Month: November 2019

Enlarge / Microsoft's upcoming Fluid framework allows real-time, extremely low latency collaboration—and blurs the boundaries between document types. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is getting ready to make some extremely big changes in Office. Ars spoke Monday with Rob Howard, VP of the Microsoft 365 Foundation team at the Ignite conference in Orlando, and he gave us some pretty eye-opening demonstrations.

The first thing Howard showed us was Microsoft's new collaborative technology framework, Fluid. Fluid is a low-level platform available to developers who want to create extremely low-latency (under 20ms, network connection permitting) collaborative experiences that scale to hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous collaborators. Instead of just seeing a cursor hopping sporadically around a page and entire sentences appearing or disappearing every few seconds, one collaborator can see another typing into a document in real time, letter by letter.

It's reasonable to wonder why you'd want such a collaborative platform to scale to thousands of users, and Howard posed exactly that hypothetical question. The idea of document-based performance art immediately sprang to mind—but Howard had a different answer. This kind of massive scale makes it easy for AI to collaborate directly alongside humans, in many of the same ways that humans might—and he showed us a demo of typing into a Word document, with AI routines translating the text in real time into eight different languages simultaneously.

Enlarge / A video still showing an Exploration Upper Stage in flight. (credit: NASA)

On Halloween, NASA posted a document that provides some perspective on the agency's long-term plans for the Space Launch System rocket. This is the agency's titanic booster that has been under development since 2010, has an annual budget of more than $2 billion, and will not fly before at least 2021. The new document, known as a Justification for Other Than Full and Open Competition, explains why NASA rejected a lower-cost version of an upper stage for its rocket.

Early on, the space agency opted to build the large SLS rocket in phases. The initial version, Block 1, would have a placeholder upper stage. As a result, this initial variant of the rocket would be somewhat limited in its capabilities and only marginally more powerful than private rockets—most notably SpaceX's Falcon Heavy and Blue Origin's New Glenn boosters—developed without the deep pockets of US taxpayers.

The much more capable Block 1b of the SLS rocket will stand apart from these private rockets. With its more powerful second stage, known as the Exploration Upper Stage, it will more than double the lift capacity of these private rockets. Additionally, it will have the capability to launch both large amounts of cargo and the crewed Orion spacecraft at the same time.

Enlarge (credit: Jérôme Segura)

Scammers are actively exploiting a bug in Firefox that causes the browser to lock up after displaying a message warning the computer is running a pirated version of Windows that has been hacked.

The message reads:

Please stop and do not close the PC... The registry key of your computer is locked. Why did we block your computer? The Windows registry key is illegal. The Windows desktop is using pirated software. The Window desktop sends viruses over the Internet. This Windows desktop is hacked. We block this computer for your safety.

The message then advises the person to call a toll-free number in the next five minutes or face having the computer disabled. Below is a GIF showing the attack flow: