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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.)

SAN FRANCISCO—A jury of ten men and women has been selected for the second Oracle v. Google copyright trial, and opening statements will be heard here tomorrow morning.

The trial is expected to last about a month. If Oracle wins, damages could be in the billions.

The jury includes an employment coordinator, a lawyer who works for local government, a former aerospace CFO, an HR professional, an electrician, a retiree, a homemaker, and a product manager for a local power company.

(credit: LHCb)

After more than a month of checking out the equipment, the Large Hadron Collider is set to return to the frontiers of particle physics. This will be the second run at higher energies after a few years at lower energy and a couple years of upgrades. The plan for this year is to increase the frequency of high-energy collisions in order to get a better view of the Higgs boson and pursue the search for new particles.

After suffering a catastrophic failure early in its history, the LHC was run for several years at energies that created collisions at seven or eight Tera-electronVolts. This was followed by an extended shutdown that upgraded hardware and fixed the defects that caused the earlier failure. Last year's physics run was the fist at 13TeV, and the collider's operators were relatively cautious as they learned how to control the machine at these higher energies.

The new energies provide two major advantages. Since new particles are created by converting energy to matter, the higher the energy, the heavier the particles you can produce. And some analyses have been finding hints that there might be a new particle in the neighborhood of 750 Giga-electronVolts—nearly 800 times the mass of the protons that were smashed to create it.

(credit: SPUR)

Uber and Lyft said Monday they are suspending their ride-hailing services in Austin—the home of the South by Southwest festival—in the wake of a driver-fingerprinting fracas.

The companies had said they would bail on the tech hub if voters rejected Proposition 1 to repeal regulations in a dispute that is likely to play itself out in other areas. It's a legal fight that is a victory for taxi cab companies, which have been hit hard by ride-hailing companies.

Nearly 56 percent of voters rejected Proposition 1 on Saturday. The companies spent a combined $8 million in a failed bid to get it passed. The measure would have repealed earlier regulations for transportation network company drivers to pass a driver-history background check and a fingerprint background check. The fingerprints eventually make their way to the FBI. The companies said the regulations were making it too difficult to follow their business models.

This wizard greets visitors to ImageMagick's website. (credit: ImageMagick)

Attackers have wasted no time targeting a critical vulnerability that could allow them to take complete control over websites running a widely used image-processing application, security researchers said.

As Ars reported last week, a vulnerability in ImageMagick allows hackers to execute code of their choice on webservers that use the app to resize or crop user-uploaded images. Over the past few days, security researchers said, attackers have begun uploading booby-trapped images in an attempt to exploit the vulnerability, which is indexed as CVE-2016-3714. CloudFlare, a content delivery network that helps secure and optimize websites, has updated its Web application firewall to block exploits in an attempt to protect customers who have yet to patch the remote code-execution threat.

"We began watching the exploitation of CVE-2016-3714 as soon as the WAF rule went live across our network," CloudFlare researcher John Graham-Cumming wrote in a blog post published Monday. "The bad news is that this vulnerability is being actively used by hackers to attack websites."

Even turtles need more than 4Mbps. (credit: Comcast)

Four US senators say that the Internet speed standard for a government grant program shouldn't be stuck at 4Mbps.

The Community Connect program run by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) funds broadband deployment in rural communities, but it uses a speed standard of just 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. Even that speed is an increase over the 3Mbps (download and upload combined) standard the program used until just a few weeks ago.

US Senators Angus King (I-Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) say that the USDA didn't raise the standard high enough. In a letter last week to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, the senators questioned the decision to set the grant program's speed threshold below the 10Mbps/1Mbps standard used by a separate USDA loan program.