Month: August 2018

Enlarge / Ballistic missile defenses will be one of the things that would be shifted into the space force. (credit: Department of Defense)

Today, Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech at the Pentagon in which he filled in some details on the administration's plans to add a distinct space force to the Department of Defense. The speech coincided with the completion of a Pentagon report that provides a greater sense of how the space force would be structured and fit in with the existing Defense bureaucracy. But there's still a lot unspecified regarding whether non-defense space activities, such as those pursued by the NSA, will be affected by the changes.

Now is the time

A significant portion of Pence's speech was devoted to arguing that this is the right time for a space force. Some of the arguments date back to the Cold War, like the development of anti-satellite weaponry, a concern enhanced by China's testing of such a weapon about a decade ago. Others are more recent, like the development of things such as GPS-jamming hardware. One of the arguments stretched logic a little, as Pence cited the threat of hypersonic missiles, which pose a risk because they don't enter space and therefore can't be targeted for antimissile interception there.

While these events may not represent a coherent plan by an adversary to militarize space, Pence argued that they represent a situation where US adversaries like China and Russia have already made space what he termed a warfighting domain. "What was once peaceful and uncontested is now crowded and adversarial," Pence said, referring to space. "Today, other nations are seeking to disrupt our space-based systems and challenge our supremacy as never before." He quoted Trump in saying that this was unacceptable and that "We must have American dominance in space."

Enlarge (credit: Lucien Monfils / Wikimedia)

Life-saving pacemakers manufactured by Medtronic don’t rely on encryption to safeguard firmware updates, a failing that makes it possible for hackers to remotely install malicious wares that threaten patients’ lives, security researchers said Thursday.

At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, researchers Billy Rios and Jonathan Butts said they first alerted medical device maker Medtronic to the hacking vulnerabilities in January 2017. So far, they said, the proof-of-concept attacks they developed still work. The duo on Thursday demonstrated one hack that compromised a CareLink 2090 programmer, a device doctors use to control pacemakers after they’re implanted in patients.

Because updates for the programmer aren’t delivered over an encrypted HTTPS connection and firmware isn’t digitally signed, the researchers were able to force it to run malicious firmware that would be hard for most doctors to detect. From there, the researchers said, the compromised machine could cause implanted pacemakers to make life-threatening changes in therapies, such as increasing the number of shocks delivered to patients.

Ron Amadeo

NEW YORK CITY—I have touched a Galaxy Note9, and I'm back to talk about it. Samsung's flagship smartphone for the back-half of 2018 was announced earlier today, with headline features like, uh, a new S-Pen? Bixby? It's "new," and Samsung hopes that will be good enough.

There's not much to say on the hardware front. Anyone who has put a finger on a Galaxy S8, S9, or Note 8 will immediately be familiar with the Note9. It's all glass, and it feels really solid, but the back is also fragile and a fingerprint magnet. The display is huge and beautiful, although the 0.1-inch increase this year is something you'll only notice by looking at the spec sheet.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by an excellent deal on the 32GB variant of Amazon's Fire HD 8 tablet, which is down to $59 (and potentially down to $54 for some users with the code "SAVE10OFF" at checkout). That's a low for this higher-capacity model, which normally sits between $90-110. Amazon says this deal will expire on Friday.

The Fire HD 8 has been around for a little bit now, and it's totally possible Amazon is cutting the price ahead of the release of a new model in the coming months. But generally speaking, it remains the most affordable tablet that's actually worth buying. It's no iPad, to be sure: the display only has a resolution of 1200x800, it's not exactly a gaming powerhouse, there's no 802.11ac WiFi, and it's all made of plastic. Amazon's Fire OS is still a far cry from stock Android, too, with baked-in ads and no official support for Google apps like Gmail or Google Drive.

But with Android tablets an eternal mess, a dirt-cheap yet competent slate like the Fire HD 8 is arguably the only worthwhile iPad alternative. Its 1.3GHz MediaTek MT8163V/B SoC and 1.5GB of RAM are still enough to do the basic Web browsing and video streaming without too much frustration, it gets a solid 10-12 hours of battery life per charge, it's comfortable enough, and that HD display is well worth the step up over Amazon's cheaper Fire 7 tablet. While Fire OS pushes Amazon's services in your face at every turn, it still has its advantages if you use the Kindle or Prime Video apps often. It recently gained the ability to work like an Echo Show, too. And if you wanted to avoid it altogether, it's still not that difficult to load it with the Google Play Store and bring Google apps in that way. (Just know you might have to do a little extra legwork.)