Month: February 2019

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, it's time for another Dealmaster. While we usually highlight discounts on known entities, every so often we like to alert you to a product that isn't a household name but is still worth your consideration when it's on sale.

Today is one of those days, as our list is led by a deal on Anker's wireless Soundcore Space NC noise-cancelling headphones. They are currently down to $79 on Amazon when you use the code "TOMSA3021" at checkout. That's $20 off their usual going rate and a great price for one of the few budget noise-cancelling headphones we find acceptable.

Now, if you can afford to pay for a more premium pair from Sony or Bose, do so. Noise-cancelling headphones haven't been commoditized as much as other tech categories; the higher-end gear is still genuinely worth it. But if you can't pony up the $350 it costs to get the best, the Dealmaster has tested the Soundcore Space NC and can say it's effective enough to be good value.

Enlarge (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Facebook is preparing to launch a cryptocurrency, the The New York Times reports. The new cryptocurrency would be integrated with Facebook's WhatsApp messaging platform, allowing ordinary WhatsApp users to send electronic cash to friends and family across international borders. The Times says it talked to five anonymous sources who have been briefed on the project.

The most popular cryptocurrencies float freely against conventional currencies, leading to high volatility. By contrast, Facebook is planning to peg its currency to a basket of national currencies. This approach could give the new WhatsApp coin greater stability without tying it too tightly to any specific country's financial system.

The Times notes that Facebook is just one of several messaging companies that are working on cryptocurrencies. Two privacy-focused messaging apps—Telegram and Signal—are each working on cryptocurrencies of their own, too. These are expected to be more traditional cryptocurrencies not pegged to conventional money.

Enlarge / This singing mouse species (Scotinomys teguina) thrives in the cloud forests of Costa Rica. Their songs could yield clues about how human brains accomplish the "turn-talking" that makes conversation possible. (credit: NYU School of Medicine)

High in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, there's a species of mouse that sings call-and-response duets, similar to the high-speed back and forth humans engage in with conversation. Now scientists have pinpointed the precise brain circuit responsible for this behavior, which may lead to fresh insights into how humans converse, according to a new paper in Science.

Co-author Michael Long of New York University's School of Medicine calls this conversational back and forth "turn talking," likening it to hitting a tennis ball back and forth over a net between two players. "If I were to summarize [the results] in one sentence, I'd say this is the first demonstration of the neural mechanisms that lead to coordinated vocal turn-talking in the mammalian brain," he said. "Our strong prediction from the mouse study is that a similar kind of vocal coordination center may exist in the human brain as well."

Long's lab specializes in the study of vocal communication, something at which human beings excel. We don't often stop to think about the intricate neural processing even a simple conversation requires. The pause time between when one speaker finishes and another begins—called "floor transfer time"—is just 200 milliseconds. But one in ten people experiences some form of communication disorder, whether due to a stroke or a developmental disorder like autism.

Enlarge / An aerial view of homes destroyed by the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. Three months after the deadly and destructive Camp Fire, the community is beginning the rebuilding process. (credit: Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

In a statement on Thursday, California utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) told investors that it would take a $10.5 billion charge related to the deadly Camp Fire that burned through Northern California in November of last year.

"Although the cause of the 2018 Camp Fire is still under investigation, based on the information currently known to the company and reported to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and other agencies, the company believes it is probable that its equipment will be determined to be an ignition point of the 2018 Camp Fire," PG&E told investors.

The utility goes on to state that its Caribou-Palermo 115 kilovolt (kV) transmission line deenergized approximately 15 minutes before a PG&E employee observed a fire in the vicinity of a tower on the line. In addition, "a suspension insulator supporting a transposition jumper had separated from an arm" on the tower in question.

Enlarge / Illustration of a OneWeb satellite. (credit: OneWeb)

OneWeb yesterday launched the first six low-Earth orbit satellites for its planned global broadband network, saying it will provide worldwide broadband access by 2021. The satellites are test units, which OneWeb will evaluate over the next half-year to make sure they work properly.

"If we get six out of six working, that will be amazing," OneWeb founder Greg Wyler said, according to a Bloomberg article.

The satellites were "aboard a Soyuz launch vehicle from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana," the company said in an announcement today. The satellites left the rocket in two batches and "[s]ignal acquisition has been confirmed for all six satellites," the company said.

Enlarge / Tattoo Artifact Andrew Gillreath-Brown (credit: Bub Hubner/WSU)

It’s a simple object about the size of a modern pen: two parallel cactus spines, stained black at the tips and lashed with split yucca leaves to an 89mm (3.5-inch) handle of skunkbrush sumac. But its simplicity hides its significance. Sometime around the start of the Common Era, an Ancestral Pueblo person living in what is now southeastern Utah got a tattoo in black ink. 2,000 years later, archaeologists unearthed the needle, and about 40 years after that, Andrew Gillreath-Brown found it in a box in museum storage, with the ink still staining the tips of the cactus-spine needles.

Gillreath-Brown studied the black pigment under a scanning electron microscope to get a better look at its crystalline structure, and he analyzed its chemical composition with x-ray fluorescence. It turned out to be high in carbon, which is still true of many body paints and tattoo inks in use today. At 2,000 years old, the tool is the oldest tattooing implement ever discovered in western North America, and it’s a clue to a part of prehistoric North American culture that archaeologists still know very little about.

Tattoos have played an important role in many cultures around the world, but anthropologists don’t understand as much as they'd like about the origins of the art form. That's in part because so little evidence remains, and what little we can see is sometimes just as enigmatic as a stranger’s tattoos can be today.

Enlarge / European flags wave in front of the Berlaymont building—the European Commission (EC) headquarter—in Brussels, Belgium. EC commissioners have cited a lack of progress by Google, Facebook, and Twitter on measures to stop disinformation operations associated with European elections. (credit: Michele Spatari/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Last October, in an attempt to fend off additional regulation, advertising trade organizations and major Internet platform providers—including Google, Facebook, and Twitter—signed off on a voluntary code of conduct aimed at reducing the threat posed by fraudulently purchased political advertisements and the posting of "fake news" articles. But a report released by the European Commission today called the social media platforms to task for not living up to those voluntary measures to help protect upcoming elections across Europe in the next few months—and particularly the European Parliament elections in May.

In a joint statement issued by the European Commission, Vice President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip; Commissioner for Justice, Consumers, and Gender Equality Věra Jourová; Commissioner for the Security Union Julian King; and Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Society Mariya Gabriel wrote:

[W]e need to see more progress on the commitments made by online platforms to fight disinformation. Platforms have not provided enough details showing that new policies and tools are being deployed in a timely manner and with sufficient resources across all EU Member States. The reports provide too little information on the actual results of the measures already taken.

Finally, the platforms have failed to identify specific benchmarks that would enable the tracking and measurement of progress in the EU. The quality of the information provided varies from one signatory of the Code to another depending on the commitment areas covered by each report. This clearly shows that there is room for improvement for all signatories... We urge Facebook, Google and Twitter to do more across all Member States to help ensure the integrity of the European Parliament elections in May 2019. We also encourage platforms to strengthen their cooperation with fact-checkers and academic researchers to detect disinformation campaigns and make fact-checked content more visible and widespread.

The EC report specifically called out each of the major social media platforms for specific failures. Facebook was cited for not providing details of its efforts to scrutinize political advertisement placement, which the company said it began in January. Facebook had also promised a Europe-wide archive for political and issue advertising, to be available by March 2019. And while Facebook’s reports to the EC thus far have given details on “cases of interference from third countries in EU Member States,” the commissioners said, it does not provide the number of fake accounts removed due to “malicious activities targeting specifically the European Union.”

Enlarge / Microsoft security experts monitoring the world, looking for hackers. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has announced two new cloud services to help administrators detect and manage threats to their systems. The first, Azure Sentinel, is very much in line with other cloud services: it's dependent on machine learning to sift through vast amounts of data to find a signal among all the noise. The second, Microsoft Threat Experts, is a little different: it's powered by humans, not machines.

Azure Sentinel is a machine learning-based Security Information and Event Management that takes the (often overwhelming) stream of security events—a bad password, a failed attempt to elevate privileges, an unusual executable that's blocked by anti-malware, and so on—and distinguishes between important events that actually deserve investigation and mundane events that can likely be ignored.

Sentinel can use a range of data sources. There are the obvious Microsoft sources—Azure Active Directory, Windows Event Logs, and so on—as well as integrations with third-party firewalls, intrusion-detection systems, endpoint anti-malware software, and more. Sentinel can also ingest any data source that uses ArcSight's Common Event Format, which has been adopted by a wide range of security tools.

Enlarge / Actress Eva Longoria shows off the standard "left side" cabinet grip in a 2007 photo. (credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Did you ever notice that the left-side panel of classic, unrestored Pac-Man arcade cabinets tend to have a distinct wear pattern on their outer finish? Arcade researcher and historian Cat DeSpira did, and she's written a wonderfully detailed examination of the distinct and largely unremarked-upon arcade playing stance that led to this relatively consistent pattern.

Picture yourself in a really intense Pac-Man session on an original standing cabinet. If you're like a large majority of the population, your right hand is wrapped around the game's single control: a joystick centered in the front of the machine. But where do you put your left hand when there are no buttons or secondary controls to occupy it?

Maybe you rest that hand on your side, or place it gently alongside the cabinet's control panel. But as DeSpira notes, it's more likely that: