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An artist's impression of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft atop an Atlas V rocket. (credit: Boeing Defense)

NASA has pinpointed next year as the time when its dependence upon Russia to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station will finally end. However, one of the two companies now slated to provide that service, Boeing, has said it will not be able to launch a crewed mission of its Starliner spacecraft until 2018 at the earliest.

In a report that first appeared in GeekWire, chief executive officer of Boeing’s defense, space and security division, Leanne Caret, told investors: “We’re working toward our first unmanned flight in 2017, followed by a manned astronaut flight in 2018." The company has been struggling to limit the mass of the spacecraft and acoustic issues related to its launch vehicle, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.

After an intense competition with other providers, Boeing received $4.2 billion in 2014 to finalize development of the Starliner capsule, and SpaceX received $2.6 billion to finish development of its Dragon capsule. A spokesman for SpaceX told Ars Wednesday night that the company remains on track for crewed missions in 2017.

More than 36 organizations—some in the gas, telecommunications, and steel manufacturing industries—have been breached by attackers exploiting a vulnerability in older SAP business applications that gives them remote access to highly confidential data, the US government-sponsored CERT warned Wednesday.

The attacks were carried out over the past three years by attackers exploiting the "invoker servlet," which is a set of functions in SAP applications that allows users to run Java applications without use of a password or other authentication measure. Attackers outside the targeted organizations have abused the feature to gain access to sensitive data and possibly to take control over servers that process the data, according to researchers at security firm Onapsis.

"The exploitation of this vulnerability gives remote unauthenticated attackers full access to the affected SAP platforms, providing them with complete control of the business information and processes run by them, as well as potentially further access to connected SAP and non-SAP systems," company researchers wrote in a blog post published Wednesday.

(credit: Dan Pisut/NOAA NNVL)

El Niño and La Niña may have diminutive names, but anyone who keeps an eye on climate news or weather reports knows their impact around the globe isn’t small. Like a mythical two-faced beast, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) seems to have a mind of its own. Currently, we can’t forecast which one we’re going to get much more than a few months before it appears. So it’s interesting to look back and ask why an expected El Niño fizzled in 2014. It turns out the answer also helps explain why the current El Niño grew into such a monster.

The El Niño Southern Oscillation relates to the pattern of sea surface temperatures along the equatorial Pacific Ocean. In neutral conditions, the westward-blowing trade winds push surface waters aside, uncovering deeper, colder water along the South American coastline that wells up to the surface. Warmer surface water piles up on the other side of the Pacific, near the Philippines.

In a La Niña, more cold water is brought up in the east and the cool area spreads to the west. Conversely, an El Niño occurs when the warm water from the west sloshes eastward, putting a lid on the upwelling of cold water near South America. The different sizes and positions of these warm and cool patches of ocean water shift weather patterns around the globe, and help drive the global average surface temperature.

Author's approximation of what VR on Chrome might look like. (A little too literal? Whatever.)

The ongoing virtual reality battles aren’t just being waged on the hardware side. Software firms are making a big play for the platform—particularly the ones making 3D engines, which game and app makers are heavily relying on to help them create optimized content that looks good and runs at a crisp 90 frames-per-second refresh.

While Unity and Unreal have fetched the most headlines about VR 3D engines, Google might have a surprising game-changer on its hands: the Chrome Web browser.

A Wednesday report from Road to VR surfaced a late-April speech from Google software engineer Boris Smus, and that speech stood out because it stressed efforts by the Chrome team to finally support a 90 frames-per-second refresh for systems such as the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Up until recently, the burgeoning WebVR platform had been capped at 60 FPS, which doesn’t reach the necessary visual-smoothness threshold needed to ensure comfort for VR users.

James Comey (right) is the director of the FBI.

The head of the FBI said Wednesday that the government will bring more legal cases over encryption issues in the near future, according to Reuters.

Speaking with reporters at FBI headquarters in Washington, FBI Director James Comey specifically said that end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp is affecting the agency’s work in "huge ways." However, he noted the FBI has no plans to sue Facebook, the app’s parent company.

He also said that since October 2015, the FBI has examined "about 4,000 digital devices" and was unable to unlock "approximately 500."

(credit: Wikimedia)

Things aren’t going well for two of the country’s top health agencies—the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tuesday, USA Today reported that the CDC has repeatedly faced secret federal sanctions over the mishandling of bioterror pathogens in several of its labs. The report, which came about only after USA Today won a Freedom of Information Act appeal, reveals that the CDC is one of just a handful of facilities that had a lab suspended after serious safety violations were found. The CDC acknowledged after the FOIA appeal that its labs have gotten into trouble with federal regulators six times for unsafely handling bacteria, viruses, and/or toxins that are considered potential bioterror weapons.

The agency refused to reveal the specific labs and most of the bioterror agents involved in the mishaps, citing security reasons and the federal Bioterrorism Act. However, it vaguely described issues such as “sending improperly killed select agent pathogens to entities not approved to receive them” and storing potential bioterror weapons in “un-registered” spaces within CDC labs. The CDC said that one of the incidents involved Japanese encephalitis virus, which can cause deadly brain inflammation. The agency was quick to note that the virus is no longer considered a potential bioterror weapon by the government.