Month: May 2018

SEATTLE—The PC is, for many of us, no longer the central hub for our digital and online activities; the phone has taken that role. In this new world, the relationship between the two has flipped: the phone is not a companion device for the PC, but rather, the PC is now a companion device for the phone.

At its Build developer conference today, Microsoft showed a pair of applications that reflect this new world. First are updated versions of the Launcher for Android and Edge for iOS that include support for Timeline, the big new feature of the Windows 10 April 2018 Update. Timeline gives a historic view of the documents, emails, and webpages that you have visited, making it easy and convenient to go back and resume working on your ongoing tasks. With the updated versions of the apps, the Timeline view is now accessible on your mobile devices.

(credit: Comcast)

Comcast has lined up $60 billion in financing in order to make a hostile bid for the 21st Century Fox media assets that Disney is attempting to buy, according to news reports.

Comcast is waiting to find out whether AT&T will be allowed to buy Time Warner Inc. before moving forward with the bid for Fox assets, reports say. "Comcast is getting the pieces in place to make a hostile bid for 21st Century Fox's entertainment assets should it choose to do so," a Wall Street Journal article said.

The Walt Disney Company already struck a $52.4 billion all-stock deal to buy various 21st Century Fox properties. That includes Fox's stake in Hulu, the popular video streaming service. Comcast would try to buy the same assets that Disney is attempting to acquire. Disney, Fox, and Comcast each own 30 percent of Hulu; Time Warner owns the other 10 percent. The Disney/Fox purchase announcement in December noted that Disney would gain a "controlling interest" in Hulu by purchasing Fox assets. Comcast would receive the same controlling interest in Hulu if it can pry the Fox assets away from Disney.

Enlarge (credit: Mobilus In Mobili)

In the US, partisan political lines define a debate about climate change that does not exist among climate scientists. It has been this way long enough that you could be forgiven for thinking that rejecting the human cause of climate change is somehow inherently conservative. But few countries beyond the US are actually having this debate despite—and this is true—being home to their own politically conservative citizens.

To find out what's going on, Matthew Hornsey, Emily Harris, and Kelly Fielding of the University of Queensland in Australia surveyed 5,323 people in 25 countries. And the results confirmed that the US really is the weird one.

The survey asked respondents to answer questions that allowed them to be placed on four different political scales: left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, individualist vs. communitarian, and hierarchical vs. egalitarian. They were also asked about a handful of conspiracy theories to test a separate connection between conspiratorial thinking and the idea that climate science is a vast hoax.

Enlarge (credit: Smith Collection Gado/Getty Images)

On May 7, executives of Equifax submitted a "statement for the record" to the Securities and Exchange Commission detailing the extent of the consumer data breach the company first reported on September 7, 2017. The data in the statement, which has also been shared with congressional committees investigating the breach, reveals to a fuller extent how much personal data was exposed in the breach. Millions of driver's license numbers, phone numbers, and email addresses were also exposed in connection with names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers—offering a gold mine of data for identity thieves and fraudsters.

Equifax had already reported that the names, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth of 143 million US consumers had been exposed, along with driver's license numbers "in some instances," in addition to the credit card numbers of 209,000 individuals. The company's management had also reported "certain dispute documents" submitted by about 182,000 consumers contesting credit reports had been exposed as well, in addition to some information about British and Canadian consumers.

But the exact details of the nature of these documents and information had not been revealed, in part because Equifax felt it did not have a legal obligation to disclose those details. "With respect to the data elements of gender, phone number, and email addresses, US state data breach notification laws generally do not require notification to consumers when these data elements are compromised, particularly when an email address is not stolen in combination with further credentials that would permit access," Equifax's management asserted in the SEC letter.

Enlarge / NASA's Orion spacecraft and its launch abort system shown in this rendering of the Ascent Abort-2 test flight. (credit: NASA)

It has been a long three-and-a-half years since the Orion spacecraft first launched into space in December 2014, making a successful shake-out flight. But now, NASA’s program aimed at building a large, deep-space capsule capable of sending astronauts to and from lunar orbit is finally ramping back up toward a series of test flights.

In less than a year, a boilerplate model of the Orion spacecraft will be jettisoned from its rocket at 55 seconds after liftoff, to test the vehicle’s launch abort system. Provided that goes well, about a year after that, the Orion spacecraft will be sent into lunar orbit for longer than a week for a shakedown cruise. Finally, as early as June 2022, two to four astronauts will fly aboard Orion into lunar orbit, sending humans into deep space for the first time since 1972.

This isn’t exactly a rapid cadence of flights, but three missions in four years would represent a remarkable increase from the vehicle’s flight rate to date—one in 13 years. “Our destiny is to explore, so you want to get your tests behind you and get humans on the spacecraft, and start that exploration,” Annette Hasbrook, an assistant manager for the Orion program in Houston, told Ars.