Month: July 2019

Enlarge (credit: SpaceX)

The rocket is ready. The Dragon spacecraft is ready for its supply run to the International Space Station. But Mother Nature may not be ready for the launch of a Falcon 9 booster on Wednesday evening from Florida.

An unseasonably strong front has pushed into Florida, providing lift for atmospheric moisture and allowing for the development of widespread showers and thunderstorms. As a result, the official forecast for the 6:24pm ET (22:24 UTC) launch time—it is an instantaneous launch window, so the rocket must go at this moment—calls for just a 30 percent chance of "go" conditions. SpaceX will hope to get lucky and hit a gap in the storms this evening.

There is a back-up launch date on Thursday at 6:01pm ET (22:01 UTC), but unfortunately the weather appears to be about the same. If the rocket cannot get off the pad Thursday, the launch will likely slip into early August due to docking and undocking schedules of other visiting vehicles at the International Space Station.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Six days after Ars revealed an online service selling links to tax returns, prescription refills, and reams of other sensitive information collected from more than four million browsers, the data remains available to existing customers—thanks to essential assistance from Google Analytics.

In a July 11 email, Nacho Analytics founder and CEO Mike Roberts told customers the site suffered a permanent data outage after its third-party supplier was no longer available. The site would no longer accept new customers or provide new data, he said, but customers who kept accounts open would still be able to access any existing data they bought previously.

As the redacted screenshots below demonstrate, the existing data is imported directly into customers’ Google Analytics accounts. That existing data can include the same sensitive information that led to Nacho Analytics being shut off in the first place. The first image shows the names of medical patients who obtained lab results through a Dr. Chrono, a patient care cloud platform that contracts with medical services. The one below that shows non-public project management issues taken from inside Tesla’s network, funneled to Nacho Analytics, and then imported into Google Analytics.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | AndreyPopov)

Broadcast TV stations are being blacked out on cable and satellite TV systems in record numbers this year, with 230 blackouts so far in 2019.

That beats the record of 213 blackouts set in 2017, even though 2019 is just seven months old. The 230 figure represents a huge rise over the eight blackouts seen in 2010 and 42 in 2011, according to a pay-TV industry advocacy group.

Blackouts has mostly been trending up in the past decade, though the number frequently goes down one year before rising again the next. There were 90 blackouts in 2012, 119 in 2013, 94 in 2014, 193 in 2015, 104 in 2016, 213 in 2017, and 165 in 2018.

Enlarge / The company can afford to shrug it off. (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a long-rumored, record-smashing $5 billion settlement with Facebook over allegations related to user privacy.

The fine is high, and the settlement demands more privacy oversight at the company. But what the deal does not do is find anyone, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, personally responsible, nor does it mandate huge changes to the way Facebook collects data⁠—only to the way it makes disclosures and honors user settings.

Facebook repeatedly "subverted users' privacy choices to serve its own business interests," the FTC said in the order (PDF). The company's actions violated a previous settlement requiring Facebook to adhere to certain privacy guidelines.

Enlarge / Hauer on the set of Blade Runner. (credit: Warner Bros)

Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, an icon of genre fiction perhaps best known to general audiences for his portrayal of renegade android Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic Blade Runner, died on Friday.

As reported today in Variety, Hauer’s agent Steve Kanis confirmed the actor’s death, noting that a funeral had already been held. Hauer died at the age of 75 at his home in Beetsterzwaag in the Netherlands after struggling with an unnamed illness.

Hauer starred as a leading man in Dutch TV series and films before starring alongside Sylvester Stallone in 1981’s Nighthawks. He soon became a staple of '80s genre films, appearing in Blade Runner, Ladyhawke, and The Hitcher, among others.

Enlarge / A stack of plant-based Impossible Burgers. (credit: Impossible Foods)

Tofurky is searing mad over Arkansas’ new food-labeling law that prevents makers of meatless meat products from using words such as “burger,” “sausage,” “roast,” “jerky,” and “meat” in their labeling.

Instead, veggie burgers and sausages will have to be served up with unappetizing descriptors like “savory plant-based protein.”

The law is Act 501, with the lengthy title “To Require Truth in Labeling of Agricultural Products that Are Edible by Humans,” which passed the Arkansas State Legislature back in March. It essentially states that only animal-based products can be called “meat” or be labeled with the names of common meat products. Foods can only bear meat-related terms if the product is “derived from harvested livestock, poultry, or cervids [deer family members],” according to the law.

Enlarge / One of Ohio's nuclear power plants. (credit: Ohio State Senate)

The incredibly low prices of new renewable and natural gas generators have made it difficult for some traditional generating plants to stay in business. That's mostly good news for the climate, as the majority of plants that are shuttering burn coal, the most polluting source of energy we use. But they've also hit nuclear power hard, which is bad news from the perspective of carbon emissions.

The risk of having to close nuclear plants has led their owners to ask the federal government for a bailout, a move that initially gained some traction but has since stalled out. With that effort ground to a halt, the state of Ohio has stepped in to pass a law that will see state ratepayers subsidize a nuclear plant operator. But the bill steps into spectacularly misguided territory by also subsidizing coal plants, cutting funding for efficiency programs, and lowering the state's renewable energy standards.

What to subsidize?

The law had been sent back and forth between the House and Senate and was the subject of heavy lobbying, so both its final form and its passage had been uncertain (a Senate draft reveals extensive revisions). In part, it places new charges on the bills of all Ohio ratepayers. One will provide a subsidy to First Energy, the company that had been asking the federal government for a bailout as it faces bankruptcy. The primary beneficiary of this subsidy will be First Energy's two aging nuclear plants, which have been struggling to turn a profit in the changed energy landscape.