Month: January 2020

Streaming service CBS All Access has already renewed Star Trek: Picard for a second season just over a week before the first season is even set to start airing, Deadline reports.

The announcement was made at the Television Critics Association (TCA), a recurring event at which television networks present their slate of programming to advertisers, the press, and partners. In a Picard-themed panel at the event, the show's cast and showrunner talked about what viewers can expect from the series, which returns to a character who has not appeared on screen since the film Star Trek: Nemesis way back in 2002.

Executive Producer Akiva Goldsman said we can expect to see some of the social relevance that the Star Trek franchise has been known for. Quoted in Deadline, he said:

Enlarge / E3 won't happen with an official Sony presence this year. (credit: Aurich Lawson / PlayStation)

On Monday, Sony Interactive Entertainment confirmed that it will, for the second year in a row, not attend the Electronic Entertainment Expo.

The news came in a statement sent to Ars Technica by a SIE representative:

After thorough evaluation, SIE has decided not to participate in E3 2020. We have great respect for the ESA as an organization, but we do not feel the vision of E3 2020 is the right venue for what we are focused on this year. We will build upon our global events strategy in 2020 by participating in hundreds of consumer events across the globe. Our focus is on making sure fans feel part of the PlayStation family and have access to play their favorite content. We have a fantastic line up of titles coming to PlayStation 4, and with the upcoming launch of PlayStation 5, we are truly looking forward to a year of celebration with our fans.

SIE's representatives did not immediately clarify what the company means by "the vision of E3 2020."

Enlarge (credit: Netgear)

Hundreds of millions of cable modems are vulnerable to critical takeover attacks by hackers halfway around the world, researchers said.

The attacks work by luring vulnerable users to websites that serve malicious JavaScript code that's surreptitiously hosted on the site or hidden inside of malicious ads, researchers from Denmark-based security firm Lyrebirds said in a report and accompanying website. The JavaScript then opens a websocket connection to the vulnerable cable modem and exploits a buffer overflow vulnerability in the spectrum analyzer, a small server that detects interference and other connectivity problems in a host of modems from various makers. From there, remote attackers can gain complete control over the modems, allowing them to change DNS settings, make the modem part of a botnet, and carry out a variety of other nefarious actions.

Cable Haunt, as the researchers have named their proof-of-concept exploit, is known to work on various firmware versions of the following cable modems:

A brilliant doctor suffering from a rare blood disease goes to extreme lengths to find a cure and becomes a monster who craves human blood in the first trailer for Morbius, based on the popular villain (and later, antihero) in the Spider-Man comic books.

Sony's film adaptation of the character is intended to be part of a new shared universe of films along the lines of the Marvel model. The studio hopes to spin-off the Sony Marvel Universe (SMU) from its successful Spider-Man franchise. The 2018 film Venom kicked off the series, starring Tom Hardy in the title role. Critics slammed it, but Venom went on to gross over $850 million worldwide, and a sequel is slated for release this fall. So Sony decided to move forward with the planned Morbius movie, tapping Daniel Espinosa (Life) to direct—a solid choice, since Espinosa clearly knows how to merge science fiction and horror. Jared Leto will play Morbius.

Based on the trailer, Morbius will focus on the character's origins. Per the official synopsis:

Enlarge / Local Fish Surprised by Results of Experiment. (credit: Klaus Stiefel / Flickr)

In the academic equivalent of "shots fired," a newly published paper evaluates a number of prior studies on the effects of ocean acidification on fish—and finds it can't replicate any of the results.

A number of studies in recent years has conducted experiments on the behavior of coral fish in normal and high-CO₂ water. (Increasing dissolved CO₂—which is happening due to human-caused emissions—lowers the pH of seawater, hence the term "acidification.") These studies have found some surprising impacts, from a failure to recognize and avoid the smell of a predator to a loss of "handedness" (preferring left or right turns) during development. These behaviors have been linked to CO₂ interfering with a specific receptor in the brain.

Individual variation

But a group of researchers found itself skeptical of these results and hatched a plan to replicate them in a standardized experimental setup. Over the course of several years, the researchers repeated some of these experiments with a variety of fish species, carefully documenting and filming each step to create an accessible database of results. And those results seem markedly different.

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  The iPhone XR's Smart Battery case in black. [credit: Apple ]

iPhone users have been using battery cases to extend the battery life of their phones for years, but Apple has recently offered its own versions of these accessories. Now, a number of Apple-made cases sold in 2018 has exhibited problems, and the company has launched a program to replace customers' faulty battery cases for free.

Affected products include the Smart Battery Cases for the iPhone XS, the iPhone XS Max, and the iPhone XR sold between January and October of 2019.

The battery cases in question sometimes either charge intermittently or do not charge at all when plugged into a power source, and they may also fail to charge the iPhones to which they are attached. Apple was careful to clarify that this problem is not a safety issue; that's a necessary clarification, given that there have been battery-related issues with other gadgets that were safety concerns.