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On Monday, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) announced that it had “exclusively licensed” a technology that could help it bring the transit system idea, popularized by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, to fruition.

The licensed technology, called passive magnetic levitation, departs significantly from the system that Musk theorized back in 2013. Musk’s Hyperloop design involves a low-pressure tube through which the system's trains, floating an inch above the track on skis ejecting compressed air, are propelled with the help of a magnetic field created by electricity-fed magnets on the tube’s internal surface.

The HTT technology, on the other hand, is based on passive magnetic levitation, which relies on magnets placed on the underside of the passenger train in a Halbach array—an arrangement that focuses the magnetic field of a set of magnets on one side of the array while canceling out the field on the other side. Those magnetic fields under the train cause it to levitate as it passes over non-powered electromagnetic coils on the rail beneath the train at even low speeds created by an electric motor.

Enlarge / An image showing a SQL injection attack on the Lee County Elections Office exposing the plaintext passwords of Supervisor Sharon Harrington. (credit: Dan Sinclair)

A Florida man has been slapped with felony criminal hacking charges after gaining unauthorized access to poorly secured computer systems belonging to a Florida county elections supervisor.

David Michael Levin, 31, of Estero, Florida, was charged with three counts of unauthorized access to a computer, network, or electronic device and released on $15,000 bond, officials with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said. According to a court document filed last week in Florida's Lee County and a video it cited as evidence, Levin logged into the Lee County Elections Office website using the pilfered credentials of Sharon Harrington, the county's Supervisor of Elections. Levin, who authorities said is the owner of a security firm called Vanguard Cybersecurity, also allegedly gained access to the website of Florida's Office of Elections.

Levin posted a YouTube video in late January that showed him entering the supervisor's username and password to gain control of a content management system used to control leeelections.com, which at the time was the official website for the elections office. At no time did anyone from the county authorize Levin to access the site, officials said.

Microsoft Research's "SparseLightVR" project, without the sheer plastic screen that is eventually used to better diffuse the array of 80 LEDs. (credit: Microsoft Research)

The current world of consumer-grade virtual reality has a bit of a tunnel-vision problem. As realistic as VR can feel, even the most expensive headsets are restricted to a 110-degree field of view, compared to the over 180 degrees of real-world vision. While most early industry enthusiasts have been able to get past that issue, a team at Microsoft Research has not.

"You don’t realize when you’re playing with Oculus or other [headsets] how much black there really is in the device," Carnegie Mellon PhD candidate Robert Xiao said in an interview with Ars Technica. "You strap it on, and the first thing your eyes focus on is the middle part, the bright screen. You don’t realize how much of the visual field is taken up by black, empty space."

Xiao, who served as a Microsoft Research intern in 2015 as part of his work in CMU's Human Computer Interaction Institute, decided to focus on that blackness in his first major Microsoft project. Alongside senior researcher Hrvoje Benko, Xiao came up with an idea borne mostly from affordability: a cheap array of LEDs to fill in the rest of a VR headset's dark spots. (The results of their findings were published in CHI'16 last week.)