Month: August 2019

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  This is the 2019 Ferrari Portofino. I'm sorry the pictures aren't great, but I didn't have very long with the car, and driving seemed more important than taking photographs. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

I don't know if you've noticed, but cars keep getting bigger and heavier. There's no mystery to it; safety became a selling point, and airbags and energy-absorbing crash structures take up room and add weight. Naturally, we would expect that power would increase along with mass to prevent next year's model from being slower than this year's, but they're actually getting faster, too.

Consider the Golf GTI. When it launched in 1976, it had 110hp (81kW) and took 9.2 seconds to reach 62mph (100km/h). The 2018 version is exactly twice as powerful (220hp/162kW) and takes just 6.5 seconds to complete the same test.

This trend intensifies as you go up the performance ladder; despite the occasional call for a truce, the arms race continues in full swing. The conventional wisdom—which I myself have peddled on these very pages—is to wonder whether all this progress is actually a good thing. When Formula 1 cars grew too fast for the tracks upon which they raced, the sport moved to new, purpose-built tracks that could contain those speeds. But our roads haven't really changed; if anything, they're usually a lot more crowded than back in the day.

Mythical creatures fleeing their war-torn homeland live uneasily alongside humans in Carnival Row, the new "neo-Victorian noir" fantasy series from Amazon Prime, starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne and directed by Jon Amiel. Amazon must be excited about the series, because it has already ordered a second season. The studio just dropped the latest trailer, and visually, at least, it's gorgeous and chock-full of sumptuous detail at a level rarely seen on streaming television.

Carnival Row is based on a feature film script by Travis Beacham when he was still in film school, some 17 years ago, and it made the infamous Hollywood Black List in 2005. Legendary Entertainment bought the script in 2015 and reimagined it as a series for Amazon Prime. Oscar-winning Director Guillermo del Toro was originally tapped to direct the series—the neo-Victorian setting and fantastical creatures would have been very well-suited to his idiosyncratic style. But del Toro left the project before production officially began to focus on his feature-film commitments. He was replaced by Paul McGuigan, who was in turn replaced by Amiel.

Judging from Beacham's comments at San Diego Comic-Con last month, the budget for the series is significant. Some of that budget no doubt went toward the numerous reshoots—often a sign of trouble for a project—although Bloom called the reshoots "a gift" during the Comic-Con panel. Beacham agreed, per Deadline Hollywood:

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

A Pakistani man bribed AT&T call-center employees to install malware and unauthorized hardware as part of a scheme to fraudulently unlock cell phones, according to the US Department of Justice. Muhammad Fahd, 34, was extradited from Hong Kong to the US on Friday and is being detained pending trial.

An indictment alleges that "Fahd recruited and paid AT&T insiders to use their computer credentials and access to disable AT&T's proprietary locking software that prevented ineligible phones from being removed from AT&T's network," a DOJ announcement yesterday said. "The scheme resulted in millions of phones being removed from AT&T service and/or payment plans, costing the company millions of dollars. Fahd allegedly paid the insiders hundreds of thousands of dollars—paying one co-conspirator $428,500 over the five-year scheme."

In all, AT&T insiders received more than $1 million in bribes from Fahd and his co-conspirators, who fraudulently unlocked more than 2 million cell phones, the government alleged. Three former AT&T customer service reps from a call center in Bothell, Washington, already pleaded guilty and agreed to pay the money back to AT&T.

Enlarge / Ring video doorbell. (credit: Ring)

Hundreds of police departments around the country have partnerships with Amazon's home surveillance brand Ring. The relationship benefits both sides: the company provides tech and software to law enforcement, and the cops both provide data to Amazon and also help sell the product to local homeowners. That alone raises troubling issues, but according to a pair of new reports, Ring also gets access to real-time 911 data, and the company helps police work around a need for search warrants when looking for footage.

Gizmodo reported late last week that Ring is tapping directly into real-time 911 dispatch data, which it then uses to "curate" crime news for its Neighbors app.

Ring confirmed to Gizmodo that, in many jurisdictions, it has access to computer-aided dispatch (CAD) data from the emergency response systems their law enforcement partners use. It uses an API call to pull in the address or GPS coordinates of a call, the incident time, and a description of the incident.

Enlarge / That's a dirty Falcon 9 first stage rocket on the pad for the Amos-17 launch. (credit: SpaceX)

8:30pm ET Update: After a short weather delay, a Falcon 9 rocket launched on Tuesday evening from Florida, and successfully delivered a large, 6.5-ton communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit. Although the first stage was not recovered due to mission requirements, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said at least one of the fairing was successfully caught by a recovery ship.

The short, embedded video is worth watching.

Rocket fairing falls from space & is caught by Ms Tree boat pic.twitter.com/nJv0Ry1iKk

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2019

Original post: Less than two and a half years have passed since SpaceX first reused one of the first stages of its Falcon 9 rocket. But in the 28 months since the historic launch of the SES-10 communications satellite on a previously flown booster, SpaceX has made re-use routine. The company has now launched previously flown Falcon 9 first stages more than two dozen times.

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  The Apple Card is first and foremost a virtual card—meaning you make contactless or online payments using your phone or other supported Apple device. [credit: Apple ]

Apple Card, the tech giant's innovative take on virtual (and physical, for that matter) credit cards, has begun rolling out to users who previously expressed interest by signing up to be notified on the card's website.

Users Apple notifies of the card's availability can sign up for the virtual card from within the Wallet app on their iPhones, and they can also order the physical card from there, though that will obviously take a bit of time to arrive. Once you've signed up for the virtual card, though, you can start using it right away if approved.

It's a gradual rollout, and Apple hasn't explained its criteria for selecting the first customers to receive the card—it seems it's random. But sign-ups for the card are expected to open up to everyone who is interested by the end of August. Well, it will open up to everyone in the United States, at least—the card isn't yet available in other regions like Europe or Latin America yet, though Apple is in talks with partners about making that happen in the future.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a deal on one-year membership cards for Sony's PlayStation Plus service, which are currently going for $40 on eBay.

While this is the typical sale price we see for 12-month subscriptions, it's generally as low as they get for most of the year. (This was their going rate on Prime Day, for instance, and the rare occasions on which they have dropped lower usually involve being a part of a membership program for a particular retailer such as Costco.) For context, Sony itself sells 12-month plans for $60, though it's not unusual to see them in the high $40 or low $50 range at any given point online.

Just note that this discount applies to physical membership cards, not digital codes, so while you're paying less, you'll have to wait a few extra days from shipping. The specific eBay seller here is "neogames," which isn't a household name by any means but has received extremely high user ratings over the years, so there's little reason to expect anything fishy or untrustworthy. And as a reminder, PlayStation Plus memberships are required for online access with most PS4 games and include two free monthly games, as well as various PlayStation Store discounts, as perks. New codes can be stacked on top of existing subscriptions, and there's been next to no indication that Sony will drop the service in any way with the inevitable launch of the PlayStation 5.

Enlarge / This is all that remains of Naranjo, the city-state that attacked and destroyed neighboring Bahlam Jol in 697 CE as part of a campaign to subdue several former vassal states that had rebelled. (credit: By Rudy Canales - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31825471)

We now have a much better idea of what warfare between Maya city-states was like, and it seems to have been common even during the stable, prosperous peak of Maya civilization.

“[On the day] 3 Ben, 16 Kasew (Sek), Bahlam Jol burned for the second time,” proclaims a hieroglyphic inscription in the thousand-year-old Maya city of Naranjo. The inscribed stela records how Naranjo defeated several rebellious formal vassal kingdoms. According to the modern calendar, Bahlam Jol burned on May 26, 697 CE. More than 1,300 years later, archaeologists working 32km (20 miles) north of Naranjo at a site now called Witzna discovered a stela bearing the location's ancient name: Bahlam Jol.

Burned for the second time

Most of the major buildings in the city—its temples and the palaces of its ruling class—bore the marks of long-ago fire and destruction. “There is abundant charcoal on the floors of the structures as well as burning of the plaster on the walls," US Geological Survey geoarchaeologist David Wahl told Ars. “Several stela and other monuments were intentionally broken to pieces and show signs of burning.” Archaeologists dated the destruction to between 650 and 800 CE.