Month: October 2019

Sony does a lot of things, but the PlayStation brand is a huge part of its profits. Vue? Not so much. (credit: xsix / Flickr)

Sony today announced that it will soon shut down PlayStation Vue, streaming TV service that served as a lighter alternative to traditional cable for live-TV viewers. The company's short blog post on the subject says that Vue will continue to operate until January 30, 2020, but that it will become inoperable after that date.

"Unfortunately, the highly competitive Pay TV industry, with expensive content and network deals, has been slower to change than we expected," Sony wrote. "Because of this, we have decided to remain focused on our core gaming business."

Sony will continue to offer movies and TV episodes for purchase on-demand through the PlayStation Store, however; this closure only affects the live-TV service, which licensed channels traditionally found on cable for streaming in an interface that was available on PlayStation game consoles, Roku, Apple TV, and other platforms.

Enlarge / The early ARPANET, the predecessor of the modern Internet, was born on this day in 1969. (credit: ARPA)

On October 29, 1969, at 10:30pm Pacific Time, the first two letters were transmitted over ARPANET. And then it crashed. About an hour later, after some debugging, the first actual remote connection between two computers was established over what would someday evolve into the modern Internet.

Funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (the predecessor of DARPA), ARPANET was built to explore technologies related to building a military command and control network that could survive a nuclear attack. But as Charles Herzfeld, the ARPA Director who would oversee most of the initial work to build ARPANET put it:

The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.

In its infancy, ARPANET had but four "nodes":

Enlarge (credit: Christoph Scholz / Flickr)

Facebook and its WhatsApp messenger division on Tuesday sued Israel-based spyware maker NSO Group. This is an unprecedented legal action that takes aim at the unregulated industry that sells sophisticated malware services to governments around the world. NSO vigorously denied the allegations.

Over an 11-day span in late April and early May, the suit alleges, NSO targeted about 1,400 mobile phones that belonged to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and senior foreign government officials. To infect the targets with NSO's advanced and full-featured spyware, the company exploited a critical WhatsApp vulnerability that worked against both iOS and Android devices. The clickless exploit was delivered when attackers made a video call. Targets need not have answered the call or taken any other action to be infected.

Routing malware through WhatsApp servers

According to the complaint, NSO created WhatsApp accounts starting in January 2018 that initiated calls through WhatsApp servers and injected malicious code into the memory of targeted devices. The targeted phones would then use WhatsApp servers to connect to malicious servers allegedly maintained by NSO. The complaint, filed in federal court for the Northern District of California, stated:

Enlarge / David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have opted to focus on their lucrative development deal with Netflix. (credit: Jeff Kravitz/HBO)

Former Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will no longer be developing the next Star Wars film trilogy for LucasFilm, Deadline Hollywood reports. Instead, they'll be focusing on developing new films and series for Netflix, part of a lucrative nine-figure deal they signed in August with the streaming giant.

"We love Star Wars," Benioff and Weiss told Deadline Hollywood. "When George Lucas built it, he built us, too. Getting to talk about Star Wars with him and the current Star Wars team was the thrill of a lifetime, and we will always be indebted to the saga that changed everything. There are only so many hours in the day, and we felt we could not do justice to both Star Wars and our Netflix projects. So we are regretfully stepping away."

Benioff and Weiss signed onto Star Wars back in February 2018, before the much-maligned (by fans) final season of Game of Thrones aired on HBO earlier this year. They had been developing a series called Confederates for HBO, a fictionalized alternative history of the US where the South won the Civil War and slavery remained legal. The series was tabled, ostensibly due to scheduling conflicts rather than in response to an online outcry over the controversial premise. Then came the backlash against the GoT finale, even sparking an online petition with 1.75 million signatories calling for a remake. (As we noted in our review of the finale, that's not how any of this works.)

Enlarge / Image of Hygiea made using a ground-based telescope. (credit: ESO/P. Vernazza et al./MISTRAL algorithm)

The bodies of our Solar System's asteroid belt have violent pasts. Some, like the dwarf planet Ceres, have seen their interiors restructured under the force of gravity while having their surfaces blasted by collisions. Smaller asteroids have experienced collisions that completely shattered them, leaving their debris' weak gravity to pull the pieces together into a rubble pile. Now, new images of the fourth-largest body in the asteroid belt, Hygiea, suggest it has a history that's somewhere between the two. After suffering a shattering collision in the distant past, the body's remains had enough gravitational pull to shape it into a dwarf planet.

History vs. observations

We know Hygiea has experienced a collision in the past, because we can see its remains. An entire family of small asteroids are found in orbits that suggest they originated from the asteroid about two billion years ago.

In other cases where we've seen asteroid families like this, the body on which they originated is either pockmarked with craters and/or has suffered at least one extremely large collision. So, planetary scientists probably had similar expectations in mind when they turned the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory toward Hygiea in 2017.