Month: August 2019

Enlarge (credit: Getty | John Moore)

Utah man Aaron Shamo, 29, will stand trial starting today, Monday August 12, over federal charges that he allegedly ran a deadly, multimillion-dollar counterfeit opioid racket on the black market amid the country’s devastating opioid epidemic.

Federal prosecutors allege that Shamo and his accomplices pressed hundreds of thousands of counterfeit pills in the basement of Shamo’s suburban Salt Lake City home and sold them on the Dark Web to customers all across the US, making millions in the process. The pills resembled prescription opioid painkillers, such as oxycodone, but they were actually fakes laced with the highly potent and deadly opioid fentanyl, which Shamo allegedly imported from China illegally.

Prosecutors linked the pills to dozens of customer deaths, according to the Associated Press. However, Shamo is charged in connection to only one death, that of a 21-year-old who died in 2016 after snorting a fentanyl-containing pill that was made to resemble prescription oxycodone.

Enlarge / Main character Evelyn looks upon her hometown of Seattle in the fascinating new visual novel Eliza. (credit: Zachtronics)

"You're a computer," a graduate student says in a huff, directly to my face. "You don't know what [relationships] are like, do you?"

I don't respond. Instead, I eye him quietly, his face appearing between two informational grids, full of biometric analysis. His vitals (heart rate, voice levels) appear in a chart on the right. His word choice, and each word's associated value (positive, negative), pop up in a chat log on my left. I study him. I wait.

This person—my therapy client—continues speaking, like a freight train full of anxiety, and his rhetorical questions fall like discarded cargo as he continues. He eventually compares his distress to something out of a "self-pitying novel," which finally prompts my guiding system, named Eliza, to offer a question: "Why did you think you were so much better than those types of writers?" I see this question pop up in my augmented-reality field, and I speak it aloud, word-for-word.

Enlarge / Seaman Timothy North stands watch as the helmsman on the bridge of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Forrest Sherman (DDG 98). Forrest Sherman is participating in a sustainment exercise with the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, an integrated, comprehensive exercise designed to ensure the strike group is ready to meet all mission sets and carry out sustained combat operations from the sea. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Raymond Maddocks/Released) (credit: Specialist 3rd Class Raymond Maddocks | US Navy)

The US Navy has had enough of touchscreens and is going back to physical controls for its destroyers, according to a report last week in USNI News. Starting next summer the Navy will refit its DDG-51 destroyer fleet with a physical throttle and helm control system. The effort is a response to feedback the Navy solicited in the wake of a pair of fatal crashes involving that class of ship during 2017.

In June of that year, seven sailors were killed when the USS Fitzgerald collided with the MV ACX Crystal, a container ship. In August, 10 US sailors were killed when the USS John S McCain hit another container ship, the Alnic MC.

On August 5, the National Transportation Safety Board published its report into the USS John S McCain incident. Although the agency found that the probable cause was "a lack of effective operational oversight of the destroyer by the US Navy," it also criticized the ship's complex throttle and steering touchscreen controls.

Enlarge / Ninja's defunct Twitch page, as it looked briefly this weekend (The explicit thumbnail in the upper left has been blurred by Ars Technica). (credit: Keemstar / Twitter)

Popular video game streamer Tyler "Ninja" Blevins isn't on Amazon's popular Twitch service anymore after Microsoft paid to move him to its competing Mixer earlier this month. But Ninja's Twitch page lives on without him, existing in a zombie form that ended up accidentally promoting a pornographic channel over the weekend.

Most defunct, offline streamer pages on Twitch revert to a kind of permanent archival form, where streamers can point their followers to new locations and viewers can access old streams and clips. After Ninja's Twitch departure, however, Twitch used that prime online real estate (which had over 14 million followers at its peak) to point users to other popular Fortnite streams on Twitch. "The Ninja you are looking for is in another castle" a header on the page read. "Check out these popular live channels."

This deviation didn't cause too much trouble for anyone until this weekend, when a stream featuring hardcore pornography somehow shot to the top of those Fortnite recommendations. Visitors to Ninja's old Twitch page this weekend were faced with an explicit thumbnail from the stream along with a Cyrillic description of its contents. After the explicit content promotion was noticed, Twitch quickly reverted Ninja's page the standard archival mode, as normal.

Enlarge / Hurricane Florence on NOAA's GOES satellite in 2018. (credit: NOAA)

Not that they're ones to brag about it, but hurricane forecasters have gotten a lot better at their jobs in recent years, especially when it comes to predicting where tropical cyclones will go.

From the period of 1990 through 2016, the three-day track error for tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico declined from 555km to 185km, dramatically reducing the size of hurricane warning and evacuation zone areas. Similarly, the three-day track error in the eastern North Pacific hurricane region fell from 415km to 135km over the same period.

These improvements are due to significantly better computer modeling, more powerful supercomputers, more advanced methods to collect and ingest data into these models (particularly from satellites), and improved techniques to blend these models into a single forecast.