Month: April 2018

Enlarge / Alto Rabagao dam. Tras os Montes, Portugal (credit: Getty Images)

Portugal's energy system operator had some interesting news to share once March had closed out. It seems that even as Portugal's monthly energy consumption increased 9.7 percent compared to March 2017, the country produced enough renewable energy (just over 4,800 Gwh) to exceed its energy demand (just over 4,600 Gwh).

This doesn't mean Portugal avoided fossil fuel use: these figures just compare the total gigawatts of renewable energy produced with the total gigawatts of energy demanded for the whole month. Sometimes, that demand didn't coincide with the time that the renewables were producing, so natural gas and coal plants had to be used. Still, according to the Portuguese Renewable Energy Association (APREN), the day with the least amount of renewable consumption (March 7) still had enough to meet 86 percent of Portugal's demand through renewable energy. On the other extreme, Portugal's renewable energy sector produced 143 percent of its demand on March 11. In fact, Portugal's electricity consumption was met fully by renewable energy for a 70-hour period beginning on March 9 and for a 69-hour period beginning on March 12.

Extra energy can be exported or used to pump water for Portugal's pumped storage, APREN's President of the Board, António Sá da Costa, told Ars via email. The Association confirmed that no water in the pumped storage facilities was turbined in March, so that water can be used to create more renewable energy in June or July, when hydroelectric power might run low.

FCC

A recent filing with the Federal Communications Commission suggests that audio equipment maker Koss is working on a Bluetooth version of its long-popular Porta Pro headphones.

The documentation, identified as "L76-PORTA-PRO-BT," was submitted to the FCC and made available on December 20, so it looks like it has been out in the open for a few months. But the filing includes a number of exterior and interior photos of a device that greatly resembles the existing Porta Pro headphone. A user manual included in the filing refers to the device as the "Koss Porta Pro Wireless," suggesting that will be the headphone's official name.

Sony latest flagship smartphone, the Sony Xperia ZX2 Premium, was announced today. The phone brings us Sony's usual combo of high-end specs and low-end design that hasn't changed since 2013.

The spec sheet looks fine with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, 6GB of RAM, 64GB of storage plus a MicroSD slot, a 3540mAh battery, and Android 8.0 Oreo. The rear camera setup combines a 19MP main camera with a secondary 12MP black-and-white camera, while the front has a 13MP camera.

Enlarge (credit: portal gda)

Hackers pushing nation-state-style surveillance malware recently scored a major coup by getting three advanced malicious applications hosted in Google's official Play marketplace, researchers said.

The mAPTs, short for mobile advanced persistent threats, likely came from two separate groups that both target people in the Middle East, Michael Flossman, head of threat intelligence at mobile security company Lookout, told Ars. The three apps combined received from about 650 to 1,250 downloads, according to Google Play figures. All three of them gave attackers considerable control over infected phones.

The apps—two from a family known as ViperRat and the third from the Desert Scorpion family—represent one of the few known times mAPTs have been found in the official Google market. The attackers' success is largely the result of a modular design where malicious functionality isn’t part of the initial version first downloaded from the Play Store. Rather, the surveillance capabilities come in a second stage that's downloaded later. Previously, both hacker groups relied largely on social engineering that tricked targets into downloading apps from third-party markets. The ability to get the apps hosted in Play is considered a win because it gives targets much more assurance the apps are legitimate.