A group of retirees-turned-shipwreck hunters have discovered the remains of the Washington , an 18th century trading vessel that sank to the bottom of Lake Ontario in 1803. The 53-foot sloop is the second largest shipwreck to ever be found in the Great Lakes. Read more…
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Shipwreck Hunters Bag an Amazing Discovery At the Bottom of Lake Ontario
(credit: SpaceX) SpaceX appears to be betting big on carbon fiber composites, which could increase the capacity of its future rockets to get people and supplies into space—and eventually to the surface of Mars. According to a report in Nikkei Asian Review , SpaceX has signed an agreement with Toray Carbon Fibers estimated to be worth $2 billion to $3 billion. The total price and delivery dates have yet to be finalized. It is not immediately clear exactly when, and in which launch vehicles, these lightweight composites will be employed by SpaceX. But the company is not alone in its interest—NASA and other aerospace companies have been experimenting with the materials because they have the potential to increase the amount of payload that can be carried by a rocket. They could also lower overall manufacturing cost. The scale of the deal seems telling, however. If the value of the deal as reported is correct, in the billions of dollars, it seems probable that the carbon fiber composites would be used in SpaceX’s proposed Mars Colonial Transporter rocket. This is the very large (but still under development) rocket the company plans to use to transport humans to Mars. SpaceX is already far along in the production of its Falcon Heavy rocket, which is based on the Falcon 9 core stage. The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, which SpaceX has successfully been landing this year, has tank walls and domes built from an aluminum lithium alloy. (Ars has reached out to SpaceX for comment on this story and will update accordingly). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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He must be serious about Mars: Elon Musk invests $2 billion in carbon fibers
(credit: HEI Hotels & Resorts) The chain that owns Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt, and Intercontinental hotels—HEI Hotels & Resorts— said this weekend that the payment systems for 20 of its locations had been infected with malware that may have been able to steal tens of thousands of credit card numbers and corresponding customer names, expiration dates, and verification codes. HEI claims that it did not lose control of any customer PINs, as they are not collected by the company’s systems. Still, HEI noted on its website that it doesn’t store credit card details either. “We believe that the malware may have accessed payment card information in real-time as it was being inputted into our systems,” the company said. The breach appears to have hit 20 HEI Hotels, and in most cases, the malware appears to have been active from December 2, 2015 to June 21, 2016. In a few cases, hotels may have been affected as early as March 1, 2015. According to a statement on HEI’s website, the malware affected point-of-sale (POS) terminals at the affected properties, but online booking and other online transactions were not affected. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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20 hotels suffer hack costing tens of thousands their credit card information
It’d be cool to see this in a resolution higher than 640×480. (credit: Blizzard Entertainment) Are you one of the thousands of diehard real-time strategy gamers who has yet to abandon the 1998 version of StarCraft ? Would you rather not deal with the sequel’s altered soldiers and upgrade trees, yet also pine for a version of the original that runs at a higher resolution than 640×480 pixels? The game’s creators at Blizzard Software might have a treat in store for you: a remastered version of the original StarCraft . According to Korean news outlet iNews24— spotted by Kotaku on Friday—multiple sources are confident that Blizzard plans to announce StarCraft HD in September. The announcement would be followed by a deeper reveal at BlizzCon’s November event in Anaheim. The Korean report hints at “improved graphics resolution and user interface,” but it doesn’t confirm whether fans should expect redrawn 2D assets or a complete 3D overhaul of the game’s Terran, Protoss, and Zerg races. The report doesn’t mention whether or not the remaster will include single-player content, and it doesn’t mention whether the multiplayer mode will hinge on the Brood War expansion pack (though, based on that version’s dominance in international competitive play, we assume it will). Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Report: Blizzard will reveal HD remaster of StarCraft in September
Wrightspeed is currently working with Mack Trucks to supply the OEM with electric powertrains for its LM chassis. Wrightspeed Out of all of Elon Musk’s recent “Master Plan Part Deux,” the part that really caught our eye was a short paragraph about a Tesla semi. Much of the rest—solar, autonomous driving, ride-sharing—wasn’t exactly unforeseen. But the idea of a heavy duty Tesla electric vehicle took us by surprise and left us scratching our heads. Tesla isn’t the only company going after this market; Wrightspeed, Proterra, and BYD are already building heavy duty urban electric vehicles, and Mercedes-Benz is about to enter the fray. The Nikola Motor Company (no connection to Tesla Motors) already has 7,000 orders for a zero-emission heavy duty freight hauler that won’t be revealed until December. To find out if our confusion over the Tesla Semi is unwarranted, we spoke to some of the big players in the heavy duty EV market. Even though heavy duty vehicles only account for about eight percent of US carbon emissions (light duty vehicles make up roughly 20 percent), Wrightspeed CEO Ian Wright says electrifying that sector makes more economic sense. In fact, Wright doesn’t think the economics work in favor of electric passenger vehicles. “A Nissan Leaf is twice the price of a Versa and you only save $800 a year,” he told Ars, “that’s a 20-year payback time.” Wright goes on: Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Is Elon Musk serious about the Tesla Semi?
An artist’s concept of Moon Express’ MX-1 lander on the surface of the Moon. Moon Express The Outer Space Treaty requires countries to “authorize and continuously supervise” the activities of space missions under their jurisdiction, including those of commercial companies. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration carries out those duties with regard to private spaceflight, and things have worked well enough. But now a number of companies, including SpaceX with its Red Dragon mission , are seeking to push beyond Earth orbit, which has been the traditional boundary for commercial activity. Perhaps the biggest of the many questions this raises is how permissive the federal government would be regarding this new commercial interest. The early answer seems encouraging. The first company to apply for a commercial space mission beyond Earth orbit has just received approval from the federal government. As part of the Google Lunar X Prize competition, Moon Express intends to launch a small, single-stage spacecraft to land on the Moon by the end of 2017. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The federal government just approved first private mission to the Moon
(credit: Alpha six ) Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze has published its latest batch of drive reliability data. The release covers failure information for the 70,000 disks that the company uses to store some 250PB of data. This is the first quarter that Backblaze has been using a reasonable number of new 8TB disks: 45 from HGST and 2720 from Seagate. Drives from both companies are showing comparable annualized failure rates: 3.2 percent for HGST, 3.3 percent for Seagate. While the smaller HGST drives show better reliability, with annualized failure rates below one percent for the company’s 4TB drives, the figures are typical for Seagate, which Backblaze continues to prefer over other alternatives due to Seagate’s combination of price and availability. Annualized failure rates for all of Backblaze’s drives. (credit: Backblaze) But it’s still early days for the 8TB drives. While evidence for the phenomenon is inconclusive, hard drive reliability is widely assumed to experience a “bathtub curve” when plotting its failure rate against time: failure rates are high when the drives are new (due to “infant mortality” caused by drives that contain manufacturing defects) and when the drives reach their expected lifetime (due to the accumulated effects of wear and tear), with a period of several years of low failure rates in the middle. If the bathtub theory is correct, Backblaze’s assortment of 8TB drives should suffer fewer failures in the future. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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8TB disks seem to work pretty well, HGST still impressive
Intel’s Core m3 Compute Stick. Andrew Cunningham Back in January at CES , Intel showed us a full range of mini desktop PCs that it has been releasing steadily over the course of the year. The first was a new, inexpensive version of its Compute Stick , followed by a new, mainstream Skylake NUC , and finally a quad-core NUC box that wasn’t quite like anything the company had done before. Now Intel has sent us the last device we learned about at the beginning of the year: a Core m3-powered version of the Compute Stick that sits somewhere between the Atom version and the Skylake NUC on the price and performance spectrum. It looks more or less like the Atom version we’ve already seen, but it introduces a few neat ideas (and enough performance) that it’s actually plausible as a general-use desktop computer. The bad news is the price tag, which at $380 (with Windows, $300 without, and XXX with Windows and a Core m5) is pretty far outside the sub-$150 impulse-buy zone that the other Compute Sticks exist inside. So how well does it work? What compromises do you make when you shrink a decent laptop’s worth of power into a stick? And how big is the niche for a relatively powerful, relatively expensive stick-sized desktop, anyway? Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Intel’s Core M Compute Stick is an actually usable computer with caveats
The suspected hacking of a Democratic National Committee consultant’s personal Yahoo Mail account provides new evidence that state-sponsored attackers penetrated deeper than previously thought into the private communications of the political machine attempting to defeat Republican nominee Donald Trump. According to an article published Monday by Yahoo News, the suspicion was raised shortly after DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa started preparing opposition research on Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Upon logging in to her Yahoo Mail account, she received a pop-up notification warning that members of Yahoo’s security team “strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.” After Chalupa started digging into Manafort’s political and business dealings in Ukraine and Russia, the warnings had become a “daily occurrence,” Yahoo News reported, citing a May 3 e-mail sent to a DNC communications director. (credit: Yahoo News) It was one of more than 19,000 private DNC messages posted to WikiLeaks on Friday. The massive e-mail dump came five weeks after DNC officials said hackers with backing from the Russian government had breached its network and made off with opposition research into Trump and almost a year’s worth of private e-mail. The airing on WikiLeaks, which included messages in which DNC officials derided Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, has already led to the resignation of Chair Debra Wasserman Schultz. Now, the revelations about Chalupa’s Yahoo account suggest the hack may have gone deeper than previously reported. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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New evidence suggests DNC hackers penetrated deeper than previously thought
Accused Dallas pimp Martavious Banks Keys was ordered by a federal judge to unlock his iPhone with his fingerprint. (credit: Facebook via The Dallas Morning News ) A Dallas, Texas man accused of prostituting underage girls was secretly ordered by a federal judge to unlock his iPhone using his fingerprint, according to federal court documents that are now unsealed. It’s rare that we see a case demanding that a phone be unlocked in that manner, but we should expect more as the mainstream public begins embracing fingerprint technology. Ever since 2013, when Apple popularized this form of unlocking technology, legal experts have predicted that these types of government demands would slowly become more common. Experts also warned these demands are probably not a breach of the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. As an aside, some courts don’t necessarily think that compelling a suspect to reveal their computer passcode is a constitutional violation. A Philadelphia man accused of possessing child pornography has been behind bars on a contempt charge for more than seven months for refusing to divulge his password. The man’s attorney claims it’s a constitutional violation to compel his client to assist the authorities with their prosecution. A federal appeals court has tentatively agreed to hear the case in September as the suspect (who has not been charged with a crime) remains in prison. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Apple’s Touch ID blocks feds—armed with warrant—from unlocking iPhone