Month: September 2018

Enlarge / Mold growth on cannabis. (credit: Getty | OlegMalyshev)

Almost 20 percent of marijuana products in California have failed the state’s new safety-testing standards for contamination and labeling accuracy, the Associated Press reports.

While growers argue that the standards are too strict, costly, and inconsistent, some testing experts say the standards don’t go far enough to adequately catch fungal contamination that would otherwise be found in routine drug and food testing.

California now has the country’s largest legal market of marijuana products. Since testing regulations went into full swing there on July 1, labs have examined nearly 11,000 batches of products ranging from buds to oils and edibles. About 2,000 products failed the tests. Of those, about 65 percent of failures were down to labeling and potency issues. The concentration of the psychoactive cannabinoid tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in any given product must be within 10 percent of what is listed on the label to pass the test, for instance.

Enlarge / The Belgian government says these kinds of randomized in-game cards are a form of gambling. EA is standing firm in its disagreement.

In the months since the Belgian Gaming Commission determined that certain video game loot boxes constituted illegal gambling, publishers like Blizzard, Valve, and Take-Two have removed loot boxes from their games in the country. Electronic Arts, though, has yet to remove the randomized items from its recent FIFA games, a decision which seems poised to set up a court fight.

Machine-translated reports from Belgium's Niewsblad and Metro newspapers suggest that Belgian gaming commission has now referred the matter to the country's public prosecutor's office, which is conducting an investigation into it.

Any such prosecution would then go before a judge, which may be a legal battle EA is looking for. In a May conference call, EA CFO Andrew Wilson stated the company's position that the loot boxes in FIFA are not a form of gambling. That's "firstly because players always receive a specified number of items in each pack, and secondly we don't provide or authorize any way to cash out or sell items or virtual currency for real money," Wilson said.

Enlarge / The invitation Apple sent to members of the press. (credit: Apple)

On September 12, Apple will host a live product announcement event out of the Steve Jobs Theater at its Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. The company is expected to announce multiple new iPhones and an updated Apple Watch, but other product announcements are also possible.

Ars will be in attendance, so tune in here for our liveblog at 10am PDT (1pm EDT, 5pm GMT).

Apple's iPhone X has been the top-selling smartphone since its launch in November 2017, so expect Apple's new phones to draw from the trends that the X started—specifically, a near-edge-to-edge display that has a notch to house the TrueDepth sensor array. We're also expecting a new chip that, according to Apple's usual naming convention, will be called the A12. That chip might be the result of a 7nm manufacturing process.

Enlarge / Dark metallic silver paint will still be available, but if you want a light shade of silver you better act fast. (credit: Tesla)

On Tuesday morning, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to let the world know that Tesla is slim-lining paint options for its electric vehicle. On Wednesday, Obsidian Black and Metallic Silver will disappear from the online configurators for the Model S, Model X, and Model 3 EVs. Both colors will remain available via special request for another 10 days turnaround time, according to an email sent to potential customers. That leaves just five shades to pick from. The reason? It will "simplify manufacturing."

Moving 2 of 7 Tesla colors off menu on Wednesday to simplify manufacturing. Obsidian Black & Metallic Silver will still be available as special request, but at higher price.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 11, 2018

Like the iconic Ford Model T more than a century ago, Tesla standardized on black paint as the default option for all its new cars. Anyone wanting a more adventurous shade—of which there were six—has to find a little more cash. That's $1,500 for Midnight Silver Metallic, Deep Blue Metallic, and until tomorrow, the aforementioned Obsidian Black and Metallic Silver. While paint stocks of those two remain, special ordering them will set you back $2,000, the same as Pearl White or Red multi-coats.

Tesla is under heavy pressure to build as many cars as it can as efficiently as possible, and taking two paint options out of the equation certainly seems like a reasonable move. And the company's struggles with its paint shop are well-documented, with at least four fires in that area of the factory since 2014.

Enlarge / Thousands of BA customers had their credit card data "skimmed" by malicious JavaScript code inserted into the airline's website. (credit: Alf van Beem)

Last week, British Airways revealed that all the payment information processed through the airline's website and mobile app between August 21 and September 5 had been exposed. As many as 38,000 British Airways customers may have had their contact and financial information stolen in the breach, which evidence suggests was the result of malicious JavaScript code planted within British Airway's website.

According to a report by RiskIQ's Head Researcher Yonathan Klijnsma published Tuesday, RiskIQ detected the use of a script associated with a "threat group" RiskIQ calls Magecart. the same set of actors believed to be behind a recent credit card breach at Ticketmaster UK. While the Ticketmaster UK breach was the result of JavaScript being injected through a third-party service used by the Ticketmaster website, the British Airways breach was actually the result of a compromise of BA's own Web server, according to the RiskIQ analysis.

"This attack is a highly targeted approach compared to what we’ve seen in the past with the Magecart skimmer,” said Klijnsma. "This skimmer is attuned to how British Airways’ payment page is set up, which tells us that the attackers carefully considered how to target this site in particular."

Two very thin membranes for measuring heat transfer via the edges (credit: Daktoah Thompson)

One of the hidden heroes of the modern world is heat transfer. Sucking the heat out of modern electronics is a technical feat all by itself. And we've tackled even stickier situations, like cooling objects in the vacuum of space. 

Getting rid of heat is governed by laws that have been tested for over a century. These elderly laws are, for the most part, undefeated and undefeatable. But there are a few exceptions. And, now researchers have found another exception: beating the limits of radiative heat transfer.

So hot it glows

In electronics, heat can be conducted away to large surfaces, where convection can take care of the rest. In space, there is no convection; everything has to be radiated. The nice feature about radiative heat transfer (often referred to as "blackbody radiation") is that it is radiative. Heating and cooling can take place over long distances—light from the Sun warms the Earth through radiative heat transfer.