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NASA

I was sitting with Apollo 7 veteran Walt Cunningham in his west Houston living room on Monday afternoon when his wife, Dot, stepped tentatively in. "I'm sorry for interrupting," she said. "But Gene's dead."

She meant Eugene Cernan, the US Navy Captain who commanded Apollo 17, and the last person to walk on the Moon. He was 82 and had been ill for about six months.

Enlarge / Brian Armstrong, as seen here in 2014, is the CEO of Coinbase. (credit: TechCrunch)

Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, has estimated that it will cost the company between $100,000 and $1 million to defend its customers from what he described as an “overly broad subpoena.”

Last month, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Coinbase could be ordered, at the request of the Internal Revenue Service, to provide years of data that would reveal the identities of all its active United States-based users.

The IRS is concerned that some of Coinbase’s customers may have used its service to circumvent or mitigate tax liability. Federal investigators say they need Coinbase’s records to be able to identify some Bitcoin wallets and to check against tax records to make sure Coinbase’s users are paying any and all proper taxes on their Bitcoin-related income.

Enlarge / Ars' Kyle Orland tries out the Nintendo Switch in its portable mode. (credit: Jennifer Hahn)

After multiple hands-on events around the world on Friday, press and fans alike now have an idea of how the Nintendo Switch plays and feels. It has games (though not many new ones). It has a nice screen and a slim portable form factor. It has an interesting controller proposition.

Underlying all of those, however, is a problem. The Nintendo Switch has an identity crisis. Worse, Nintendo is actively pumping fuel and fire into this problem. The company's confusing—and apparently stubborn—system launch strategy revolves around a packed-in peripheral that adds cost, bulk, and use-case confusion, and it goes so far as to point out the system's technical limitations.

This is the kind of problem that should seem incredibly familiar to fans of the gaming industry. That's right: Nintendo is on the verge of its own Kinect-like moment.

Windows 7's extended support ends on January 14, 2020. The operating system left mainstream support in 2014, meaning that for the last two years—and next three—it only receives security fixes. But Microsoft is telling corporate customers that even with those security updates, the 2009 operating system isn't really cut out for the world of today. According to Redmond, enterprises should plan to move to Windows 10 sooner, rather than later.

The reason, according to Markus Nitschke, head of Windows at Microsoft Germany, is that Windows 7 "does not meet the requirements of modern systems, nor the security requirements of IT departments."

There are two elements to this. Companies buying new hardware using Intel's Skylake or Kaby Lake processors have little choice but to use Windows 10. Installation and driver support for Windows 7 and 8.1 is limited to certain systems since changes in the Skylake platform, such as the integrated USB 3 controllers and processor-controlled power management, aren't supported in Windows 7. PC OEMs can still make the older operating system work, but it requires extra effort on their part. AMD's new Ryzen processors and Windows machines built using the Qualcomm 835 processor will similarly need Windows 10.

Beware its furry cyber-wrath. (credit: Washington State)

WASHINGTON, DC—For years, the government and security experts have warned of the looming threat of "cyberwar" against critical infrastructure in the US and elsewhere. Predictions of cyber attacks wreaking havoc on power grids, financial systems, and other fundamental parts of nations' fabric have been foretold repeatedly over the past two decades, and each round has become more dire. The US Department of Energy declared in its Quadrennial Energy Review, just released this month, that the electrical grid in the US "faces imminent danger from a cyber attack."

So far, however, the damage done by cyber attacks, both real (Stuxnet's destruction of Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges and a few brief power outages alleged to have been caused by Russian hackers using BlackEnergy malware) and imagined or exaggerated (the Iranian "attack" on a broken flood control dam in Rye, New York), cannot begin to measure up to an even more significant cyber-threat—squirrels.

That was the message delivered at the Shmoocon security conference on Friday by Cris "SpaceRogue" Thomas, former member of the L0pht Heavy Industries hacking collective and now a security researcher at Tenable. In his presentation—entitled, "35 Years of Cyberwar: The Squirrels Are Winning"—SpaceRogue revealed the scale of the squirrelly threat to worldwide critical infrastructure by presenting data gathered by CyberSquirrel 1, a project that gathers information on animal-induced infrastructure outages collected from sources on the Internet.

Enlarge / President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Drew Angerer)

President-elect Donald Trump's transition team is reportedly pushing a proposal to strip the Federal Communications Commission of its role in overseeing competition and consumer protection.

Multichannel News has what it calls an exclusive report that says the incoming Trump administration has "signed off on an approach to remaking the Federal Communications Commission." The plan, offered by transition team members appointed by Trump, "squares with the deregulatory philosophies of FCC Republicans Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly," who will take a 2-1 majority after Trump's inauguration on Friday, the report said.

Besides restructuring FCC bureaus, the majority of the transition team wants to "eventually move functions deemed 'duplicative,' like, say, competition and consumer protection, to other agencies, particularly the Federal Trade Commission," Multichannel news reported. The story cites "sources familiar" with a recent meeting involving Trump officials and FCC transition team members. The Trump team has not made any on-the-record statements about specific plans for the FCC.

The image shows a 180-area multimodal human cortical parcellation on the left and right hemisphere surfaces. Colors indicate the extent to which the areas are associated in the resting state with auditory (red), sensation (green), visual (blue). (The brain, continuing to amaze us.) (credit: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature18933.html)

The brain can reorganize itself in the face of a traumatic injury or a sensory disability. For example, in deaf mammals, the auditory processing neurons of the brain may be rewired to handle other stimuli. But we haven’t been able to figure out if this reorganization is task-specific—will the circuits be recruited to do the same tasks?—or more general.

A recent study published in PNAS suggests that, in at least one case, these brain circuits are repurposed for a similar task. When deaf people were asked to interpret visual rhythms (represented by a flashing light), the same auditory processing regions used to listen to rhythms were activated.

This study used fMRI to look at the brain activation of both congenitally deaf subjects and those with normal hearing. While in the fMRI machine, all subjects were asked to discriminate between different rhythms of flashing lights. As a control, all subjects were also asked to look at a light that flashed with a regular, predictable pattern. Hearing subjects were then asked to discriminate between different auditory rhythms as well. As a control, these subjects were asked to listen to a similar noise occurring in a regular, consistent pattern.

John Carmack, seen here wearing an early prototype Oculus Rift headset.

ZeniMax Media, the parent company of both Bethesda Softworks and Id Software, says it will prove at trial that John Carmack and others at Oculus stole trade secrets to "misappropriate" virtual reality technology that was first developed while Carmack was working at Id Software. What's more, ZeniMax is now accusing Oculus of "intentional destruction of evidence to cover up their wrongdoing." Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Oculus parent company Facebook, is scheduled to respond to those accusations in testimony starting tomorrow, according to a report by Business insider.

"With the start of the trial of our case in Federal District Court in Dallas against Defendants Facebook, Oculus and its management, ZeniMax and id Software welcome the opportunity to present substantial evidence of the Defendants' misappropriation of our Virtual Reality (VR) intellectual property," ZeniMax wrote in a statement given to Ars.

"That evidence includes the theft of trade secrets and highly confidential information, including computer code. ZeniMax will also present evidence of the Defendants' intentional destruction of evidence to cover up their wrongdoing. ZeniMax and id Software are the visionary developers of breakthrough VR technology and look forward to the vindication of our claims."

Enlarge / The policy was announced last week by nuclear physicist and DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz, who will be replaced by former Texas Governor Rick Perry if he is confirmed by the Senate. (credit: Thomas Kelsey/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon)

When President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team sent a questionnaire to the Department of Energy asking, among other things, for the names of employees who had worked on anything that touched climate policy, it raised concerns about whether those employees would be targeted. (The transition team later said the questionnaire was “not authorized.") Thanks to a new Department of Energy policy announced last week, that sort of political interference should be (at least a little) harder to do going forward.

The new policy has its roots in a 2009 President Barack Obama memo directing agencies to craft “scientific integrity” policies that protect research staff from having their work censored or altered or prevent researchers being muzzled themselves. Twenty-four departments and agencies have followed through with such policies, but the Department of Energy’s version was a little vague and weak. The newly finalized policy is stronger, earning praise from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The policy now clearly covers all staff at the Department of Energy's 17 national laboratories around the country, including employees of contractors and university researchers funded by DOE grants. They are free to share research findings with the public and other scientists and “are free to discuss their personal opinions on scientific and technical related policies, provided these views are not represented as those of the US Government or DOE.” There are explicit exceptions for classified information given the department’s nuclear work.

AUSTIN, Texas—“We aren't born woke, something wakes us up."

By now, everyone's experienced a newsfeed full of #NoDAPL or long Twitter threads explaining some proposed legislation that threatens a certain cause. With years of social media experience behind us, it's easy for this stuff to feel like white noise. But the next time someone shrugs off any of these posts in the name of social justice as useless, tell them DeRay Mckesson begs to differ. All of it has the ability to help others get "woke," to newly realize there's a problem and a need to combat it. So during his keynote Q&A at the Texas Tribune's weekend symposium on race and policy, the Black Lives Matter activist encouraged everyone to fight toward “equity, justice, and fairness” in the way that works best for them... even if starts as small as a tweet.

For Mckesson, in fact, social media initially proved to be the way of getting involved. Back in August 2014 after the tragic murder of Michael Brown, he wanted to go to Ferguson, Missouri, and merely participate in the peaceful response for a weekend. He had no grand plans of country-wide organizing at the time; then the protests spanned 300 days: “I drove nine hours for a weekend, but I guess it's been a long weekend,” Mckesson said of his work since.