Month: December 2018

Enlarge / Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) in all her iconic glory. (credit: Marvel Studios)

Captain Marvel took off into space Monday night, delivering knock-down punches and lots of adrenaline-fueled action in the character’s first starring film this coming March. We learn a bit more about her backstory, and get more hints about the mysterious character Jude Law plays in the film.

Fans have been eagerly awaiting Captain Marvel's big screen debut, not least because it seems likely she'll play some role in the upcoming (as yet untitled) Avengers 4 movie. When the first trailer dropped in September, it confirmed that Captain Marvel will be set in the 1990s, long before the infamous "Snappening" at the end Avengers: Infinity War. She falls from the sky and lands in a Blockbuster video, and soon draws the attention of a young Nick Fury (all hail the power of CGI).

Marvel Studios

Enlarge (credit: Frank Lindecke / Flickr)

Brace yourself for yet another massive data breach. Quora.com, a site where people ask and answer questions on a range of topics, said hackers breached its computer network and accessed a variety of potentially sensitive personal data for about 100 million users.

Compromised information includes cryptographically protected passwords, full names, email addresses, data imported from linked networks, and a variety of non-public content and actions, including direct messages, answer requests and downvotes. The breached data also included public content and actions, such as questions, answers, comments, and upvotes. In a post published late Monday afternoon, Quora officials said they discovered the unauthorized access on Friday. They have since hired a digital forensics and security firm to investigate and have also reported the breach to law enforcement officials.

“It is our responsibility to make sure things like this don’t happen, and we failed to meet that responsibility,” Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo wrote in Monday’s post. “We recognize that in order to maintain user trust, we need to work very hard to make sure this does not happen again.”

Enlarge / From left to right: the iPhone 8, the iPhone XS, the iPhone XR, and the iPhone XS Max. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple will not introduce an iPhone capable of taking advantage of faster 5G cellular data networks in 2019, a report from Bloomberg says. Citing people familiar with Apple's plans, the report specifies that Apple will wait until "at least 2020" to make the move.

5G networks are expected to ramp up deployment in the US, China, and other Apple markets in 2019. 5G promises one of the biggest generational leaps in cellular data speeds yet, and Apple competitors like Samsung are likely to market 5G handsets next year to capitalize on it. Further, networks like Verizon want to lead users onto the new 5G networks as soon as possible because the technology is more efficient and will ensure that the companies can make higher profits while theoretically offering the most reliable service.

Investors and analysts might have reason to be concerned that Apple will miss a major marketing opportunity if it waits too long to adopt the new technology, the Bloomberg report suggests.

Enlarge / From left to right: the iPhone 8, the iPhone XS, the iPhone XR, and the iPhone XS Max. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple will not introduce an iPhone capable of taking advantage of faster 5G cellular data networks in 2019, a report from Bloomberg says. Citing people familiar with Apple's plans, the report specifies that Apple will wait until "at least 2020" to make the move.

5G networks are expected to ramp up deployment in the US, China, and other Apple markets in 2019. 5G promises one of the biggest generational leaps in cellular data speeds yet, and Apple competitors like Samsung are likely to market 5G handsets next year to capitalize on it. Further, networks like Verizon want to lead users onto the new 5G networks as soon as possible because the technology is more efficient and will ensure that the companies can make higher profits while theoretically offering the most reliable service.

Investors and analysts might have reason to be concerned that Apple will miss a major marketing opportunity if it waits too long to adopt the new technology, the Bloomberg report suggests.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaking at a press conference on October 1, 2018, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Mark Wilson )

The Federal Communications Commission has once again refused a New York Times request for records that the Times believes might shed light on Russian interference in the net neutrality repeal proceeding.

The Times made a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request in June 2017 for FCC server logs and sued the FCC in September of this year over the agency's ongoing refusal to release the records. The court case is still pending, but the Times had also appealed directly to the FCC to reverse its FoIA decision. The FCC denied that appeal in a decision released today.

The Times' FoIA request was for server logs related to the system for accepting public comments on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality rules. The Times sought the information in order to investigate Russian involvement in fraudulent public comments. A similar request was made by Buzzfeed News, and the FCC rejected the requests from both news organizations in its order today.

Enlarge / Artist's rendering of two merging black holes, producing telltale gravitational wave signatures that were picked up by the LIGO/VIRGO detectors.. (credit: Aurore Simonnet/LIGO-Virgo Collaboration/Sonoma State University)

At a weekend workshop in Maryland, physicists from the LIGO and Virgo collaboration reported four previously unannounced detections of gravitational waves from merging black holes, including the biggest-known black-hole collision to date, roughly 5 billion years ago. That merger resulted in a new black hole that is a whopping 80 times larger than the sun.

All four are part of the first official catalog of gravitational wave events (called the Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog, or GWTC-1), listing all events detected to date. Their addition brings the total number to 11. Two scientific papers on the new findings have been posted to the arXiv preprint repository (here and here), pending publication.

LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. (LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced VIRGO, came online in 2016.) On September 14, 2015, at 5:51am EST, both detectors picked up signals within milliseconds of each other for the very first time—direct evidence for two black holes spiraling inward toward each other and merging in a massive collision event that sent powerful shockwaves across spacetime.