Category: Uncategorised

East 127th Street in Harlem. (credit: Vernon Williams)

Last summer, a manhole fire knocked out Verizon telephone and DSL Internet service at an apartment building on East 127^th Street in Harlem.

Verizon didn’t restore service to the building until Friday of last week, about seven months after the outage began. Needless to say, the owner of the building is angry at Verizon—and also can’t figure out why his building doesn’t yet have Verizon’s fiber-based FiOS service. Verizon made an agreement with New York City to bring FiOS to every household in the city by June 2014, but many buildings still don’t have access.

“You can’t turn around without seeing a pitch for Verizon FiOS,” the building owner, Vernon Williams, told Ars. “It sounds great.” Williams figures that his neighborhood is a lower priority for Verizon because there are fewer customers per block than areas with high-rise buildings.

In a briefing Monday afternoon, Defense Department leaders announced that the US was participating in a coalition operation with Iraqi and Kurd forces to recapture the city of Mosul from the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh). The leading edge of that effort, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said, is an ongoing cyberwarfare operation against the communications infrastructure of the city.

This may be the first time that the US has openly announced that it is using network-based electronic attacks as an integrated part of a military operation. Electronic warfare efforts such as radio jamming have long been part of military operations, and the US allegedly used electronic sabotage against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. But while cyberattacks in the past have been attributed to the US (such as the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear program), and the US has used electronically gathered intelligence to target individuals in the past, the US has rarely acknowledged offensive computer and network attacks. And the DOD has never announced these sorts of attacks as part of an ongoing broader military operation.

Carter said the attacks were intended to "interrupt and… disrupt ISIL's command and control, to cause them to lose confidence in their networks, to overload their networks so they can't function, and to do all of these things that will interrupt their ability to command and control forces there, control the population and the economy."

Ron Amadeo

The Xiaomi Redmi 3.

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Xiaomi is one of the most exciting Android OEMs in the industry—despite the fact that you can't buy the company's phones in the US or Europe. It has redefined the term "bang for your buck" for smartphones, offering low-cost unlocked devices with great specs and build quality.

Previously, we were impressed with the Mi 4 and Mi Note, both of which offered relatively high-end specs for under $400. The Xiaomi Mi 5 will follow a similar pattern, offering the brand new Snapdragon 820 for less than the competition. Xiaomi doesn't just live in the high end of the market, though—today we're asking "What can you build us for about a hundred bucks?" Xiaomi's answer is the astoundingly good Redmi 3.

Rimac Automobili

The Rimac Automobili Concept_One. The world's fastest electric car?

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If yesterday's Bugatti Chiron reveal had you realizing you need a hypercar, but old-fashioned internal combustion is too uncool for school, never fear: Rimac Automobili has you covered. The Croatian electric vehicle maker has been showing off the Concept_One for a while now—we first saw it at last year's Formula E race in Miami, but the production version broke cover at the Geneva auto show this week. How does 1072hp (800kW) and 1180ft-lbs (1600Nm) sound?

The Concept_One uses a pair of electric motors fed by an 82kWh lithium-ion battery pack and all-wheel torque vectoring that Rimac says provides the functions of traction control, stability control, and antilock braking by constantly calculating the optimum torque for each of the four wheels. 0-62mph (0-100km/h) is said to be dispatched in 2.6 seconds, and it should hit 186mph (300km/h) in just 14.2. Top speed won't rival the Bugatti, though—it's limited to 220mph (355km/h).

And if the Concept_One isn't enough for you, it now has an evil twin, called the Concept_S. This version drops some weight (110lb/50kg) and gains an additional 296hp (200kW) and 147 lb-ft (200 Nm). That drops 0.1 seconds off the 0-62mph time and more than a second from the dash to 186mph.

(credit: EIA)

Today, the US Energy Information Administration released data on planned additions to the US power grid this year. The year is notable because it will see the first new nuclear plant brought online in 20 years, contributing 1.1 GigaWatts to the grid. But that contribution will be dwarfed by renewable power sources, which together will account for nearly two-thirds of 2016's new capacity. And these numbers only count utility-scale solar, ignoring commercial and residential installations.

Part of the boom in renewables came because the tax incentives for their installation were in danger of expiring, so utilities rushed to get projects through the pipeline ahead of the end of the year. (The incentives have since been extended in the most recent budget deal.) This led to a phenomenal boom in solar, with 9.5GW of capacity expected to come online—more than the past three years combined.

Last year saw 8.4GW of distributed solar installed in the US (compared to 3.1GW of utility scale); given the continued slide in solar panel prices, that figure is likely to grow as well. Thus, the actual solar capacity installed next year may be double the EIA's estimates. California will see the most installations, with 3.9GW of capacity, followed by North Carolina (1.1GW), Nevada (0.9GW), Texas (0.7GW), and Georgia (0.7GW).