Month: December 2018

The era of 5G mobile networks is quickly approaching, and while there isn't any smartphone out yet sporting the new network connectivity, AT&T says that "select" early adopters will soon be able to jump on AT&T's mobile 5G mmWave service with a mobile hotspot. AT&T's 5G service kicks in on December 21 in some cities, which AT&T says makes it "the first and only company in the US to offer a mobile 5G device over a commercial, standards-based mobile 5G network."

The hotspot hardware is a "Netgear Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot," which Netgear is calling the "first standards-based mobile 5G device in the world." Netgear's 5G hotspot comes in at a pricey $499 and sounds ridiculously overbuilt. Despite being a mobile router/modem that has very little to do computationally, the Nighthawk is packing one of the newest, fastest SoC's on Earth, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC.

Enlarge / One of Texas' top BBQ destinations: Micklethwait. (credit: Nathan Mattise)

People want to be good. They want to save the Earth, or at least maybe just destroy it a little more slowly. The problem is, they don’t know how. They don’t really have any idea about how much energy their appliances are using, or how much energy it takes to make the food they eat, and thus don't know the greenhouse gas impact of using those appliances or eating that food.

If only they knew, the hope goes, they (we) would change their (our) destructive ways. “Those who believe that reducing meat consumption effectively reduces greenhouse gas emissions are much more likely to intend to reduce eating meat,” according to a paper just out in Nature Climate Change.

A study done in 2010 indicated that people knew that refrigerators and dishwashers use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases than light bulbs. But they had no real sense of the true emissions numbers, nor the magnitude of the difference between high- and low-emitting appliances.

Enlarge / A general view of a coal-fired thermal power plant belonging to Essar Power in Salaya, some 400km from Ahmedabad, on October 4, 2016. (credit: SAM PANTHAKY/AFP/Getty Images)

In the US, coal is decidedly on the decline despite the current administration's attempts to save it. US coal plant retirements doubled in 2018, and demand for coal dropped to the lowest level in more than three decades. But the International Energy Agency's (IEA) annual coal report (called Coal 2018) reminds us that the forces that have sent coal into a free fall in the US don't exist elsewhere in the world. In fact, demand for coal is growing globally for the second year in a row after a few years of decline, driven by high demand in India and Southeast Asia.

In the US, cheap natural gas has been a primary driver in coal's fall from grace. (This was the conclusion of the Department of Energy's 2017 "baseload study.") But in other parts of the world, coal remains the cheapest and most available energy source. Declines in the US, Canada, and Europe have been counter-balanced by coal growth in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Pakistan, the IEA wrote.

China, too, "accounts for nearly half of the world's coal consumption," although the Chinese government has taken steps to control the growth of coal in recent years.

Enlarge / Neutron stars may produce radio signals when interacting with dark matter. (credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

Dark matter is proving elusive. Apart from the gravitational evidence, which is strong, all the other potential indications of it haven't held up to scrutiny. One issue may be that we simply don’t know how to look for it, so detectors are based on informed guesses about how we might expect to find dark matter. One approach to these searches is to look for places in the Universe that might generate a dark matter signal.

This is exactly the approach taken by some physicists in a recent Physical Review Letter. In their case, they suggest that dark matter might produce a weak, but quite narrow, bandwidth radio signal from neutron stars.

This team is not the first to propose looking for dark matter signatures in the Universe. Excess gamma rays from the center of our own galaxy were, for a while, thought to be a possible signature of dark matter. But, as with all these proposals, the work focuses on a particular version of dark matter.

Enlarge / The iPad Pro is just one-fourth of an inch thick. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Gadget-makers have long played with the idea of bendable displays, but this isn't what they were going for: Apple has confirmed that some brand-new iPad Pro units have a slight bend to them—and this is expected and not a defect.

There are numerous stories and images of very slight bends on brand-new devices on the MacRumors forums, and The Verge's Chris Welch observed the same issue in his own iPad.

When The Verge reached out to Apple for comment, the company told the publication that the bending is "a side effect of the device’s manufacturing process and shouldn’t worsen over time or negatively affect the flagship iPad’s performance in any practical way." (The Verge's words.) Apple says the bending happens as a result of a cooling process used on the components when the device is manufactured.

Enlarge (credit: Fortnite / Aurich)

A Thursday BBC report takes a look at the state of Epic Games' mega-popular game Fortnite through the eyes of a particular audience: its black market of account thieves. After speaking with "about 20" perpetrators, reporter Joe Tidy put together a report that breaks down what's being stolen and resold, how it's happening, and what the game's players can do to shore up their own accounts.

The resulting story shouldn't surprise anyone in the infosec world, and it doesn't expose any apparent data leaks on the part of Epic. But it's a reminder that a few modern trends have come together in convenient fashion, ready for any enterprising script kiddie to tap into, and that users should know how a mountain of years-old data leaks can come back to haunt them.

Off-the-shelf, off your old passwords

The report begins with a teenaged Fortnite fan speaking to the BBC via webcam with his identity hidden. He got into the Fortnite-theft game inadvertently, he claims, by starting as a victim. The bad news began when he received email alerts from Epic Games—one saying his account's email address had been changed, and another saying that two-factor authentication (2FA) had been turned on (and attached to a phone number that wasn't his). His original account was totally lost as a result, the teen alleged.

Enlarge / Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson join forces as Agent H and Agent M to ward off an alien attack in Men in Black: International. (credit: YouTube/Sony Pictures)

If you couldn't get enough of Chris Hemsworth's Thor and Tessa Thompson's Valkyrie fighting side by side in Thor: Ragnarok, you'll love the trailer for the forthcoming Men in Black: International trailer. The comrades-in-arms are in top form battling more invading other-worldly beings—and seemingly having a blast doing it. We weren't sure how much longer Sony could milk this particular franchise, but the trailer is surprisingly good, with all the elements that made the original films global blockbusters.

The first Men in Black film (1997) was an instant classic and pretty much cemented Will Smith's status as a mega-star. Smith's chemistry with costar Tommy Lee Jones was a sheer delight, rounded out by an equally terrific cast. Miraculously, the sequel, Men in Black II (2002), was just as good, and a Hollywood franchise was born, reuniting Smith and Jones one last time with Men in Black 3 in 2012.

YouTube/Sony Pictures

Enlarge / The new extended emoji picker. (credit: Microsoft)

One of the more welcome additions to Windows 10 has been the emoji search panel, making it as easy to type emoji on a PC as it is on your phone. The latest Windows 10 insider build, 18305, is taking this a step further, including not just emoji but also kaomoji and symbols.

Kaomoji ("face characters") is, apparently, the name for those complicated faces made up of sequences of Japanese symbols. While some, such as shrugging ¯‍\‍_‍(‍ツ‍)‍_‍/‍¯, have become widespread (Slack's /shrug surely having at least some of the blame there), there is in fact a rich variety of faces that are used. So while sometimes you might be table flippingly mad (‍╯‍°‍益‍°‍)‍╯‍彡‍┻‍━‍┻ other times you might just want to flip the bird ┌‍∩‍┐‍(‍◣‍_‍◢‍)‍┌‍∩‍┐. If that's all a bit shocking you might be a little surprised (‍⊙‍_‍⊙‍) and perhaps you'll even run away ε‍=‍ε‍=‍┌‍(‍ ‍>‍_‍<‍)‍┘.

With Christmas and the New Year imminent, this is likely to be the last new build we see for a few weeks, so it's nice that it has an interesting new feature to explore. The new build also includes the first iterations of the Windows Sandbox feature announced earlier this week. Sandbox uses a combination of hypervisor and container technologies to provide a secure, isolated environment for running untrusted applications.