Under the guise of developing "consistent messages about EPA's climate adaptation efforts," the memo suggests a number of talking points the agency's employees can use if asked about adaptation. Most of them are general statements about how the EPA would like to help citizens and local governments manage adaptation. But there are two that directly address what we know about our changing climate, and both of them do a pretty awful job with the subject.

The memo, which has been confirmed as authentic by the EPA, is from Joel Scheraga, a senior advisor on climate adaptation. In it, Scheraga says that the EPA's Office of Public Affairs has developed a set of talking points on climate issues. While he's pleased that many of them focus on adaptation, it's striking that they describe nothing but adaptation. Scheraga describes them as general "talking points about climate change," yet they don't contain a single mention of greenhouse gasses or any action by the EPA that might limit greenhouse gas emissions.

But that's hardly the only issue with the talking points, given that one is largely false and a second is questionable at beast.

Enlarge / Ransomware took Baltimore's 911 system offline on March 24 and 25 as the city's IT department worked to isolate and restore the computer-assisted dispatch network. (credit: Kim Hairston/Baltimore Sun/TNS via Getty Images)

Last Friday, the City of Atlanta was struck by a ransomware attack that took much of the city's internal and external services offline. As of today, many of those services have been restored, but two public portals remain offline. On Saturday, the network for Baltimore's 911 system was also taken offline by an apparent ransomware attack. And yesterday, Boeing's Charleston facility—which manufactures components for Boeing's 777 and other commercial jets, and for the Air Force's KC-46 tanker—was struck by what was initially reported to be WannaCry malware.

While it is not clear at this point if these attacks are related in any way, the vulnerability of both businesses and government agencies—particularly local governments—to these sorts of attacks has been continuously demonstrated over the past few years. Even as organizations have moved to deal with the vulnerabilities that were exploited in the first waves of ransomware and ransomware-lookalike attacks, the attackers have modified their tactics to find new ways into networks, exploiting even fleeting gaps in defenses to gain a destructive foothold.

Baltimore’s 911 emergency weekend

In the case of the Baltimore 911 system, the type of ransomware attack is not yet clear, but the city's top information systems official confirmed that Baltimore's computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system was taken offline by ransomware. In a release emailed to Ars Technica, Baltimore Chief Information Officer and Chief Digital Officer Frank Johnson said that the CAD network was shut down over the weekend "due to 'ransomware' perpetrators" and that the city's IT team was able to "isolate the breach to the CAD network itself." Systems connected to the CAD network, including systems at the Baltimore City Police Department, were taken offline to prevent the spread of the ransomware.

(credit: Comcast)

Comcast would support a ban on paid prioritization as long as there is an exception for "specialized services" that benefit consumers, a company executive said this week.

Comcast Senior Executive VP David Cohen, who is generally the public face in Comcast's dealings with government policymakers, spoke about paid prioritization at the Free State Foundation's Telecom Policy Conference on Tuesday. (Video available on C-SPAN's website; the segment begins at 2:20.)

"How about if we agree to a prohibition on paid prioritization and we have a limited exception created in some way for this concept of specialized services," Cohen said.

These photos show dendrites after pulses of different current densities are applied, from lowest density at the top to highest at the bottom.

Dendrites—branching structures that look like tree limbs—are fun to draw and good on neurons, but they're generally best avoided in lithium-ion batteries. As ions are exchanged between the anode and cathode over several charge and discharge cycles, lithium electrodes will sometimes grow dendrites that can expand through the electrolyte that separates the anode and cathode. These dendrites can reduce the battery's capacity, shorten the life of the battery, or even start fires as the dendrites heat up. (Dendrites were found in the batteries related to the Boeing 787 battery fires that happened in 2014, for example.)

But researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York have proposed a way to ameliorate this dendrite growth. They've done this not by fighting against the dendrites and trying to contain them (as many researchers have attempted) but by using the tendency of dendrites to heat up in response to high-current density to make those electrode growths smaller.

By applying a high-current pulse to a lithium-metal anode, the researchers were able to produce heat that wasn't enough to melt the lithium metal but was enough to encourage "extensive surface migration" of the lithium atoms. That essentially "healed" the lithium-metal anode of newly growing dendrites, which smoothed out the surface of the lithium anode again.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today, the Dealmaster is all about variety: we've got deals on everything from desktop speakers and gaming PCs to iPads and Nintendo Switch accessories.

We'll choose to focus on a solid pair of wireless exercise headphones, though, as Anker's SoundBuds Slim+ are now down to $22 with the coupon code below. This, as you might guess, is an upgraded version of the SoundBuds Slim, which Ars recommended as a top budget option among Bluetooth exercise earbuds late last year. The main difference here is that the Slim+ support the aptX codec, which boosts audio quality somewhat with compatible devices.

They're still $20 earbuds, of course, so don't expect phenomenal sound, but for the price they more than hold their own. Beyond that, you're looking at a decent 7 hours of battery life per charge, IPX5-rated water resistance, and a nondescript but well-constructed build that shouldn't be tricky to fit in your ears. If you just need a cheap beater pair of earbuds for the gym, you could certainly do worse.

Enlarge / Track #20, showing a slip mark. (credit: Douglas McLaren)

Thirteen thousand years ago, a small group of people walked on a beach on one of the thousands of low islands off the coast of British Columbia. These walkers were some of the first humans to settle here.

A team of archaeologists led by Duncan McLaren of the Hakai Institute and the University of Victoria unearthed 29 footprints on the shore of Calvert Island, British Columbia, embedded in a layer of light-brown clay 60cm below today’s sandy beach. Radiocarbon dating of a small piece of wood embedded in the clay puts the footprints at 13,317 to 12,633 years old, making them some of the earliest clear evidence of human presence this far north on Canada’s Pacific Coast.

The footprints offer proof that people were on the west coast of Canada in the final stages of the last glacial period, when a huge expanse of ice called the Cordilleran Ice Sheet stretched to Canada’s Pacific Coast. The ice sheet seems to have receded from the shoreline in patches, creating small areas of thawed land called refugia, just large enough to support plants and large animals—including humans, if they could get there. It’s possible that the first North Americans made their way south along the edges of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet after crossing the Beringia Land Bridge.