Month: January 2020

Enlarge / People take photos as China's heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket blasts off from its launch center in Wenchang, south China's Hainan province on December 27, 2019. (credit: STR/AFP via Getty Images)

For the second year in a row, China dominated the global rankings in terms of orbital launches. The communist country finished 2019 with 34 orbital launch attempts and 32 successes.

Russia ranked second, with 25 attempts and successes, followed by the United States with 21 out of 21 successful launches. New Zealand, Europe, and India all tied for fourth place overall, with six successful launches. (These rankings are determined by where the rocket's primary stage is manufactured.)

The coming year should see this global competition tighten. China has declared its intention to launch 40 or more orbital missions in 2020. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation will conduct the majority of missions with its Long March fleet of rockets, including notable missions such as China's first Mars spacecraft as well as the Chang'e-5 lunar probe, which is intended to bring Moon samples back to Earth.

Enlarge / An image from Apple's lawsuit shows a real iPhone X and Corellium's service running a virtual iPhone X. (credit: Apple)

Apple has expanded a lawsuit against an iOS virtualization company, claiming that its actions facilitate jailbreaking and violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibition on circumvention of copyright-protection systems.

Apple sued Corellium, a company that sells access to virtual machines that run copies of the operating system used in iPhones and iPads, in August 2019. We detailed the initial allegations in a previous article; Apple said that Corellium sells "perfect replicas" of iOS without a license from Apple and markets its software as "a research tool for those trying to discover security vulnerabilities and other flaws in Apple's software." But instead of aiding good-faith security research, Corellium "encourages its users to sell any discovered information on the open market to the highest bidder," Apple alleged.

The first version of Apple's lawsuit accused Corellium of copyright infringement. A new version filed on December 27 alleges both copyright infringement and "unlawful trafficking of a product used to circumvent security measures in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1201," a statute that's part of the DMCA. Apple argued that Corellium gives users the ability to jailbreak iOS for either benign or malicious purposes.

Apple discusses the iPad Pro's A12X CPU and GPU on stage at its October 30, 2018 event. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Imagination Technologies, which used to provide the graphics processors for Apple's mobile devices, has entered into a new licensing agreement with Apple that comes after two years of turmoil between the companies. Imagination shared the news in a very short press release on its website:

Imagination Technologies (“Imagination”) announces that it has replaced the multi-year, multi-use license agreement with Apple, first announced on February 6, 2014, with a new multi-year license agreement under which Apple has access to a wider range of Imagination’s intellectual property in exchange for license fees.

Founded in 1985, UK-based Imagination Technologies (formerly called VideoLogic) has produced silicon and software for home theater set-top boxes, the Sega Dreamcast game console, arcade game cabinets, and many other devices—including the GPUs for Apple’s iPhones until Apple began designing its own video chips in recent years.

Through much of the 2010s, Imagination was heavily dependent on Apple for revenue, and its fortunes were tied to shrinking iPhone sales. Apple reportedly hired engineers and other employees away from Imagination, and ultimately the company notified Imagination in 2017 of its intention to end its licensing agreements within two years in favor of making its own chips.

Enlarge / Horns like these, but on a man's back. (credit: Image Engine)

Smartphones won’t make you grow horns—but neglecting a worsening skin cancer lesion for years could do the trick.

Recently, doctors in the UK surgically removed a 14cm-long “dragon horn” from a man’s lower back. The 50-year-old patient reported that it had been growing for at least three years.

The doctors determined that the “gigantic” skin growth was a cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC)—a type of skin cancer that causes growing, scaly bumps on the top layer of skin.

Enlarge / An Oracle building in the San Francisco Bay Area. (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

Charles Duan is the Director of Technology and Innovation Policy at the R Street Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, DC . He has authored several amicus curiae briefs in the litigation between Oracle and Google, as well as the article Internet of Infringing Things: The Effect of Computer Interfaces on Technology Standards. The R Street Institute has received financial support from Google. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Ars Technica.

Early this year, the Supreme Court will hear an important case that will determine the legal status of application programming interfaces under copyright law. If the high court sides with Oracle in its multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Google’s Android platform, it could stifle competition and entrench dominant technology firms—possibly including Google itself.

Oracle has accused Google of infringing copyright law by copying the API of the Java programming language. An API is essentially a language for instructing a computer on what to do. It includes a vocabulary of named commands tied to grammatical structures for how those commands are to be used. To cause Java software to perform pre-defined tasks, such as calculating a sine function or encrypting a message, a programmer must use those named commands and grammatical structures with precision, much in the same way that a Waffle House diner invokes exact code words like “scattered, smothered, chunked, and diced” to get a hash brown order correct.

Enlarge / TEHRAN, IRAN - (ARCHIVE): A file photo dated September 18, 2016 shows Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani during Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's meeting with Revolutionary Guards, in Tehran, Iran. (credit: Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)

The assassination by missile last night of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander Major General Qasem Soleimani and four other senior Iranian officers has triggered vows of revenge from Iran's Supreme Leader and other members of Iran's leadership. Those vows have raised concerns about both physical and electronic attacks by Iran against the US and other targets—including an expansion of the already noted broadening attempts at cyber attacks by Iranian state-sponsored hackers.

A Department of Defense spokesperson said in a statement on the attack, "At the direction of the President, the US military has taken decisive defensive action to protect US personnel abroad by killing Qasem Soleimani… General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region."

The attack, apparently launched from a drone against Soleimani's motorcade as it left Baghdad International Airport, also is reported to have killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of Iraq's Kata'ib Hezbollah militia—the force the US blamed for a December 27, 2019 rocket attack on a Peshmerga-operated base that killed a US contractor and wounded several US soldiers there as part of a training operation. Soleimani was alleged by the Defense Department's spokesperson to have orchestrated that attack, as well as the protest and assault on the US Embassy in Baghdad this week.