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One of the two JLENS aerostats on the ground at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Two aerostats make up a JLENS "orbit."

Last October, a Defense Department tethered radar blimp broke loose of its moorings near Baltimore and drifted across two states—taking out power lines as it dragged its tether cable behind it in a 13-hour, unguided flight. A new investigation into the incident has revealed that most of the damage could have been avoided. The aerostat—half of the pair used by the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS) System—would have come down without causing nearly as much damage if someone had remembered to install its batteries.

The JLENS program, which uses two high-flying aerostats with radar domes (one a search radar system and the other a targeting radar to lock onto low-flying cruise missiles and other potential threats), has cost over $2.7 billion since the program began in 1998. Each aerostat was equipped with an automatic deflation system to bring the giant floating sensor to the ground quickly in the event of a cable break. But the system's batteries had not been installed at the time of the accident, so the system failed to activate when main power was lost.

The report, a summary of which was obtained by the Los Angeles Times, found that "design, human, and procedural issues all contributed" to the aerostat breaking loose, disrupting air traffic and causing jets to be scrambled to track its progress. When it finally came down 160 miles north in Moreland Township, Pennsylvania, the Army had state police bring it down the rest of the way with approximately 100 shotgun blasts. At the time, authorities believed they had no other way under the circumstances to deflate it.

George Poinar

The new fossil flower Strychnos electri in its original Dominican amber piece of mid-Tertiary age. The whole flower is less than 20 mm long and is the first finding of an asterid flower in amber from the New World.

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This delicate flower has been preserved in amber, with each petal and tiny hair intact, for as many as 45 million years. Scientists discovered the flower in a cave in the Dominican Republic along with a treasure trove of insects preserved in amber. Now the flower has been identified by an expert as a member of the vast Asterid clade of flowers, whose members include the coffee plant as well as potatoes, peppers, and the poisonous Strychnine tree.

Amber is fossilized tree sap, and pinning an exact date on it is extremely difficult. In a paper published this morning in Nature Plants, biologists George Poinar and Lena Struwe carefully used two methods of dating the material to suggest that this flower might have been fossilized as early as 45 million years ago or as late as 15 million. They came up with such a broad spread of dates largely because we still don't have very many fossils from these kinds of plants, which makes precise dates difficult.

The researchers had to date the flower by proxy by examining other life forms found in the amber cache, including the common single-celled organisms known as foraminifera and coccoliths. There are distinct evolutionary and population changes in foraminifera and coccoliths over time, and paleontologists often use these tiny animals to place fossils during specific geological periods. What's certain is that this flower bloomed long before the age of apes during the mid-Tertiary period.

(credit: Shawn)

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday, will go down in history as the backbone of the court's modern conservative wing. The Reagan-appointee's long tenure touched upon so many facets of life that intersection with the Ars worldview was inevitable.

When viewed through this lens, the 79-year-old justice's writings concerned cases involving Aereo, video gaming, GPS tracking, thermal imaging, drug dogs, Second Amendment rights, Obamacare, and DNA among a host of other topics. So as the remembrances and reflections continue to trickle out, here's a reminder of how Justice Scalia's opinions and dissents impacted the technologies and policies we keep an eye on at the Orbital HQ.

American Broadcasting v. Aereo: The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in a 2014 decision that resulted in the shuttering of the over-the-air broadcast TV company Aereo. New York-based Aereo needed the broadcasters' permission to sell monthly subscriptions, the court ruled. The court sided with broadcasters who said that Aereo offering customers tiny antennas to transmit the signal was akin to a cable company. In dissent, Scalia wrote, "The Court manages to reach the opposite conclusion only by disregarding widely accepted rules for service-provider liability and adopting in their place an improvised standard ("looks-like-cable-TV") that will sow confusion for years to come."

(credit: NoHoDamon)

Hackers have siphoned about $103,000 out of Bitcoin accounts that were protected with an alternative security measure, according to research that tracked six years' worth of transactions. Account-holders used easy-to-remember passwords to protect their accounts instead of the long cryptographic keys normally required

The heists were carried out against almost 900 accounts where the owners used passwords to generate the private encryption keys required to withdraw funds. In many cases, the vulnerable accounts were drained within minutes or seconds of going live. The electronic wallets were popularly known as "brain wallets" because, the thinking went, Bitcoin funds were stored in users' minds through memorization of a password rather than a 64-character private key that had to be written on paper or stored digitally. For years, brain wallets were promoted as a safer and more user-friendly way to secure Bitcoins and other digital currencies, although Gregory Maxwell, Gavin Andresen and many other Bitcoin experts had long warned that they were a bad idea.

The security concerns were finally proven once and for all last August when Ryan Castellucci, a researcher with security firm White Ops, presented research at the Defcon hacker convention that showed how easy it was to attack brain wallets at scale. Brain wallets used no cryptographic salt and passed plaintext passwords through a single hash iteration (in this case, the SHA256 function), a shortcoming that made it possible for attackers to crack large numbers of brain wallet passwords at once. Worse, a form of the insecurely hashed passwords are stored in the Bitcoin blockchain, providing all the material needed to compromise the accounts.

For years now, dedicated PC gamers have known Blizzard as one of the few large publishers that has kept an almost singular focus on their platform of choice. So it might come as a surprise that the company seems to be thinking about mobile platforms as the focus for its upcoming real-time strategy plans.

Speaking to VentureBeat recently, a trio of Blizzard executives suggested that the idea of bringing real-time strategy (RTS) to mobile platforms deserves "conscious evaluation," as Senior Vice President and co-founder Frank Pearce put it. That means potentially changing up the way the genre has been known to work in its home on PC, he said.

"If we were going to continue to evaluate experiences in real-time strategy, I think we’d have to figure out what that means to the current player space," Pearce said. "Legacy of the Void is great. [But] I don’t think that people want to sit down and play 45 minute missions any more. I think that space might need some reinventing."

Let us show you how fast 5G will be—as you can see, it will be almost half the speed of 11G. (credit: Embassy Pictures)

AT&T is testing an early version of its 5G network this year, saying it will be 10 to 100 times faster than LTE and might be used for home Internet service. "An early use of 5G’s underlying technology could be delivering broadband to homes and businesses, and it’s possible that we could have limited commercial availability this year depending on the trials," an AT&T spokesperson told Ars.

This sounds like it could fit in with AT&T plans to provide fixed wireless Internet to areas without good wired broadband.

AT&T's announcement on Friday said the 5G network will rely on millimeter waves, which are 30GHz and above and require line-of-sight connections. As we've written before, 5G will also likely use spectrum below 1GHz in order to connect areas that can't be covered by extremely high frequencies.