Bipartisan pair of senators blast plan to end space station in seven years

NASA inspector general appears to buttress senatorial concerns.

Enlarge / Sen. Ted Cruz, right, and Sen. Bill Nelson (background) both support extending ISS operations beyond 2025. (credit: NASA)

At one point on Wednesday afternoon, US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) turned to his counterpart from Florida, Democrat Bill Nelson, and spoke of their mutual preference for continuing federal funding for the International Space Station throughout the 2020s. "Senator Nelson and I are on exactly the same page," Cruz said.

"Why couldn't we agree on a lot of other pages?" Nelson quipped in reply.

The exchange came during a hearing of the Senate's Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, which Cruz chairs, on the topic of "Examining the Future of the International Space Station: Administration Perspectives." More specifically, the Trump administration has said it will end NASA's direct support for the International Space Station in 2025. Wednesday's hearing delivered a bipartisan response from the Senate in which key members vigorously oppose this plan.

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Company used by police, prisons to find any mobile device breached (again)

Service used by prisons, police to track mobile devices had usernames, passwords exposed in hack.

Enlarge / Usernames, passwords, emails, and phone numbers of thousands of users of a system designed to investigate prisoners' phone calls were allegedly exposed in a hack, details leaked to Motherboard suggest. (credit: Securus Technologies)

Securus Technologies—the company that provides a geolocation service used for cell phone tracking by law enforcement agencies—has been hacked, exposing the usernames and weakly protected passwords of thousands of customers. The person claiming to be responsible for the breach provided some of the data to Motherboard's Joseph Cox, along with an explanation of how it was obtained. Securus has not confirmed the breach.

Securus, which offers phone services for prisons, began offering location-based tracking to help prisons track where inmates' calls were actually going to. This allowed prisons to "geofence" areas "associated with illegal activity," as a redacted Securus brochure posted online by the Electronic Frontier Foundation shows. But that same service can be used to show the location of mobile phones on a map. The service, called GeoLoc, "provides the approximate location of the cellular device being called at both the beginning and the end of the call," the Securus marketing material states.

But the data Securus uses for GeoLoc can also be used for other purposes—including tracking the location of virtually any cell phone. A Web-based application from Securus, called Securus Call Platform, allows law enforcement officers to log in from a browser and run searches for mobile devices without requiring an outbound call.

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The revamped Google News app is now available on iPhones and iPads

App replaces Google Play Newsstand, sports Google’s new Material Design digs.

Jeff Dunn

Google detailed an overhaul of the Google News app at its I/O developer conference last week, and on Wednesday that redesign officially became available to download on iOS devices. It replaces the previous Google Play Newsstand app.

The new app arrived on Android devices shortly after Google’s initial announcement. Google says the app is available in 127 countries.

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Wonder’s gaming phone will be like an Android-powered Nintendo Switch (that’s also a phone)

The Nintendo Switch is a new type of game console that’s designed to be used both as a gaming tablet and as a home console. Attach controllers to the sides of the tablet and you can use it anywhere. Detach the controllers and prop up the tablet o…

The Nintendo Switch is a new type of game console that’s designed to be used both as a gaming tablet and as a home console. Attach controllers to the sides of the tablet and you can use it anywhere. Detach the controllers and prop up the tablet on its kickstand and you can play without […]

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An 800-year-old label may rewrite the history of a Java Sea shipwreck

The label suggests the wreck is a century older than archaeologists thought.

Enlarge (credit: The Field Museum, Anthropology. Photographer Pacific Sea Resources)

In the 1980s, fishermen working off the coast of Indonesia made a surprising haul: a cargo of ceramic vessels, elephant tusks, sweet-smelling resin, and other artifacts from a ship that had lain on the bottom of the Java Sea for centuries. Most of the ship's hull was long since gone; wood decays quickly in warm waters, leaving behind only its former contents.

Now, a closer look at its cargo reveals that the ship may have gone to the bottom a century earlier than archaeologists first suspected, which puts it in the middle of a very interesting period in Chinese history.

May you live in interesting times

The Song dynasty (1127-1279) was the height of ceramic export production in China, when the imperial court encouraged overseas trade. Ships crossing the seas were beginning to form a more direct link between far-flung trading partners than the ancient Silk Road could allow. The Srivijaya empire, a formidable maritime power based on Sumatra, was in decline, and other coastal powers in the region were vying for its former supremacy.

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Senate votes to overturn Ajit Pai’s net neutrality repeal

Senate defies “armies of lobbyists,” but House may help FCC kill net neutrality.

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 09, 2018: Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) speaks during a news conference on a petition to force a vote on net neutrality. Also pictured are Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). (credit: Getty Images | Zach Gibson)

The US Senate today voted to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules, with all members of the Democratic caucus and three Republicans voting in favor of net neutrality.

The Senate approved a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution that would simply undo the FCC's December 2017 vote to deregulate the broadband industry. If the CRA is approved by the House and signed by President Trump, Internet service providers would have to continue following rules that prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has scheduled his repeal to take effect on June 11. If Congress doesn't act, the net neutrality rules and the FCC's classification of ISPs as common carriers would be eliminated on that date.

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It seems someone is producing a banned ozone-depleting chemical again

Decline of CFC-11 has slowed in recent years, pointing to a renewed source.

Enlarge / The latest satellite measurements of ozone from May 14 show the "hole" that still exists over the South Pole. (credit: NASA Ozone Watch)

The Montreal Protocol—a 1987 international agreement to end production of ozone-destroying chemicals like freon—seems miraculous compared to the long struggle to achieve meaningful action on climate change. Even more astonishing is that the agreement has worked. Those chemicals (known as CFCs) take a long time to flush out of the atmosphere, but monitoring has shown that the flushing is proceeding largely according to plan.

That keeps the hole in the ozone layer on track to shrink over the coming decades. However, a new study shows that someone has been cheating in the last few years.

A group of researchers led by Stephen Montzka of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been tracking the progress of CFCs and noticed something off with CFC-11. This chemical has been used as a refrigerant, solvent, and propellant for aerosol spray cans, as well as in the production of styrofoam. As with the other CFCs, nations agreed to end production of CFC-11 entirely. While there may still be some older machines leaking CFC-11, these sources should gradually disappear over time, allowing the decline of its atmospheric concentration to accelerate.

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Google temporarily rolls back Chrome’s autoplay restrictions that keep web games from working

When Google released Chrome 66 last month, one of the most notable changes was a restriction on web content that automatically plays audio when you visit a website. Intended to keep your browser from unexpectedly making sounds as you surf the web, the …

When Google released Chrome 66 last month, one of the most notable changes was a restriction on web content that automatically plays audio when you visit a website. Intended to keep your browser from unexpectedly making sounds as you surf the web, the new restriction also had the unintentional impact of casing many web-based games […]

The post Google temporarily rolls back Chrome’s autoplay restrictions that keep web games from working appeared first on Liliputing.

Tesla’s new battery in Belgium shows value is in dispatch speed

A stack of 140 batteries will work to keep the European grid at 50Hz.

Tesla Powerpacks balancing the grid in Terhills, Belgium.

Thus far, batteries haven't taken over grids around the world. Due to the sheer expense of batteries, large installations have generally been government mandated or heavily subsidized. In South Australia, though, Tesla's giant 100MW/129MWh battery has seen a lot of success—not by selling power to meet general demand but by providing so-called "frequency response services." And a company called Restore has just partnered with Tesla to replicate that success for itself in Belgium.

In South Australia, Tesla Powerpacks are charged by the energy from a nearby wind farm, and the battery installation dispatches electricity to the grid when grid frequency suddenly drops. Grid frequency—a measure of current that must be held constant for the grid to work properly—is vitally important to the functioning of any grid system.

In Europe, for example, a recent power dispute between Serbia and Kosovo led average frequency on the Continental Europe Power System to drop to 49.996Hz instead of the required 50Hz, which resulted in oven and microwave clocks everywhere across Europe being six minutes slow after just a month of these conditions.

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Forget scanning license plates; cops will soon ID you via your roof rack

ELSAG LPR upgrade can ID “spare tire, bumper sticker, or a ride-sharing company decal.”

Enlarge (credit: RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

On Tuesday, one of the largest LPR manufacturers, ELSAG, announced a major upgrade to "allow investigators to search by color, seven body types, 34 makes, and nine visual descriptors in addition to the standard plate number, location, and time."

Such a vast expansion of the tech now means that evading such scans will be even more difficult.

For years, Ars has been reporting on automated license plate readers (ALPRs, or simply LPRs)—a specialized camera often mounted on police cars that can scan at speeds of up to 60 plates per second.

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