Month: April 2019

Enlarge / Uber has been using Volvo XC90 hybrid SUVs as R&D platforms. Soon, we can expect these to be joined by Toyota Siennas. (credit: Uber)

On Thursday, news broke that Toyota, Denso, and the SoftBank Vision Fund are investing heavily in Uber's autonomous driving operation. Together, the three companies will put $1 billion into Uber's Advanced Technologies Group: $667 million from Toyota and Denso, with an additional $333 million coming from SoftBank.

"Leveraging the strengths of Uber ATG’s autonomous vehicle technology and service network and the Toyota Group’s vehicle control system technology, mass-production capability, and advanced safety support systems, such as Toyota Guardian™, will enable us to commercialize safer, lower cost automated ridesharing vehicles and services," said Shigeki Tomoyama, Toyota executive vice president and president of Toyota’s in-house Connected Company, in a statement sent to Ars.

It's actually not the first time Toyota has opened its wallet for Uber. In August 2018, the Japanese OEM signed a $500 million deal to integrate Uber's autonomous tech into Toyota Sienna minivans, which will operate through Uber's ride-hailing network at some future date. That followed an earlier investment of $300 million in 2016.

Enlarge / A sign warns people of measles in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Williamsburg on April 10, 2019 in New York City. Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced a state of emergency and mandated residents at the center of the outbreak to get vaccinated for the viral disease. (credit: Getty | Spencer Platt)

A Brooklyn judge on Thursday rejected the petition from five anonymous anti-vaccine mothers who attempted to block the city’s recent vaccination mandate amid the largest measles outbreak the city has seen in several decades.

And the city wasted no time enforcing its upheld order. As the judge made his decision Thursday, city health officials doled out the first penalties to violators, according to the New York Times. Officials sent summonses to the parents of three children for failing to vaccinate the children even after city officials determined that they had been exposed to the dangerous viral illness.

Measles is so contagious that up to 90 percent of unvaccinated or otherwise susceptible individuals who are exposed will become ill, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Measles’ extreme contagiousness is due in part to the fact that once it is launched into the air from a cough or sneeze it can remain airborne and infectious for up to two hours. Any vulnerable passersby who breathe in the virus or touch contaminated surfaces can pick it up.

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  Well, at least the bots got the launch countdown right. [credit: NASA/Facebook ]

An Antares rocket built by Northrop Grumman launched on Wednesday afternoon, boosting a Cygnus spacecraft with 3.4 tons of cargo toward the International Space Station. The launch from Wallops Island, Virginia, went flawlessly, and the spacecraft arrived at the station on Friday.

However, when NASA's International Space Station program posted the launch video to its Facebook page on Thursday, there was a problem. Apparently the agency's caption service hadn't gotten to this video clip yet, so viewers with captions enabled were treated not just to the glory of a rocket launch, but the glory of Facebook's automatically generated crazywords. As of Thursday morning, 86,995 people had watched the Facebook video.

Some of the captions are just hilariously bad. For example, when the announcer triumphantly declares, "And we have liftoff of the Antares NG-11 mission to the ISS," the automatically generated caption service helpfully says, "And we have liftoff of the guitarist G 11 mission to the ice sets."

Enlarge (credit: Brian Smithson / Flickr)

A researcher has uncovered strange and unexpected behavior in Windows 10 that allows remote attackers to steal data stored on hard drives when a user opens a malicious file downloaded with the Edge browser.

The threat partially surfaced last week when a different researcher, John Page, reported what he called a flaw in Internet Explorer. Page claimed that when using the file manager to open a maliciously crafted MHT file downloaded with Internet Explorer, the browser uploaded one or more files to a remote server. According to Page, the vulnerability affected the most recent version of IE, version 11, running on Windows 7, Windows 10, and Windows Server 2012 R2 with all security updates installed. (It’s no longer clear whether any OS other than Windows 10 is affected, at least for some users. More about that in a moment.)

Below this paragraph in Page's post was a video demonstration of the proof-of-concept exploit Page created. It shows a booby-trapped MHT file triggering an upload of the host computer's system.ini file to a remote server. Interestingly, while Page's post says his exploit is triggered when the malicious file is downloaded by IE, and makes no mention of Edge at all, the video shows the file being downloaded with the newer Microsoft browser.

AUSTIN, Texas—In some ways, I am the worst candidate among the Ars Technica gaming braintrust to demo the world premiere of Iron Man VR, a video game slated to launch on PlayStation VR by the end of this year. I have never used a PSVR, let alone any VR headset between the pricey HTC Vive and the build-it-yourself Nintendo Labo VR. And I'm an inconsistent Marvel movie follower at best. If we don't count the early 2000s Spider-Man trilogy, Black Panther is my only MCU reference point.

But maybe that actually makes me the best candidate to fake like Tony Stark via a bulky headset. There is no veneer of VR snobbery to rely on. Instead, I had simple questions: Is this fun? Would I do it again, and for longer?

After a 20-minute(ish) flight test with a rep from the devs at Camouflaj (the studio behind the upcoming PSVR game) nearby, I can still confidently say the old X-Men co-op arcade cabinet remains my favorite Marvel game of all-time. But I would absolutely be down to fly around a bit more in Iron Man's ruby-red armor soon, which is probably good news for millions of VR and Marvel novices who might be intrigued by the possibility of becoming their own living-room Iron Person.

Enlarge / The Rocket Report is published weekly. (credit: Arianespace)

Welcome to Edition 1.45 of the Rocket Report! This week, half of our stories concern the biggest rockets on the planet, from Blue Origin engine tests at Marshall Space Flight Center to NASA's efforts to accelerate development of the Space Launch System.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Stratolaunch flies for the first time. The world's largest airplane, nicknamed Roc, took to the skies for the first time on Saturday, April 13. The flight lasted 150 minutes, during which time the aircraft reached a maximum of 15,000 feet and a top speed of 189mph, Parabolic Arc reports. Backed by Microsoft-co-founder Paul Allen and built by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, the aircraft is designed to air-launch satellites using boosters carried on the wing between its two fuselages.