Month: September 2020

Less than one month ago, SpaceX blasted a full-scale prototype of its Starship vehicle to an altitude of 150 meters above South Texas before returning it safely to the ground. On Thursday, the company did it again with the latest version of the vehicle, dubbed Serial Number 6, or SN6.

As outdoor temperatures soared into the mid-90s Fahrenheit shortly after noon, the prototype was loaded with liquid methane and liquid oxygen before igniting its single Raptor engine. This engine, situated off-center, powered the vehicle at a slight angle into the sky, where it moved several dozen meters laterally before descending and coming to rest near the launch stand.

These test flights represent significant technical achievements, as they involved testing out the large, complex plumbing systems for Starship's fuel tanks and rocket engine as well as pushing the thrust vector control system of the Raptor engine in flight.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by the first notable price drops on The Last of Us Part II, Sony's PS4-exclusive action-adventure game that released this past June. New copies are currently available for $50 in both physical and digital form, which is a $10 discount. If you're willing to buy a pre-owned copy, though, you can grab it at GameFly for $30. The latter includes the game case and any manuals or inserts that'd typically come included with the title.

As for the game itself, to call The Last of Us Part II polarizing would be an understatement. Though it's achieved startlingly high review scores, we'd guess most people won't find it perfect. It's a game that deliberately tries to avoid being fun: it tells a messy story about humanity's worst traits, horrible things happen to almost everyone in it, and its stealth-action gameplay traffics in high tension. Even if you accept those terms, our own review raised issues with how the game develops its narrative.

That said, while The Last of Us Part II isn't a pandemic-friendly pick-me-up, it is bold—particularly for a mega-budget "AAA" game marketed to mainstream audiences—and how you ultimately feel about it will likely come down to your own interpretation of the story it's telling. While it can be bleak, it's often affecting, and it's one of the few high-profile games that's unafraid to toy with typical player expectations. If you're into that sort of thing, this might be a good chance to give the relatively new game a try at less than full price. If nothing else, it's hugely impressive from a technical perspective.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Westend61)

The National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone metadata from telecom providers was illegal, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The court also found that the phone-metadata collection exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was not necessary for the arrests of terror suspects in a case that the US government cited in defending the necessity of the surveillance program.

The ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld the 2013 convictions of "four members of the Somali diaspora for sending, or conspiring to send, $10,900 to Somalia to support a foreign terrorist organization." But the Somalis' challenge of the NSA spying program yielded some significant findings. In part, the ineffectiveness of the phone-metadata collection helped ensure that the convictions would be upheld because the illegally collected metadata evidence wasn't significant enough to taint evidence that was legally collected by the government. The government got what it needed from a wiretap of defendant Basaaly Saeed Moalin's phone, not from the mass collection of metadata.

The court's three-judge panel unanimously "held that the metadata collection exceeded the scope of Congress's authorization in 50 U.S.C. § 1861, which required the government to make a showing of relevance to a particular authorized investigation before collecting the records, and that the program therefore violated that section of FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]," the ruling said.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Facebook)

Facebook subsidiary Oculus says it has "temporarily paused" sales of Oculus Quest headsets to customers in Germany. Reports suggest the move is in response to concerns from German regulators about the recently announced requirement that all Oculus users will need to use a Facebook account by 2023 to log in to the device.

"We have temporarily paused selling Oculus devices to consumers in Germany," Facebook writes in a brief message on the Oculus support site. "We will continue supporting users who already own an Oculus device and we're looking forward to resuming sales in Germany soon."

Facebook declined an opportunity to provide additional comment to Ars Technica. But in a statement to German News site Heise Online (machine translation), the company said the move was due to "outstanding talks with German supervisory authorities... We were not obliged to take this measure, but proactively interrupted the sale."

Enlarge / An image of the exosolar system (right), and an artists' conception of what we're looking at. (credit: ESO/L. Calçada, Exeter/Kraus et al.)

If all we knew about was our own Solar System—a condition that was largely true even two decades ago—we'd think that planets are all neat and tidy. All of the familiar ones rotate in a single plane aligned with the Sun's equator and move in the same direction. And that's exactly how they should behave, considering that planets form from a single disk of material rotating around the star.

But as we've gotten a clearer picture of the diversity of exosolar systems out there, we've seen some pretty odd things, like planets that orbit in the opposite direction than they should or planets with orbits that are nowhere near the plane of their system. While some of these idiosyncrasies can be explained by gravitational interactions in systems with multiple planets, there might be conditions where planets could form in bizarre orbits.

Now, researchers have imaged an exosolar system where that seems to be happening.