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What're those SteamVR "chaperone" grid lines doing in an Oculus-exclusive game? Find out yourself if you own an HTC Vive and use the new Revive patch on many "exclusive" Oculus games. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

In the race to the top of virtual reality, Oculus and HTC have kicked off a hardware showdown the likes of which we haven't seen since the "Nintendon't" days. However, the war includes a curious compatibility issue: HTC's current software hub, SteamVR, can be accessible by Oculus headset wearers, but Oculus Home doesn't currently support the HTC Vive.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has publicly stated that "we can only extend our SDK to work with other headsets if the manufacturer allows us to do so," seemingly passing the buck to HTC and Valve in regards to why its Oculus Store games don't natively support the other leading PC headset. Valve has denied this assertion. Either way, we no longer have to wait for the companies to settle their legal and licensing differences, thanks to the efforts of the LibreVR plug-in, dubbed Revive.

Short version: It works, as proven by the above screenshot we snapped of pack-in Oculus game Lucky's Tale running within the SteamVR interface (complete with its "chaperone" boundary lines). The author's test system, which includes a 4.2 GHz i7 processor and a GTX 980Ti, ran all test games without hitches in performance, while other users have reported similarly smooth performance on "VR-ready" Windows 10 PCs.

Founder and CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, at TEDMED 2014. (credit: TEDMED)

After investigations revealed major problems at its blood-testing lab in California, the high-profile medical startup Theranos is in deep water with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). As Ars has reported before, the company faces sanctions, including losing its approval to test human samples.

But, according to a Wednesday report in The Wall Street Journal, the sanctions may also include banning Theranos' CEO and founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and its president, Sunny Balwani, from owning or running any lab for at least two years. The potential ban was mentioned in a letter dated March 18 from the CMS to Theranos. The letter has not been publicly disclosed, but WSJ reporters viewed it.

According to those reporters’ sources, Theranos had 10 days to respond, which it did. The CMS is now looking over its response. If the agency is still displeased with Theranos’ performance, the revocation of its approval to test blood samples and the ban could go into effect within 60 days. Theranos could still appeal the decision, the WSJ noted, but appeals rarely succeed. Between 2001 and the end of 2010, the CMS did not lose a single such case.

Matthew Keys is accused of giving up the CMS login information that ultimately resulted in this short-lived defacement of the LA Times' website. (credit: US DOJ)

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—A federal judge sentenced journalist Matthew Keys to two years in prison Wednesday after he was convicted last year of three counts of conspiracy and criminal hacking.

Prosecutors had asked the judge to impose a sentence of five years, while Keys’ attorneys asked for no prison time.

As Ars reported earlier, Keys was accused of handing over a username and password for former employer KTXL Fox 40's content management system (CMS) to members of Anonymous and instructing people there to “fuck some shit up.” Ultimately, that December 2010 incident resulted in someone else using those credentials to alter a headline and sub-headline on a Los Angeles Times article. The changes lasted for 40 minutes before editors reversed them. (At the time, the two media companies were both owned by Tribune Company.)

(credit: CDC)

After months of speculation and mounting data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially confirmed Wednesday that the Zika virus does indeed cause microcephaly, a devastating birth defect in which babies are born with small, malformed heads and brains.

Researchers with the agency came to the conclusion after a review of existing data on the virus. There was no single piece of evidence that tipped the scales, the authors note. Rather, the accumulation of data from numerous sources convinced them of the link. Their analysis is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“This study marks a turning point in the Zika outbreak,” Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, said in a statement. “We are also launching further studies to determine whether children who have microcephaly born to mothers infected by the Zika virus is the tip of the iceberg of what we could see in damaging effects on the brain and other developmental problems.”

(credit: Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center/ Batelle)

With a paralyzing spinal cord injury, the biological wiring that hooks up our controlling brains to our useful limbs gets snipped, leading to permanent loss of sensation and control and usually a lifetime of extra health care. Researchers have spent years working to repair those lost connections, allowing paralyzed patients to sip coffee and enjoy a beer with robotic limbs controlled by just their minds.

Now, researchers have gone a step further, allowing a paralyzed person to control his own hand with just his mind.

In a study published Wednesday in Nature, researchers report using a “neural bypass” that reconnects a patient’s mental commands for movement to responsive muscles in his limbs, creating somewhat of a synthetic nervous system. The pioneering patient, Ian Burkhart, a 24-year-old man left with quadriplegia after a diving accident almost six years ago, can once again move his hand. In the pilot study he could control movement of individual fingers, grasp big and small objects, swipe a credit card, and play Guitar Hero. The advance may open the door to restorative treatments for paralyzed individuals, allowing them to have independent movement—and lives.

Enlarge / The number of zero days showed their sharpest rise ever in 2015, reaching a record 54. (credit: Symantec)

The number of attacks that exploited previously unknown software vulnerabilities more than doubled in 2015 as hackers raced against security defenders to find effective ways to infect end users with malware, according to a recently released report.

The number of "zero-day" exploits—a term that was coined because affected software developers have zero days to release a patch that keeps users protected—reached an unprecedented 54, according to researchers at security firm Symantec. That number compared with 24 in 2014, 23 in 2013, and 14 in 2012. The increase was partly caused by the breach of Italy-based zero day broker Hacking Team, which spilled six closely guarded zero days into the public domain. It also came as Adobe and other developers significantly reduced the time it took to release patches that plugged zero-day holes.

"It is difficult to defend against new and unknown vulnerabilities, particularly zero-day vulnerabilities for which there may be no patch, and attackers are trying hard to exploit them faster than vendors can roll out patches," Symantec researchers wrote in the company's annual Internet Security Threat Report. The report went on to say that the Angler exploit kit, a package sold in Internet crime forums, was able to quickly integrate the growing number of zero days into its arsenal.

I am delighted to sell you flowers. Please use this Messenger window to tell me where to deliver them. (credit: Caprica)

Facebook has become a social network for cyborgs. It happened yesterday at Facebook developer conference F8 while everyone was busy eye-rolling over Mark Zuckerberg's keynote about saving the world. The company has launched a bot revolution, and ironically (or not), these bots will eventually replace tech workers in the exact emerging markets that Zuck vowed to rescue with his largesse.

The core of Facebook's idea is to chase its ever-expanding audience, which is flocking to Messenger. Last year, Messenger was the fastest growing app in the US, and now it has almost a billion users. Though Facebook itself claims 1.59 billion monthly active users, it's obvious that Messenger has grown massively since becoming a standalone app in 2014. So Facebook is turning Messenger into a platform with open APIs. And just as developers once built apps on top of Facebook, they'll now build bots on top of Messenger.

What does that mean? Facebook obviously doesn't have the answer yet—that's why they're inviting developers to figure it out for them. That said, there are a few hints of the bot ecosystem to come. In its announcement of the Messenger Platform, the company explains: