Month: February 2020

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat is one of the most famous films in cinema history. Shot by French filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière, it achieved an unprecedented level of quality for its time. Some people regard its commercial exhibition in 1896 as the birth of the film industry. An urban legend—likely apocryphal—says that viewers found the footage so realistic that they screamed and ran to the back of the room as the train approached. I've embedded a video of the original film above.

Of course, humanity's standards for realism have risen dramatically over the last 125 years. Today, the Lumière brothers' masterpiece looks grainy, murky, and basically ancient. But a man named Denis Shiryaev used modern machine-learning techniques to upscale the classic film to 21st-century video standards.

The result is remarkable. Watching the upscaled version makes the world of our great-great-great-grandparents come to life. Formerly murky details of the train, the clothing, and the faces of the passengers now stand out clearly.

Enlarge (credit: carrotmadman6 / Flickr)

In September 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown set a greenhouse goal for the state: net-zero emissions by 2045. It's a very aggressive goal. The easiest part of the energy transition is the first bit: growing the meager share of renewables on the grid. But cleaning up the last 20 percent or so of our energy use is a bigger challenge and one that has yet to be tackled. From industry to air travel to agriculture, some things look like a very heavy lift.

However, achieving net-zero emissions is easier than "actual" zero, because activities that actively remove CO₂ from the atmosphere (sometimes called "negative emissions") could cancel out some of the stubborn emissions we can't get rid of. To find out how that might work in California's case, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report analyzed options to estimate costs. It points to a hefty—though not impossible—price tag to meet that 2045 goal.

Drawdown

The first question is just how much CO₂ California is going to need to suck out of the atmosphere to achieve its goal. The Golden State's current plan is to see emissions cut from over 400 million tons per year to about 86 million tons by 2050. To hit net-zero in that case, negative emissions would have to grow to 125 million tons per year by 2045.

Enlarge / A test of radiative cooling panels at the University of Colorado. (credit: University of Colorado)

Moving from the present world to one where renewable power dominates our energy economy is going to require some additional technologies. These may include storage, enhanced grid management, and demand-response power management, but they could also include something entirely new. Recently, a paper took a look at a technology I hadn't realized even existed.

The paper evaluates the potential of what its authors are terming "nighttime photovoltaic power," and the simplest way of thinking about it is "running solar panels in reverse": generating electricity by radiating energy away into space. The efficiency is nothing like that of standard photovoltaics and can't even get there except in unusual circumstances. But as the name implies, it can keep generating power long after the Sun goes down.

Photovoltaics at night

The easiest way to understand this tech is to think of a photovoltaic device in equilibrium with its environment. Here, incoming photons will occasionally liberate an electron, leaving behind a positively charged hole. These can then combine, radiating a photon back out of the device. When operating as a photovoltaic device, there's a large excess of photons coming in, producing a corresponding excess of electrons and holes that can then be harvested as electricity.

Enlarge / Your local police might like to interest you in this product. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon's Ring line of cloud-connected home surveillance equipment has for several months faced steep criticism not only for its nearly 900 "partnerships" with law enforcement agencies but also for lax account protections that put users' privacy at risk. Now, the company is hoping to assuage concerns from civil rights advocates, privacy advocates, lawmakers, and some users with a slate of updates.

Ring a few days ago began pushing an update to all users that creates a new "control center" in the Ring app. The control center adds several account and camera privacy settings to Ring and brings them all together into one area.

Among the new settings is an option to check for or enable two-factor authentication on one's Ring account. Ring did not previously require users to set up two-factor authentication on setup or prompt them to do so later. The lack of heavy two-factor usage was implicated in a wave of Ring camera hacks that began late last year.

Enlarge (credit: xkcd)

Sudo, a utility found in dozens of Unix-like operating systems, has received a patch for a potentially serious bug that allows unprivileged users to easily obtain unfettered root privileges on vulnerable systems.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-18634, is the result of a stack-based buffer-overflow bug found in versions 1.7.1 through 1.8.25p1. It can be triggered only when either an administrator or a downstream OS, such as Linux Mint and Elementary OS, has enabled an option known as pwfeedback. With pwfeedback turned on, the vulnerability can be exploited even by users who aren't listed in sudoers, a file that contains rules that users must follow when using the sudo command.

Sudo is a powerful utility that’s included in most if not all Unix- and Linux-based OSes. It lets administrators allow specific individuals or groups to run commands or applications with higher-than-usual system privileges. Both Apple’s macOS and Debian distributions of Linux received updates last week. People using other OSes should check their configurations and version numbers to ensure they’re not vulnerable.

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  The Poco X2. [credit: Poco ]

Xiaomi is launching a follow-up to one of India's most popular smartphones, the Poco F1, with the Poco X2. Just like the first version, this is a phone that aims to push the boundaries of bang-for-your-buck with a really big spec sheet and a really low price. A phone with a 120Hz display and six cameras for just ₹15,999 ($225)? That's crazy!

India is a major battleground country for smartphone manufacturers, thanks to the combination of the world's second-highest population along with a more open market compared to the tyrannical rules imposed by the government in China. Xiaomi really went after this market in 2018 with the launch of the Poco F1, which offered flagship-class specs (a Snapdragon 845) for $340. Naturally, the first Poco was a real hit with Indian users, but a lot of evidence suggests that Xiaomi was just using the phone as a loss leader. For about half a year, the Poco F1 was a sweetheart deal made just for India, and Xiaomi even did its best to limit the phone's overseas appeal by stripping down the cellular connectivity to India-specific bands.

For the sequel, Xiaomi isn't going quite as hard as it did with the Poco F1. Instead of Qualcomm's highest-end chipset, the Snapdragon 865, this is a Snapdragon 730G. The phone is actually just a rebrand of an earlier Xiaomi phone meant for the Chinese market, the Redmi K30. But again, this was probably the plan. Release a crazy-cheap phone in the Poco F1, build a fan base, then sell more sustainably priced devices under the same brand name.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Duncan Hull / Getty)

The price of Tesla stock soared by 21 percent on Tuesday, rising above $940 for the first time.

Tesla's value has more than doubled since the start of the year—and quadrupled since last September.

What's driving the dramatic rise in Tesla's share price is not clear. Last week, Tesla reported solid but unspectacular profits of $105 million for the fourth quarter of 2019. A number of Wall Street analysts have upgraded their share price targets for Tesla in recent weeks, but Tesla's value is now far above most analysts' estimates.

Enlarge / Matt LeBlanc, who played Joey on "Friends," on the set at the Warner Bros lot on Sept. 12, 2003 in Burbank, California. (credit: Getty Images | David Hume Kennerly )

AT&T's decision to prevent Time Warner-owned shows from streaming on Netflix and other non-AT&T services reduced the company's quarterly revenue by $1.2 billion, a sacrifice that AT&T is making to give its planned HBO Max service more exclusive content. AT&T took the $1.2-billion hit despite previously telling Congress that it would not restrict distribution of Time Warner content, claiming that would be "irrational business behavior."

AT&T's actual Q4 2019 revenue was $46.8 billion, but the company said it would have been $48 billion if not for "HBO Max investments in the form of foregone WarnerMedia content licensing revenues."

An AT&T spokesperson told Ars that the $1.2 billion in lost revenue was primarily caused by the decision "not to sell existing content—mainly Friends, The Big Bang Theory, and Fresh Prince—to third parties such as Netflix." As we've previously reported, AT&T took Time Warner shows off Netflix in order to give the exclusive streaming rights to AT&T's HBO Max, which is scheduled to debut in May 2020 for $14.99 a month.

Enlarge / Information officer wearing protective mask, gloves, and goggle, as prevention of novel coronavirus epidemic, at international arrival gate of Bali Ngurah Rai International Airport in Kuta, Bali, Indonesia on February 4, 2020. (credit: Getty | Nur Photo)

The Chinese businesswoman who spread the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) to four colleagues in Germany while reportedly experiencing no symptoms of the infection actually did have symptoms, according to a news report in Science.

The woman’s case, published January 30 in The New England Journal of Medicine, was considered the most clearly documented evidence that the novel viral infection could spread silently from asymptomatic people. Public health experts have been particularly anxious about such transmission because it could potentially ease disease spread and negate outbreak control efforts, including screening travelers for symptoms, such as fever.

“The fact that asymptomatic persons are potential sources of 2019-nCoV infection may warrant a reassessment of transmission dynamics of the current outbreak,” the authors of the NEJM article concluded.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

If you're looking for a pair of wireless noise-cancelling headphones but don't want to shell out the big bucks, today's Dealmaster should be of interest. Our roundup today is headlined by a joint low price on Anker's Soundcore Life Q20 Bluetooth headphones, which are down to $40 from an already affordable street price of $60.

Though we don't have a formal review of the Soundcore Life Q20 on Ars, we have tested them for future gift and buying guides and can verify that they're good value for a low-cost set of noise-cancelling cans. To be clear, they're still a clear step (or three) down from premium pairs like Sony's WH-1000XM3 or Bose's Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, particularly with regard to the strength of their active noise cancellation. They just aren't going to cut out as much noise in a plane or a busy office. Their bass-heavy sound isn't as nuanced as those higher-end options, either. But they're far from bad in either regard. They're comfortable for a headphone in any price range, and their battery gets more than 30 hours on a charge, which is excellent. If you want a comfy pair of headphones that can still provide decent ANC in a pinch, you could do way worse for less than $50, particularly in a market where sub-$100 options are usually worth avoiding altogether.

If you don't need a new set of headphones, we have plenty more deals on Logitech mice, the latest Pokemon games, lots of Apple devices, and more. You can check out the full list below.