Month: May 2019

Enlarge / A weather satellite in orbit. (credit: Getty Images | Erik Simonsen)

A US Navy memo warns that 5G mobile networks are likely to interfere with weather satellites, and senators are urging the Federal Communications Commission to avoid issuing new spectrum licenses to wireless carriers until changes are made to prevent harms to weather forecasting.

The FCC has already begun an auction of 24GHz spectrum that would be used in 5G networks. But Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) today wrote a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, asking him to avoid issuing licenses to winning bidders "until the FCC approves the passive band protection limits that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) determine are necessary to protect critical satellite‐based measurements of atmospheric water vapor needed to forecast the weather."

Wyden and Cantwell said that the "ongoing sale of wireless airwaves could damage the effectiveness of US weather satellites and harm forecasts and predictions relied on to protect safety, property, and national security." They chided the FCC for beginning the auction "over the objections of NASA, NOAA, and members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). These entities all argued that out-of-band emissions from future commercial broadband transmissions in the 24GHz band would disrupt the ability to collect water-vapor data measured in a neighboring frequency band (23.6 to 24GHZ) that meteorologists rely on to forecast the weather."

Enlarge (credit: Vermont.gov)

What's the appropriate role of our prison system? Depending on who you talk to, it's supposed to function as punishment for criminal activity, a deterrent to future crimes, and an opportunity for rehabilitation. It's often possible to find people arguing that an existing prison system is already playing more than one of these roles, which raises questions about how well we understand a system that US society has committed to in a big way.

Fortunately, some researchers decided to view this question as an opportunity and put some hard numbers to what, exactly, our prison system is doing. Using a data set covering more than 100,000 convicted criminals, the researchers compared the outcomes of people sentenced to prison and a similar population that was given probation instead. The results suggest that prison does limit future violent crime by keeping criminals out of the general population, but the experience of prison provides little deterrence for future crime.

Violence in Michigan

A team of social scientists had access to data on everyone who committed a felony in Michigan between 2003 and 2006. This included follow-up data running through 2015, allowing the scientists to track whether any of this population committed additional crimes.

Enlarge / Today's deals roundup includes Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K, 9.7-inch iPads, cable modems, desktop hard drives, and much more. (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a pair of deals on streaming sticks, as Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K is down to $35 for members of its Prime service, while Roku's Streaming Stick+ is down to $49. Those are $15 and $11 discounts, respectively—not the absolute lowest we've seen for each media streamer but close enough to be good value.

We've written about both of these devices in the past, but the comparison between the two remains fairly straightforward: both support 4K and HDR10 playback, include just about all of the major streaming apps, and are fast enough to stream those apps without any significant hitch. Both come with 802.11ac Wi-Fi.

Presuming you can't settle for the apps built into your game console or smart TV, which one you prefer will likely come down to its interface. Roku's is probably uglier, but it's cleaner, with a focus on apps laid out in simple rows. Amazon's puts more emphasis on content but still has a tendency to promote its own Prime Video app and partner services. Amazon's Alexa-aided voice controls are generally more robust than those on Roku (which now works with the Google Assistant), though, and the company says it will finally patch the YouTube-shaped hole in its app library in the next few months.

First disclosed in January 2018, the Meltdown and Spectre attacks have opened the floodgates, leading to extensive research into the speculative execution hardware found in modern processors, and a number of additional attacks have been published in the months since.

Today sees the publication of a range of closely related flaws named variously RIDL, Fallout, ZombieLoad, or Microarchitectural Data Sampling. The many names are a consequence of the several groups that discovered the different flaws. From the computer science department of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Helmholtz Center for Information Security, we have "Rogue In-Flight Data Load." From a team spanning Graz University of Technology, the University of Michigan, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and KU Leuven, we have "Fallout." From Graz University of Technology, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and KU Leuven, we have "ZombieLoad," and from Graz University of Technology, we have "Store-to-Leak Forwarding."

Intel is using the name "Microarchitectural Data Sampling" (MDS), and that's the name that arguably gives the most insight into the problem. The issues were independently discovered by both Intel and the various other groups, with the first notification to the chip company occurring in June last year.

Enlarge / No, World of Warcraft Classic won't look like this in-game. (Not that the modern version looks that much more polished, of course.) (credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

Rewind to those halcyon days of 2004, when cries of "for the Horde" and "for the Alliance" were still novel, with the return of World of Warcraft Classic on August 27. Blizzard announced the release date in a lengthy news post that also spells out a range of closed beta and stress-test periods over the next three months.

This release date will place the game's launch nearly two years after Blizzard Entertainment confirmed it would release and maintain the game's "vanilla" version as a live service. That decision followed years of fans doing the same "behind" Blizzard's back, though their attempt to do so was an open secret—one that Blizzard battled aggressively.

"Select WoW players will be invited" to the classic version's first closed beta period beginning May 15, though Blizzard didn't confirm what makes particular WoW fans more eligible than others (perhaps the ones who signed certain petitions get bumped to the front of the list). Meanwhile, players who want to participate in a later trio of stress tests, taking place this May, June, and July, can opt in by flipping a toggle in their official Blizzard accounts.