Month: February 2019

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Apple is reportedly working on bringing a feature to the Apple Watch that has been noticeably absent since the wearable's inception: sleep tracking. According to a report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, "people familiar with the work" claim the iPhone maker has been testing a native sleep-tracking feature for its smartwatch over the past several months. Apple reportedly plans to introduce the feature by 2020, likely in a new model of the Apple Watch.

Despite tracking all-day activity, swimming, ECG, and more, the Apple Watch has never had a native sleep-tracking feature. That's been a long-time disadvantage for the wearable in comparison to some of its biggest competitors like Fitbit's Ionic and Versa smartwatches. Almost all of Fitbit's wearables track sleep, as do devices made by Garmin, Withings, and other health-tech companies.

There are Apple Watch apps that track sleep, but they're all made by third-party developers. Apple also isn't a stranger to sleep tech in general: the company bought the Finnish company Beddit in 2017 and sells its sleep-tracking mattress sensor on its website.

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  Europe is planning to develop the Themis demonstrator in the early 2020s. [credit: Ariane Works ]

Late last week, the European rocket maker Ariane Group and the French space agency CNES announced the creation of an "acceleration platform" to speed development of future launch vehicles. The initiative, called ArianeWorks, would be a place where "teams work together in a highly flexible environment, open to new players and internationally."

"In this era of NewSpace and in the context of fierce competition, ArianeWorks will accelerate innovation at grassroots level, in favor of mid-tier firms and start-ups, with commitment to reducing costs a major priority," a news release sent to Ars states.

As part of the announcement, the organizations released a promotional video for the group's first step—a so-called Themis demonstrator. The goal of this project is to build a multiple-engine first-stage rocket that launches vertically and lands near the launch site. The rocket will be powered by Europe's Prometheus engine, a reusable liquid oxygen and methane engine that may cost as little as $1 million to build.

Enlarge (credit: Jeremy Brooks / Flickr)

More than five years have passed since researchers warned of the serious security risks that a widely used administrative tool poses to servers used for some of the most sensitive and mission-critical computing. Now, new research shows how baseboard management controllers, as the embedded hardware is called, threaten premium cloud services from IBM and possibly other providers.

In short, BMCs are motherboard-attached microcontrollers that give extraordinary control over servers inside datacenters. Using the Intelligent Platform Management Interface, admins can reinstall operating systems, install or modify apps, and make configuration changes to large numbers of servers, without physically being on premises and, in many cases, without the servers being turned on. In 2013, researchers warned that BMCs that came preinstalled in servers from Dell, HP, and other name-brand manufacturers were so poorly secured that they gave attackers a stealthy and convenient way to take over entire fleets of servers inside datacenters.

Researchers at security firm Eclypsium on Tuesday plan to publish a paper about how BMC vulnerabilities threaten a premium cloud service provided by IBM and possibly other providers. The premium service is known as bare-metal cloud computing, an option offered to customers who want to store especially sensitive data but don't want it to intermingle on the same servers other customers are using. The premium lets customers buy exclusive access to dedicated physical servers for as long as needed and, when the servers are no longer needed, return them to the cloud provider. The provider, in theory, wipes the servers clean so they can be safely used by another bare-metal customer.