Month: November 2018

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share.

Well, the rush of Black Friday and Cyber Monday has mostly subsided, but there are still a handful of leftover offers worth noting. Those include $15 off a $100 gift card for Apple's App Store and iTunes Store, $50 off a pair of Bose's flagship noise-cancelling headphones, and $30 off the latest Amazon Echo speaker. Beyond those deals, we also have discounts on Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon, gaming headsets, smart home cameras, and Samsung SSDs.

If you still have some holiday shopping left to do, have a look at the list below.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Earlier this year, a federal judge in Fresno, California, denied prosecutors' efforts to compel Facebook to help it wiretap Messenger voice calls.

But the precise legal arguments that the government made, and that the judge ultimately rejected, are still sealed.

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union formally asked the judge to unseal court dockets and related rulings associated with this ongoing case involving alleged MS-13 gang members. ACLU lawyers argue that such a little-charted area of the law must be made public so that tech companies and the public can fully know what's going on.

Enlarge / Cars sit in rush hour traffic on the 405 Freeway through the Sepulveda pass in this aerial photograph taken over Los Angeles, California, US, on Friday, July 10, 2015. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Back in August, The Boring Company was already distancing itself from a plan it pitched earlier that year to build a test tunnel under Sepulveda Boulevard and the 405 freeway in Los Angeles.

On Tuesday, The Boring Company and a group of Westside residents issued a joint statement that they had "amicably settled" a lawsuit brought by the residents against The Boring Company in May of this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. The company, founded by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, said it would drop plans to build the 405 test tunnel and focus instead on building the so-called "Dugout Loop" that will run between a downtown LA Metro station and Dodger Stadium, if all goes as planned.

Musk announced the 405-parallel tunnel in an evening talk back in May, describing it as a 2.7 mile north-south test tunnel that wouldn't carry the general public—at first. Musk added at the time that The Boring Company would eventually do test rides to get user feedback. The City of Los Angeles appeared poised to fast-track Musk's idea, with LA Metro announcing: "We'll be partners moving forward."

Enlarge / Mitochondria (red) and cell nucleus (blue) of two connective tissue cells prepared from mouse embryo. (credit: Institute of Molecular Medicine I, University of Düsseldorf)

The vast majority of our DNA—the chromosomes in the nucleus of each cell—is just what you’d expect: a mix of genetic material from both mother and father. But mitochondria are an exception. They contain a relatively tiny amount of DNA, and in nearly all mammals and even unicellular organisms, that DNA comes strictly from the mother. We've even used that fact to trace the spread of humanity around the globe.

But in 2002, researchers in Copenhagen reported a jaw-dropping finding. In an effort to work out why one of their patients had extreme fatigue during exercise despite seeming healthy in many respects, they started examining his mitochondria—the energy-generating power stations living in each cell. What they found floored them: the man had mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that matched both his father's and his mother's.

Since 2002, no other cases of paternally inherited mtDNA have been reported in humans, despite several research groups actively looking. But a paper in this week’s PNAS reports mtDNA inherited from both parents in 17 different people from three families. This kind of inheritance is still extremely rare and seems potentially linked to mitochondrial disease, but the robust confirmation of it in humans is huge news for biology and medicine.

Enlarge (credit: Sennheiser)

Audio device maker Sennheiser has issued a fix for a monumental software blunder that makes it easy for hackers to carry out man-in-the-middle attacks that cryptographically impersonate any big-name website on the Internet. Anyone who has ever used the company’s HeadSetup for Windows or macOS should take action immediately, even if users later uninstalled the app.

To allow Sennheiser headphones and speaker phones to work seamlessly with computers, HeadSetup establishes an encrypted Websocket with a browser. It does this by installing a self-signed TLS certificate in the central place an operating system reserves for storing browser-trusted certificate authority roots. In Windows, this location is called the Trusted Root CA certificate store. On Macs, it’s known as the macOS Trust Store.

A few minutes to find, years to exploit

The critical HeadSetup vulnerability stems from a self-signed root certificate installed by version 7.3 of the app that kept the private cryptographic key in a format that could be easily extracted. Because the key was identical for all installations of the software, hackers could use the root certificate to generate forged TLS certificates that impersonated any HTTPS website on the Internet. Although the self-signed certificates were blatant forgeries, they will be accepted as authentic on computers that store the poorly secured certificate root. Even worse, a forgery defense known as certificate pinning would do nothing to detect the hack.

Bose Einstein condensates (BECs) have been around for more than 20 years now. One of the best applications of the BEC, it turns out, is as a tool to explore other quantum things, like solids—yes, the properties of solids are determined by quantum mechanics.

Among those solids is a controversial and possibly nonexistent theoretical one: the supersolid. Now, a pair of theoretical physicists has shown that a recently observed BEC “droplet” state may be a way to create a supersolid-like material. That may lead to a way to explore the properties of a supersolid without the difficulties associated with conventional materials.

Bose Einstein condensates

A BEC is a state of matter that requires a specific type of particle. Essentially, the particle world is divided in two: you are either a fermion or a boson. Fermions don’t like each other, so they stack themselves in order of energy, from low to high. Any two fermions that are within touching distance of each other must be different. That might mean different energies, or different spins, or some other property, but they must be different. Pretty much everything is made of fermions, and this stacking is what makes the Universe the way it is.

Enlarge / Original production company Sunrise is attaching this image to its announcements about the new live-action Cowboy Bebop. But does that mean the series will look anything like this? There's no telling at this point. (credit: Sunrise)

We only have a teaser trailer and a list of writers, directors, producers, and supervisors, but it's enough to get a certain jazzy anime theme song rocking in our heads. That's right: the late-'90s Japanese cartoon Cowboy Bebop is coming back. As, um, a live-action series?

Netflix posted the news announcement on Tuesday night, though unfortunately, it had nothing in the way of series footage, as the cast hasn't been picked. Plus, the reveal video forgoes music, so there's no telling whether original composer Yoko Kanno will return with her inimitable noir-jazz chops. But the series' premise—four bounty hunters roaming the galaxy in search of hard-boiled hijackery—appears to be intact, according to a followup press release.

Netflix, in an apparent attempt to assuage anxious "uh live action?" responses, immediately informed fans that original animated series Director Shinichiro Watanabe will participate as a "consultant." The press release also confirmed that the series' original Japanese production company will share executive producer duties, but the project otherwise doesn't appear to include other original staffers—and has hinged the first episode's writing duties on a Westerner, Chris Yost (Thor Ragnarok).

Enlarge / The in-game photo mode has a variety of filters and frames to play with.

When you emerge from Vault 76 and get your first glimpse of Fallout 76’s Appalachia region, the world seems full of possibility. The scenery is lovely, all autumn foliage and breathtaking mountains; the map is huge and decorated with all kinds of seemingly unique locales; and you’re being led by holotape on a journey that promises to be epic.

Unfortunately, that sense of wonder proves hard to maintain. The wasteland ends up feeling empty and lonely, that lush world can quickly become a nightmare at the hands of other players, and a smorgasbord of technical issues hinders the entire experience. In the two weeks since its launch, Fallout 76 has proven to be fun and frustrating in equal measure, feeling more like an unfinished experiment than a completed game.

Almost heaven

Situated squarely in the coal mining region of Appalachian West Virginia, Fallout 76 does a good job of incorporating real-life towns and landmarks into the franchise’s deep lore. Clues left throughout the world show how the arrival of Vault-Tec initially offered the community a more promising future, particularly for those attending Vault Tech University or who chose to stay in the prestigious Vault 76.