news.buyenne.com

Battelle's DroneDefender, a "directed RF weapon" for taking down drones.

2 more images in gallery

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland—Anti-drone technology has been high on the shopping list of public safety and military organizations at least since a drunken federal employee crashed a drone onto the White House lawn. Two companies on hand at the Navy League Sea Air Space Exposition here this week had two slightly different approaches to the problem. One anti-drone device has already been deployed in the hands of federal law enforcement and the military, and a "street legal" version may be coming soon.

The drone "killer" getting the most attention at Sea Air Space was the DroneDefender, a system developed by researchers at the nonprofit research and development organization Battelle. DroneDefender is a two-pronged drone jammer—it can disrupt command-and-control signals from a remote operator or disrupt automatic GPS or GLONASS guidance, depending on which of the devices' two triggers is pulled.

Powered by a small backpack, DroneDefender looks like some futuristic over-under, radio-frequency shotgun-grenade launcher. Targeted through a simple optical sight, the device has a range of about 400 meters. Battelle calls it a "directed RF energy weapon"—it sends out a jamming signal in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands or global positioning bands in a 30-degree cone around the point of aim.

It's been seven weeks since Frontier completed a purchase of Verizon's fiber and copper networks in California, Florida, and Texas, and the company is finally explaining why so many former Verizon customers have been hit by service outages.

Bad data from Verizon is the culprit, Frontier West Region President Melinda White told lawmakers in California yesterday during a nearly-two-hour hearing held by the State Assembly's Utilities & Commerce Committee. Corrupted data prevented Frontier's network from communicating properly with equipment at customers' homes, making it impossible to provision service to everyone, she said.

Frontier is providing bill credits to customers who lost service.

As part of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update this summer, the Xbox One is being upgraded to support application development. In preparation for this change, Xbox One consoles enrolled in the preview program can be flipped into developer mode to allow development and experimentation to commence.

Whenever a system is newly opened up to developers, it's inevitable that it will soon be used to run either Windows 95 or Doom, and it appears that the Xbox One is no exception to this rule. The Dosbox emulator has been ported to the Universal Windows Platform, and that emulator has been used to boot and run Windows 95. Disappointingly, no Doom was attempted, but the shareware version of Duke Nukem 3D and the ZSNES emulator were both also demonstrated running.

The emulator is very slow, as it's using Dosbox's interpreted mode, wherein the processor is fully emulated in software. Dosbox has a faster dynamic mode that uses the host processor to execute as much code as possible, but the person who made the port, YouTube user vcfan, writes that this feature is currently suffering from some crashes in 64-bit mode. When enabled, vcfan says that the system "flies."

The standalone Android Auto interface.

10 more images in gallery

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA—Google is showing off a major Android Auto upgrade at Google I/O, and many of the features address long-standing user requests.

First up is the standalone Android Auto app. You can now get most of the Android Auto experience without needing a brand new car or going through the complicated process of ripping out your car stereo. The app can launch a revised version of the Android Auto interface right on your phone.

The phone version loads up big, chunky buttons with a simpler UI that should be easier to use while driving. On the Android Auto home screen, the navigation bar changes to an Android Auto-style app switcher with Maps, Music, and Phone icons. When you're not on the home screen, the navigation bar changes to show Back and Home icons. Notifications appear as huge, full-screen pop-ups with large, simple text strings.

Larry Ellison, then-CEO of Oracle Corp., leaves federal court in San Francisco after testifying during the 2012 trial. Ellison only appeared by video in the most recent legal clash with Google. (credit: Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—Presentation of evidence in the Oracle v. Google trial ended today, and US District Judge William Alsup has sent the jury home for a long weekend. On Monday, the jury members will come back to hear closing arguments and begin their deliberations.

The lawsuit began when Oracle sued Google in 2010 over its use of 37 Java APIs, which Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems. In 2012, a judge ruled that APIs can't be copyrighted at all, but an appeals court disagreed. Now, unless a jury finds that Google's use of APIs was "fair use," Oracle could ask for as much as $9 billion in damages.

The final hours of court time today were filled with a short Google rebuttal case, in which the company called two witnesses.

(credit: Uber)

One day, the Uber that comes to fetch you might not have anyone in the driver's seat. On Thursday, Uber announced that it will begin testing an autonomous Ford Fusion hybrid on the streets of Pittsburgh, home to Uber's Advanced Technology Center.

Drivers in Pittsburgh should have no problem spotting the research vehicle—it's carrying an array of sensors on its roof that includes a radar, lidar, and cameras. The Uber test car will actually be mapping its surroundings in addition to testing out autonomous driving—although there will be a human operator in the driver's seat at all times to take over at a moment's notice.

We've known for some time that Uber has had an interest in autonomous vehicles. In the past, the company had been working with Google, but that relationship apparently deteriorated last year. It's not the only ride-sharing service looking to ditch the human aspect, either. In January, we reported that General Motors invested $500 million in Lyft with the goal of developing a network of self-driving taxis.

(credit: Rockydallas)

ISPs around the world are being attacked by self-replicating malware that can take complete control of widely used wireless networking equipment, according to reports from customers and a security researcher who is following the ongoing campaign.

San Jose, California-based Ubiquity Networks confirmed on Friday that attackers are actively targeting a flaw in AirOS, the Linux-based firmware that runs the wireless routers, access points, and other gear sold by the company. The vulnerability, which allows attackers to gain access to the devices over HTTP and HTTPS connections without authenticating themselves, was patched last July, but the fix wasn't widely installed. Many customers claimed they never received notification of the threat.

Nico Waisman, a researcher at security firm Immunity, said he knows of two Argentina-based ISPs that went dark for two days after being hit by the worm. He said he's seen credible reports of ISPs in Spain and Brazil being infected by the same malware and that it's likely ISPs in the US and elsewhere were also hit, since the exploit has no geographic restrictions. Once successful, the exploit he examined replaces the password files of an infected device and then scans the network it's on for other vulnerable gear. After a certain amount of time, the worm resets infected devices to their factory default configurations, with the exception of leaving behind a backdoor account, and then disappears. Ubiquity officials have said there are at least two variations, so it's possible other strains behave differently.

Enlarge / The 2015 Chromebook Pixel will be one of the first to be able to run Android apps. The original 2013 Chromebook Pixel doesn't even make the list. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The Google Play store is coming to Chrome OS, and it's bringing every single Android app along with it. That means that every app that runs on Android—everything from Microsoft Word to Hearthstone to Firefox—will be able to run on Chrome OS without noticeable performance penalties. At least, you'll be able to run Android apps if you have a modern Chromebook.

Google has published a compatibility list for the feature, including both the small handful of systems that will be compatible with the early developer channel betas and a longer list of Chromebooks, Chromeboxes, and Chromebases that will be supported later in 2016 as the stable version rolls out. That list doesn't include most Chromebooks more than two years old, which Google tells us is intentional; Android apps should be supported on all new Chromebooks going forward and older hardware going back to 2015 or late 2014, but hardware older than that isn't likely to run them.

The cutoff appears to be mostly age-based and not influenced by the system's OEM, capabilities, speed, price, or CPU architecture. The original Chromebook Pixel doesn't show up on the list, for instance, despite being a Google-made system with a touchscreen and faster hardware than many modern low-end Chromebooks. Many of these systems will continue to get regular Chrome OS updates for some time yet, since Google's Chrome OS End of Life policy guarantees updates for at least five years from a device's release date. And enterprising Chrome OS users may find some way to enable the feature unofficially. But at least for now, newer Chromebooks are going to have access to a whole pile of apps that older Chromebooks just can't use.

CDC staff show two plates growing bacteria in the presence of discs containing various antibiotics. The isolate on the left plate is susceptible to the antibiotics on the discs and is therefore unable to grow around the discs. The one on the right has a CRE that is resistant to all of the antibiotics tested and is able to grow near the disks. (credit: CDC)

Without new drugs and drastic changes to the way we use antimicrobials, the future may have a lot in common with the dark ages, warns a new report commissioned by the UK government and released Thursday.

In an ominous description, the report suggests that by 2050, antimicrobial-resistant infections could sop up $100 trillion from the global economy while killing off 10 million people per year—about a death every three seconds. In addition, common procedures, such as gut surgeries, C sections, hip replacements, and therapies that suppress the immune system, including cancer chemotherapies, may be ditched for fear of sparking resistant, life-threatening infections. Thus, childbirth could once again be widely considered a deadly endeavor, joint injuries could go untreated, and curable diseases could revert to incurable.

This grim view stems from modeled scenarios carried out by two consulting groups, auditors KPMG and Rand Europe, for the report. But those numbers are likely an underestimate, the authors note. The report only accounts for a handful of types of antimicrobial infections, and it is limited by poor infection records. Currently, experts estimate that drug-resistant microbes cause 700,000 deaths per year globally, but that number may also be an underestimate. The new report also didn’t account for all indirect healthcare costs.