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Enlarge / Former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during the SXSW Conference at the Austin Convention Center on March 12, 2017 in Austin, Texas. (credit: Getty Images / Jim Bennett)

AUSTIN, Texas—Former Vice President Joe Biden continued the recent South By Southwest tradition of politicians taking the keynote stage to speak on a particular initiative. Unlike Barack Obama's address last year, which revolved around the major infosec news of the moment, Biden focused his Sunday speech on his "cancer moonshot" initiative.

His return to the term "moonshot" immediately made one Ars staffer queasy, but the address also echoed a theme that is common at this year's festival: data transparency, especially for digital interactions between, and within, government agencies and the private sector.

A lousy way to share CAT scans

Biden's call was certainly not a government-wide, "open all the data" shout. Instead, he focused on the myriad ways that medical and hospital data is shared—or, in his opinion, not shared enough.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Spencer Platt)

New York City today filed a lawsuit against Verizon. The city claims Verizon failed to complete a citywide fiber rollout by 2014 as required in its cable franchise agreement.

Verizon disputes the city's allegations. The telecom giant says that it is not required to install fiber in front of each building. Meanwhile, nearly 1 million New York households do not have access to Verizon's fiber-based FiOS service. Verizon says it has brought its network to 2.2 million NYC residences, while the city has an estimated 3.1 million households.

The city government's complaint in the New York State Supreme Court seeks a declaration that Verizon is in breach of its obligations and an order to complete the project. The 2008 agreement, which gave Verizon a citywide cable television franchise, said Verizon must "pass all households" with its fiber-to-the-premises network by June 30, 2014. The agreement covered only cable television, but the fiber build-out also provided faster Internet speeds because the same fiber is used to deliver both services.

Enlarge / A combination of pictures taken in Jerusalem on March 13, 2017, shows the logos of US computer chip giant Intel (top) and Israeli car tech firm Mobileye. Intel will buy Mobileye for more than $15 billion (14 billion euros), the companies said, in a deal signaling the US computer chip giant's commitment to technology for self-driving vehicles. (credit: Thomas Coex | Getty )

On Monday, Intel announced that it will purchase the Israeli automotive technology company Mobileye in a deal worth $15.3 billion. Currently, Mobileye's computer vision systems underpin the advanced driver assists present in many new vehicles across a wide range of brands. Once the deal finalizes, Intel's Automated Driving Group will be integrated into Mobileye and run from Israel. Mobileye's co-founder, chairman, and CTO, Professor Amnon Shashua, will head things up.

In a statement, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich wrote the following:

Intel provides critical foundational technologies for autonomous driving, including plotting the car’s path and making real-time driving decisions. Mobileye brings the industry’s best automotive-grade computer vision and strong momentum with automakers and suppliers. Together, we can accelerate the future of autonomous driving with improved performance in a cloud-to-car solution at a lower cost for automakers.

Mobileye and Intel are no strangers. In July 2016, the two companies revealed they are working with BMW to launch an autonomous vehicle called the iNEXT in 2021.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Atypeek)

US Senate Democrats have asked the Federal Communications Commission chairman for a commitment that the FCC will not try to stifle freedom of the press on behalf of President Donald Trump.

The Democrats sent a letter on Friday to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, saying he did not answer senators' questions at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing held last week.

"[Y]our refusal to answer straightforward questions about how you view the media and whether you will uphold the First Amendment rights of journalists and media outlets is concerning," Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and 12 other Democratic members of the Senate Commerce Committee wrote in the letter to Pai.

Enlarge / If all goes well, it'll look a bit like this, but darker. (credit: SpaceX)

Update: A new launch window is opening this evening, at roughly the same time.

At about 1:30am Florida time (5:30am UK time), SpaceX hopes to send a communication satellite to a geostationary transfer orbit. The launch, scheduled to take place from the Kennedy Space Center, would mark one of the last times the company doesn't make an attempt to recover and reuse a booster.

As Ars' Eric Berger detailed, the payload is a large communication satellite, EchoStar XXIII, which will ultimately reside in a high, geostationary orbit. The combination of altitude and weight means that the existing Falcon 9 rocket will burn much of its fuel on the way up, leaving an insufficient supply to land. SpaceX plans to upgrade the Falcon 9 later this year to a version that could be recovered even from launches of this sort.

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By making so much information so accessible, social media has drastically changed the way we consume information and form opinions in the modern era. The danger, however, is that social media creates an “echo chamber” that filters the information people receive so that it largely supports their existing opinions.

A recent study published in PNAS examines this phenomenon and finds that social-media users show marked focus in the types of news that interests them. These social-media participants tend to develop strong and well-defined communities around the news outlets they support, and they tend to make connections with like-minded people regardless of the geographic distance between them.

The PNAS study looked at the Facebook activity of a whopping 376 million English-speaking users. Its authors examined how these people interacted with English-speaking news sources on the platform in terms of their consumption of news, as well as their connectivity in terms of sharing, liking, and commenting on news-related items.

Enlarge / A proof-of-concept that exploits WebKit vulnerabilities on Nintendo's Switch. (credit: qwertyoruiop)

Nintendo's Switch has been out for almost two weeks, which of course means that efforts to hack it are well underway. One developer, who goes by qwertyoruiop on Twitter, has demonstrated that the console ships with months-old bugs in its WebKit browser engine. These bugs allow for arbitrary code execution within the browser. A proof-of-concept explainer video was posted here.

These bugs attracted attention last year because they were used to hijack an iPhone used by a political dissident in the United Arab Emirates; the bugs could allow attackers to steal call histories, texts, contacts and calendar information, and messages from apps like Gmail and WhatsApp. The trio of bugs, collectively known as "Trident," were disclosed after Apple patched them in iOS 9.3.5 in August of 2016.

The potential impact of these vulnerabilities for Switch users is low. A Switch isn't going to have the same amount of sensitive data on it that an iPhone or iPad can, and there are way fewer Switches out there than iDevices. Right now, the Switch also doesn't include a standalone Internet browser, though WebKit is present on the system for logging into public Wi-Fi hotspots, and, with some cajoling, you can use it to browse your Facebook feed.

Enlarge / A US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper awaits maintenance December 8, 2016, at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. (credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Christian Clausen)

The United States Air Force now has more jobs available for drone pilots—known in military parlance as "remote-piloted aircraft" (RPA)—than for any other human-flown aircraft. This is according to a recent report on Military.com.

Citing remarks made by Lt. Gen. Darryl Roberson at a recent Air Force conference held in Florida on March 3, the Air Force specifically has more jobs for MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drones. Gen. Roberson is the head of air education and training command.

"I never thought I'd say that when I joined the Air Force," he was quoted as saying. "So we're really in a much better footing with RPA pilot production in addition to just getting the numbers up."