Month: September 2019

Enlarge / Simulated image of two merging black holes detected by LIGO, viewed face-on. (credit: SXS Lensing)

Physicists have "heard" the telltale ring of an infant back hole for the first time, thanks to a fresh analysis of LIGO data. Researchers specifically looked for telltale "overtones" in the data from the collaboration's Nobel Prize-winning detection of two black holes merging. Not only were the overtones present, but the pattern of pitch and decay matches predictions for the black hole's mass and spin derived using the general theory of relativity. According to a new paper in Physical Review Letters, the result also supports the so-called "no hair" theorem for the classical description of black holes.

That classical picture of a black hole is a circle with a dot at the center. The circumference of the circle is the event horizon, and the dot is the singularity. General relativity holds that the area of the event horizon is a vacuum with no structure. That's because any dust, gas, or elementary particle placed at the horizon should fall into the black hole, maintaining the vacuum state. There would be no noticeable change if you threw something into a black hole—nothing that would provide a clue as to what that object might have been. It was the late physicist John Wheeler who coined the colorful description, "Black holes have no hair." (Wheeler had a knack for catchy names and phrases.) So all you need to describe black holes mathematically is their mass and their spin, plus their electric charge.

"We all expect general relativity to be correct, but this is the first time we have confirmed it in this way," said lead author Maximiliano Isi of MIT. "This is the first experimental measurement that succeeds in directly testing the no-hair theorem. It doesn't mean black holes couldn't have hair. It means the picture of black holes with no hair lives for one more day."

Enlarge / Dislocated cervical vertebrae (traumatic lesion of cervical vertebrae C1-C2). X-ray in profile. (Photo by: BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) (credit: BSIP | GettyImages)

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Medical images and health data belonging to millions of Americans, including X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans, are sitting unprotected on the Internet and available to anyone with basic computer expertise.

The records cover more than 5 million patients in the United States and millions more around the world. In some cases, a snoop could use free software programs—or just a typical Web browser—to view the images and private data, an investigation by ProPublica and the German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk found.

Enlarge / The US Government thanks Edward Snowden for the revenue stream with a filing in US court on September 17—the day his book hit shelves in the US. (credit: Henry Holt / Macmillan)

The US Department of Justice may never be able to prosecute Edward Snowden for his procurement and distribution of highly classified information from the network of the National Security Agency. But DOJ lawyers have found a way to reach out and touch his income—and that of Macmillan Publishers—by filing a civil suit today against them for publication of his book, Permanent Record.

The lawsuit, filed in the US Court for the District of Eastern Virginia, does not seek to stop publication or distribution of Permanent Record. Instead, as a DOJ spokesperson said in a press release, "under well-established Supreme Court precedent [in the case] Snepp v. United States, the government seeks to recover all proceeds earned by Snowden because of his failure to submit his publication for pre-publication review in violation of his alleged contractual and fiduciary obligations."

The suit—which also names Macmillan, its Henry Holt and Company imprint, and its parent company Holtzbrinck Publishers—claims Snowden was in violation of both CIA and NSA secrecy agreements he signed as terms of his employment. In the CIA Secrecy Agreements Snowden signed, he acknowledged that "Snowden was required to submit his material for prepublication review 'prior to discussing [the work] with or showing it to anyone who is not authorized to have access to' classified information," DOJ attorneys wrote in their filing. "Snowden was also required not to 'take any steps towards public disclosure until [he] received written permission to do so from the Central Intelligence Agency.'"

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of bargains to share. Today's list is headlined by a deal over at Microsoft that gets you a month of the company's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate service for $1 or two months for $2. Normally, a Game Pass Ultimate membership—which wraps Game Pass for console and PC together with Xbox Live Gold—costs $15 a month. This offer has admittedly been live for a while now, but Microsoft says the $2 deal is set to expire on September 30. (The company declined to specify when the $1 offer will end.) Plus, you could still turn the discount into an even better value with the right planning.

To explain: we noted this back when Microsoft first ran this deal earlier in the year, but when you buy Game Pass Ultimate, the company will still turn up to 36 months of existing Xbox Live Gold (or non-Ultimate Game Pass) subscription time on your account into the all-in-one membership. That means you can stock up on Xbox Live Gold first—which many Xbox players will buy anyway to play online—then add up to three years of Game Pass to that prepaid time for $1 total instead of the usual $10 (for console) or $5 (for PC) a month. Put another way: after getting three 12-month Xbox Live Gold codes for $60 each, you could get three years of Game Pass Ultimate for $181 instead of the $540 it would cost at full price. (Or two years for $121 instead of $360, one year for $61 instead of $180, etc.)

The catch is that these offers are only available to those who are new to Game Pass Ultimate, not existing subscribers. If you have a standard Game Pass subscription for console or PC, though, you can still take advantage. It's also worth noting that Game Pass Ultimate subscription time can't be reverted back to individual Xbox Live Gold or standard Game Pass subscriptions after upgrading—your account won't be locked into the Ultimate plan forever, just the prepaid time up to 36 months. But you'll have to turn off recurring billing and re-join those other services separately if you don't want to renew Game Pass Ultimate once that prepaid time expires.

Enlarge / Right now, Rockstar is giving out a free copy of a 2004 game to entice you to install their new Rockstar Games Launcher on Windows PCs. We imagine more fare—including exclusives—will come to this storefront before long. But for now, Rockstar isn't saying. (credit: Rockstar Games)

After catching our breath and believing the fractured space of PC game launchers had calmed down for a second, yet another contender arrived on Tuesday: Rockstar Games.

The simply named Rockstar Games Launcher went live worldwide on Tuesday on Windows PCs, and it includes the ability to purchase and install a range of Rockstar-developed games (and their associated microtransactions). This is the first time Rockstar has offered direct purchases of its PC games, as opposed to serving games on services such as Steam. With that in mind, the launcher also lets players find and boot existing Rockstar games' Steam installations.

Currently, the app includes zero exclusives or apparent discounts compared to other retailers, so why should gamers install it?

Enlarge / AT&T logo. (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

AT&T supervisors encouraged sales reps to create fake DirecTV Now accounts to make the online video service seem more successful than it really was, a class-action complaint alleges.

AT&T "promot[ed] and reward[ed] account fraud" such as creating the fake accounts and signing AT&T customers up for DirecTV Now "without the customer knowing," the lawsuit claims.

The new allegations were made Friday in an amended complaint as part of a lawsuit filed against AT&T in April in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The lawsuit alleges that AT&T lied to investors in order to hide DirecTV Now's failure.

Enlarge

Google Fi, Google's MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) cellular service, is launching a second plan for users today. Besides the original pay-per-megabyte plan with unlimited calls and text, Google Fi is now launching a full blown "Unlimited" plan (with throttling after 22GB) for $70, and it comes with 100GB of cloud storage thanks to a bundled "Google One" membership.

In 2018, Google Fi introduced "Bill Protection," a tweak to the pay-per-MB plan that capped monthly bills at $80, making it an "unlimited" plan that throttled after 15GB. This new $70 plan is $10 cheaper and comes with more unthrottled data, and the bundled 100GB of Google One storage saves you another $2 a month. Google One is a monthly subscription service that gives you more storage for your Google account. Free Google accounts get 15GB across Gmail, Drive, and Google Photos, and Google One allows you to purchase anywhere from 100GB to 30TB of online storage.

The new Fi plan supports Google's family bundling, too. The unlimited plan is $70 a month for a single person, $60 a month each for two accounts ($120 total), $50 each for three accounts ($150 total) and $45 each for four accounts or more ( $180 total). With this plan, you'll get 22GB of unthrottled data and 100GB of storage per person, not shared across the whole family, which sounds like a good deal.

SITREP: The RKV has been cancelled, meaning multi-target ballistic missile interceptors are even further off. (video link)

With North Korea throwing missiles around again and Iran continuing to depart from the nuclear framework after President Donald Trump exited the deal and re-imposed sanctions, there is as much reason as ever to be concerned about the United States' nascent anti-ballistic missile defenses. While the Missile Defense Agency's Ground-based Midcourse Defense System (GMD) and the Navy's Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system have shown some promise in testing, there are still some weaknesses in those systems that could be exploited by an attacker—including the use of multiple decoys to soak up attempted intercepts.

That was the rationale behind the Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV), a $1 billion program intended to create the US military’s next ballistic missile interceptor. A joint effort by Boeing and Raytheon, RKV was supposed to give GMD the capability of engaging multiple targets with a single interceptor. The RKV was intended to build on the Exo-Atmospheric Kill Vehicle, or EKV, currently deployed as part of the Missile Defense Agency’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense System. But the RKV program has been cancelled, and the Department of Defense has put the whole program back into competitive bidding after having been placed on hold for evaluation in May by Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin.