Month: February 2019

Fresh off the blockbuster success of Aquaman, director James Wan has produced a upcoming film that returns to his horror roots. And judging by the latest trailer, The Curse of La Llorona will offer chills aplenty in the same spirit as his Conjuring and Insidious franchises.

The titular ghost La Llorona (which translates as "The Weeping Woman") is based on Latin American folklore; there are many variants, but the film seems to be based on the Mexican version. A beautiful young woman named Maria marries into a wealthy family, and because her new in-laws disapprove of the match, the newlyweds build a home in her rural village. She bears her man two sons, but he eventually abandons her for a younger woman. A distraught Maria drowns the boys in a blind rage and then drowns herself.

For this crime, she is barred from the afterlife. She is condemned to spend eternity looking for her lost sons, trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead. Her constant weeping is why she is called La Llorona, and legend has it that, if you her wailing, you will have bad fortune and possibly die. La Llorona also kidnaps children wandering alone at night, mistaking them for her dead sons, and she is said to drown those children, too, all while begging for forgiveness.

Enlarge / We'll finally get the backstory of everyone's favorite small-town sheriff, Jim Hopper, in second spinoff novel. (credit: Netflix)

We've still got several months of waiting for the debut of season 3 of Stranger Things. Fans hungry for the backstory to the various residents of Hawkins, Indiana, can play the mobile game. Or they might try one of the prequel novels published by Del Rey Books that delves into the pasts of some of the peripheral characters.

Suspicious Minds, published earlier this month, tells the story of Eleven's mother Terry Ives and how she got involved with MKUltra. A second prequel novel, Darkness on the Edge of Town, will arrive June 4 and focus on police Chief Jim Hopper's early years in New York City as a homicide detective. And yes, both are considered "canon," for fans who are purists.

(Minor spoilers for the first two seasons Stranger Things below.)

Microsoft is expected to reveal a new version of its HoloLens headset at Mobile World Congress later this month. The company has an event scheduled for February 24, and that date is being promoted in the rather mysterious video published by HoloLens' creator Alex Kipman.

The planned 2019 release of the next-generation headset was leaked last year. Codenamed Sydney, the new model is expected to be lighter, more comfortable, and sport a better display. The sensors are updated (likely to something close to the Project Kinect for Azure standalone sensor), and Microsoft has confirmed that it will include an updated Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) with AI acceleration capabilities. The processor is believed to be a Qualcomm Snapdragon 850, replacing the Intel Atom of the first-generation unit.

This comes as Microsoft has sold out of original HoloLens units. Neither the developer kit nor the commercial version is available to buy.

Enlarge (credit: Christiaan Colen / Flickr)

Malware pushers are experimenting with a novel way to infect Mac users that runs executable files that normally execute only on Windows computers.

Researchers from antivirus provider Trend Micro made that discovery after analyzing an app available on a Torrent site that promised to install Little Snitch, a firewall application for macOS. Stashed inside the DMG file was an EXE file that delivered a hidden payload. The researchers suspect the routine is designed to bypass Gatekeeper, a security feature built into macOS that requires apps to be code-signed before they can be installed. EXE files don’t undergo this verification, because Gatekeeper only inspects native macOS files.

“We suspect that this specific malware can be used as an evasion technique for other attack or infection attempts to bypass some built-in safeguards such as digital certification checks, since it is an unsupported binary executable in Mac systems by design,” Trend Micro researchers Don Ladores and Luis Magisa wrote. “We think that the cybercriminals are still studying the development and opportunities from this malware bundled in apps and available in torrent sites, and therefore we will continue investigating how cybercriminals can use this information and routine.”

Over the years, Valve has made dozens of changes to the system-level software behind SteamVR. Most of them aren't inherently interesting if you're not a VR developer. Then there's the latest update, which Valve says was prompted by a change in the "limits of what we thought was humanly possible for controller motion."

After looking at "tracking data from Beat Saber experts," Valve says it had to increase the theoretical limits for how quickly a human can move in VR. In the comments, Valve developer Ben Jackson details how top-level Beat Saber players were sometimes overwhelming the "internal sanity checks" that make sure SteamVR's lighthouse tracking system is working correctly.

"One of these checks relates to how fast we thought it was physically possible for someone to turn their wrist," Jackson writes. "It turns out that a properly motivated human using a light-enough controller could go faster (3,600 degrees/sec!) than we thought."

Enlarge / Texas' state flag. (credit: Getty Images | CGinspiration)

A Texas lawmaker is proposing a state law that would prohibit wireless carriers from throttling mobile Internet service in disaster areas.

Bobby Guerra, a Democratic member of the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives, filed the bill last week. "A mobile Internet service provider may not impair or degrade lawful mobile Internet service access in an area subject to a declared state of disaster," the bill says. If passed, it would take effect on September 1, 2019.

The bill, reported by NPR affiliate KUT, appears to be a response to Verizon's throttling of an "unlimited" data plan used by Santa Clara County firefighters during a wildfire response in California last year. But Guerra's bill would prohibit throttling in disaster areas of any customer, not just public safety officials.

Enlarge / Mars One had some drawings. But that is about it. (credit: Mars One)

To the surprise of almost no one, Mars One appears to be dead. This project, founded in 2013, said it would raise funds from fees and marketing rights in order to send humans on a one-way mission to settle the Red Planet.

Now, thanks to a user on Reddit, we know that the effort has come to an apparent end. Mars One consists of two entities: the Dutch not-for-profit Mars One Foundation and the publicly traded, Swiss-based Mars One Ventures. A civil court based in Basel, Switzerland, opened bankruptcy proceedings on the latter company in mid-January. Efforts on Monday to contact officials with Mars One were not successful.

To say this site was skeptical of Mars One would be putting it mildly. In May 2013—after more than 30,000 people around the world applied to become "astronauts" for Mars One—Ars' Lee Hutchinson scoffed at the venture, writing an article about some of the technical challenges it would face.