Month: October 2021

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft wanted everyone to use Windows 10.

Faced with slow adoption of Windows 8 and the stubborn popularity of Windows 7, Microsoft made Windows 10 a free upgrade for anyone using either version—the offer technically expired years ago, but to this day, old Windows 7 and 8 product keys still activate Windows 10 without protest. The OS was billed as a return to form that would appeal to people put off by Windows 8's divisive touchscreen-oriented interface while still retaining touch-friendly features for people who had bought a PC tablet or a laptop with a touchscreen.

Windows 10 would be long-lived, too. Some in the company billed it as "the last version of Windows"—one big, stable platform that would simultaneously placate change-averse users, huge IT shops that would have kept using Windows XP forever if they had been allowed to, and software developers who would no longer need to worry about supporting multiple wildly different generations of Windows at once. Windows could still change, but a new twice-a-year servicing model would keep that change coming at a slow-but-consistent pace that everyone could keep up with.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Juj Winn)

The Federal Communications Commission hopes to reduce the number of illegal robocalls from overseas with an expansion of rules that require phone companies to implement Caller ID authentication technology and block illegal calls. "Eliminating illegal robocalls that originate abroad is one of the most vexing challenges the commission faces because of the difficulty in reaching foreign-based robocallers and the foreign voice service providers that originate their traffic," the FCC said.

To make a dent in that problem, the FCC is proposing new requirements on domestic gateway providers that accept calls from outside the US. A Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) adopted Thursday and released on Friday proposes requiring those gateway phone companies to implement STIR (Secure Telephone Identity Revisited) and SHAKEN (Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs) protocols, which verify the accuracy of Caller ID by using digital certificates based on public-key cryptography.

"This proposal would subject foreign-originated calls, once they enter the United States, to requirements similar to those of domestic-originated calls, by placing additional obligations on gateway providers in light of the large number of illegal robocalls that originate abroad and the risk such calls present to Americans," the NPRM said. Gateway providers would be required to "apply STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication to, and perform robocall mitigation on, all foreign-originated calls with US numbers," the FCC said.

Enlarge / A recently discovered species: the Galapagos Ghost Hagfish (Myxine phantasma). (credit: Tim Winegard)

Meet the humble hagfish, an ugly, gray, eel-like creature affectionately known as a "snot snake," because of its unique defense mechanism. The hagfish can unleash a full liter of sticky slime from pores located all over its body in less than one second. That's sufficient to, say, clog the gills of a predatory shark, suffocating the would-be predator. A new paper published in the journal Current Biology reports that the slime produced by larger hagfish contains much larger cells than slime produced by smaller hagfish—an unusual example of cell size scaling with body size in nature.

As we've reported previously, scientists have been studying hagfish slime for years because it's such an unusual material. It's not like mucus, which dries out and hardens over time. Hagfish slime stays slimy, giving it the consistency of half-solidified gelatin. That's due to long, thread-like fibers in the slime in addition to the proteins and sugars that make up mucin, the other major component. Those fibers coil up into "skeins" that resemble balls of yarn. When the hagfish lets loose with a shot of slime, the skeins uncoil and combine with the salt water, blowing up more than 10,000 times its original size.

From a materials standpoint, hagfish slime is fascinating stuff. Back in 2016 a group of Swiss researchers studied the unusual fluid properties of hagfish slime, specifically focusing on how those properties provided two distinct advantages: helping the animal defend itself from predators and tying itself in knots to escape from its own slime. They found that different types of fluid flow affect the overall viscosity of the slime. A flowing liquid is essentially a series of layers sliding past one another. The faster one layer slides over another, the more resistance there is, and the slower the sliding, the less resistance there is. As I wrote for Gizmodo at the time:

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

About three years ago, Blue Origin officials knew they were behind, failing to deliver on their founder's grandiose vision.

With Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos had long talked about building a world-class space transportation company and had even gone so far as to trademark "Build a Road to Space." But despite being nearly two decades old, Blue Origin had not built a road to space, nor even launched an orbital rocket.

Meanwhile, the rocket company founded by Bezos' rival, Elon Musk, had establishing itself as the most dominant launch company in the world. By the fall of 2018, SpaceX was well on its way to launching a record 21 rockets in a single year, had debuted the Falcon Heavy, and was starting to seriously reuse first stage boosters.

Enlarge / How long until EGS's new experience point system unlocks outfits and dances in Fortnite? (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Nearly three years after its debut on Windows PCs, the Epic Games Store will soon finally support a feature that has become common on other gaming platforms: achievements.

The system, as announced on Monday, will go live "next week" and revolve around a mix of "trophies" and "experience points," thus resembling both the Xbox and PlayStation families' takes on the concept. Fulfill an objective while playing a game, and a pop-up box will announce whatever you completed, along with both a trophy and a number of experience points. Every EGS achievement list will add up to 1,000 experience points, with smaller achievements (45 points or less) being labeled "bronze" and higher point counts described as "silver," "gold," and "platinum."

Epic remains coy about how these points might impact how the service works: "Keep your eyes out for more updates you’ve been waiting for as we drop new social features and player rewards later this year," it reads. Does this mean achievement points might work as currency in some fashion, akin to Ubisoft Connect? Epic isn't saying.

Enlarge / With Android 12 Beta 2, Google's color-changing UI is live, so we took a trip through the rainbow. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Here's a strange development. Plenty of people thought today would be the official release of Android 12, which would make the nearly eight-month beta process one of the longest ever for Google's latest operating system. Today, Google is releasing Android 12, sort of—but only in source code form. There aren't any day-one updates for any device, even the Pixel phones.

Android is developed in secret (though nothing is really secret when you have an eight-month beta process) and then released as open-source code once it's done. Usually, this also includes a release to Pixel phones—one of the big benefits of owning one. Today, with the source code release, Google's blog post says that Pixel devices will get the update "in the next few weeks."

Place your bets in the comments for why we're getting this unprecedented release schedule of no day-one phone releases. Is Android 12 not done? It seems pretty done based on the latest beta release from last month. It's also done enough to release the source code, so that doesn't seem like it. Is Google holding back the Android 12 release so the OS can debut on the Pixel 6? Marketing getting involved is currently the best guess we have for this strange release.

Enlarge / Today's global Facebook and Facebook-owned-services outage appears to be the result of a flubbed BGP configuration change pushed by a Facebook engineer this morning. (credit: Sean Gladwell via Getty Images / Jim Salter)

Original story 1:26 pm EDT: Facebook—and apparently all the major services Facebook owns—are down today. We first noticed the problem at about 11:30 am Eastern time, when some Facebook links stopped working. Investigating a bit further showed major DNS failures at Facebook:

DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service which translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn't know how to get to the servers that host the website you're looking for.

The problem goes deeper than Facebook's obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook's own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 (no server is available for the request) failures instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services' load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.

Enlarge / The Apple Watch Series 7.

The new Apple Watch Series 7 will be available starting October 15, Apple announced today. Online orders will begin this Friday, October 8.

Specifically, those prerelease orders will start at 5 am PDT, one week before the watch hits Apple's brick-and-mortar stores globally. In most cases, preordered Apple devices show up at your door no earlier than the same day that they arrive on store shelves.

Previous leaks from Jon Prosser and Hermes indicated that the Watch would go up for order this week and begin shipping the next, so Apple is confirming what we already suspected.