Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Mozilla's office in San Francisco. (credit: Getty Images | Iuliia Serova)

Mozilla has released Firefox 72, an update that, like many recent browser updates, focuses on privacy features—specifically, ways to deal with fingerprinting, and a new way of managing websites' requests to send you notifications.

Mozilla made it possible to block website notifications altogether in a previous update to Firefox, but this update offers this new, ostensibly more manageable variation as well. Instead of showing these requests as a pop-up that interrupts your experience, it will now show a speech bubble in the address bar that you can use to opt-in to the notifications—similar to how some modern browsers handle other kinds of pop-up attempts.

The other major feature of Firefox 72 is a further expansion of the browser's Enhanced Tracking Protection feature. The browser now blocks fingerprinting scripts by default for all users. Mozilla introduced Enhanced Tracking Protection a few versions ago and recently made it on by default. We went over some of the other aspects of Enhanced Tracking Protection in a previous report.

Samsung's CES 2020 keynote wrapped up last night, and it was a wild, rapid-fire showing of things that may or may not ever come to market. Samsung called the keynote its "vision for the future of tech and innovation" so I guess these are "concepts" and not "products."

The company ran through several devices, each of which got about three minutes of presentation time with no price or release date, and then it was on to the next thing. The devices all seemed pretty early in development, and nailing down exactly how anything would work was a challenge, but here's a roundup of the things Samsung talked about at CES.

The Bixby speaker lives!

The Galaxy Home and Galaxy Home Mini. (credit: Samsung)

Before we dive into Samsung's futuristic concepts, let's point out that this is all coming from a company that is currently struggling to bring a smart speaker to market. Samsung wants to compete with the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple Homepod, so in 2018 it announced the Samsung Galaxy Home, a smart speaker with the company's Bixby voice assistant built-in. It's almost a year and a half later, and the Bixby speaker still hasn't launched. The last thing we heard about the Galaxy Home was in June, when Samsung gave the speaker a vague release window in the second half of 2020. This would be something like two years after it was announced and six years behind the launch of the Amazon Echo.

Enlarge / A Waymo self-driving car doing its thing in May 2019. (credit: Picture Alliance / Getty Images)

Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving company, has logged 20 million miles on public roads, the company announced in a Tuesday press statement. The new milestone comes just 15 months after Waymo hit the 10 million mile mark in October 2018.

The latest figure puts Waymo far, far ahead of its rivals. I noted 15 months ago that only one company had announced even 1 million miles of driving—and that was Uber, which was forced to scale back its testing after a fatal crash. Today, the story is largely the same; if anyone else in the self-driving industry has cracked a million miles of on-road driving, I haven't seen the press release.

Back in 2018, I reported that most of Waymo's rivals are quick to dismiss the significance of testing miles. Today (as in 2018), they argue that quality of testing miles matters more than quantity.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Iran has over the past decade built up its own organic hacking and cyberwarfare capabilities. But the groups associated with orchestrating Iran's various cyberwarfare and cyber-espionage activities have also relied significantly on mining the work of others—and in at least one case, they have tried to bring in outside help for the ostensible purpose of training would-be hackers.

According to Chris Kubecka—a security researcher who played a prominent role in Saudi Aramco's response to the Iran-attributed Shamoon "wiper" malware—officials with the Telecommunication Company of Iran emailed and messaged her on behalf of the Iranian government, attempting "to recruit me to teach hacking in country against critical Infrastructure with focus on nuclear facilities," she told Ars.

These efforts, which Kubecka alluded to briefly in a presentation at AppSec California in 2018, spanned over 2.5 years—during which Kubecka informed the FBI. "I was collecting evidence and communicating with them directly until last January when the FBI stepped in," she said. "The last contact we had, the Iranians wanted my home address to send me 'a gift'."

Enlarge / The source of the fast radio bursts, circled in green. (credit: NSF'S OPTICAL-INFRARED ASTRONOMY RESEARCH LABORATORY/GEMINI OBSERVATORY/AURA)

Over a decade after their discovery, fast radio bursts remain an enigma. Often lasting less than a millisecond, the bursts release an incredible amount of energy in the radio frequencies, then go silent. In many cases, there's no indication of anything else happening near that location again, suggesting a catastrophic event that destroyed whatever produced it. But over time, a handful of repeating burst sites have been identified, allowing the galaxy of at least one source to be identified and a few inferences about its properties to be inferred.

But the identification of repeating sources hasn't cleared up as much of the mystery as we might hope. In fact, it has raised questions about whether repeating and lone events might be from entirely different sources.

On Monday, researchers described the closest repeating fast radio burst yet identified, as well as the identity of its host galaxy. And in analyzing the burst's behaviors, the scientists involved suggest that it favors a few existing ideas but should cause us to rethink a few others.

Enlarge / A new model predicts the way a spaghetti rod turns from straight to curly as it cooks. (credit: zeljkosantrac / Getty Images)

Place a strand of spaghetti in a pot of boiling water, and it will start to sag as it softens, before sinking slowly to the bottom of the pot, where it will curl back on itself to form a U shape. A cursory explanation might be that as the spaghetti softens during cooking, it deforms more easily, and gravity causes the saggy strand to sink. But what accounts for the curling behavior? Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, provide a much more thorough explanation in a new paper in Physical Review E.

There have been a surprisingly large number of scientific papers seeking to understand the various properties of spaghetti, both cooking and eating it—the mechanics of slurping the pasta into one's mouth, for instance, or spitting it out (aka the "reverse spaghetti problem"). The most well-known is the question of how to get dry spaghetti strands to break neatly in two, rather than three or more scattered pieces.

The late Richard Feynman famously puzzled over the dilemma, conducting informal experiments in his home kitchen. French physicists successfully explained the dynamics at work in 2006. They found that, counterintuitively, a dry spaghetti strand produces a "kick back" traveling wave as it breaks. This wave temporarily increases the curvature in other sections, leading to many more breaks. Basile Audoly and Sébastien Neukirch won the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for their insight.

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  The Razer Kishi will attach via a wired connection to the phone of your choice, so long as it uses either a Lightning or USB Type-C port. [credit: Razer ]

What does it take for a phone-compatible gamepad to get our attention in 2020, in a world where pretty much every Bluetooth-compatible game controller can connect to your favorite iOS or Android phone? At this year's CES, Razer has the answer: a controller that may boost the cloud-streaming proposition of "triple-A gaming anytime, anywhere."

The Razer Kishi, announced Tuesday at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, arguably doesn't look special. It features the same array of joysticks, buttons, and triggers you'll find on most consumer-grade game controllers. Its trick of splitting in half and sandwiching a smartphone has been done before—with Razer already having its own Junglecat controller, which does just that.

But the Kishi adds a rare combination for this kind of gamepad: a flush fit to your smartphone of choice and a wired connection.