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Tesla Model X production starts in earnest, pricing revealed

(credit: Tesla) Several months ago we found out pricing for the fully loaded “Signature” edition Tesla Model X electric SUV. Now, we’ve got a better idea of what the cheapest Model X will set you back: $80,000 before any options and tax rebates or incentives. That’s for the 70D, which has all-wheel drive (a motor for each axle) and a 70kWh battery (pricing for the 90D and P90D haven’t been announced). That’s $5000 more than the equivalent Model S sedan , which hits 60mph a little quicker and has a slightly longer range than the SUV but not the same funky rear doors. The distinctive Falcon wing doors are Tesla’s approach to making an SUV with all the utility of a minivan; that was how Elon Musk described the design brief back in September. By opening up and out, they’re supposed to give better access to the rear seats while taking up less space than a traditional door. There are three different interior layouts. The base 70D is a five seater, but there’s also a six seat version (three rows of two) for an extra $3000 and seven seats are yours for $4500. Tesla released the pricing information for the 70D Model X at the same time it told customers with preorders that they can begin configuring their vehicles. Screenshots of the online configurator provided by Tesla to Ars state that Model X deliveries will begin in early 2016, starting with range-topping P90D orders. “Lesser” 90D Model Xs follow by mid-year, with 70D deliveries before 2017. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tesla Model X production starts in earnest, pricing revealed

Chicago issued $2.4 million in bogus traffic tickets from speed cameras

The Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday as part of an exhaustive investigation that as many as 110,000 “questionable” speeding tickets totalling $2.4 million have been issued in the past two years in Chicago as part of a speed-camera program designed to keep kids safe near parks and schools. …City Hall has systematically ticketed drivers near schools without the legally required evidence of a schoolchild in sight. A Tribune random-sample analysis puts the number of those questionable tickets at about 110,000. And while it was pitched by the mayor as a way to protect youngsters walking near parks and schools, the most prolific cameras in the 2-year-old “Children’s Safety Zone” initiative can be found along major roadways, where crash data show child pedestrians are least likely to be struck by speeders. The lengthy  report is worth a read. Among other things, the report found that Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s speed camera program issued 22,000 tickets for speeding near parks and another 11,000 tickets near parks that were closed for the night. What’s more, another 28,000 citations “were issued at cameras plagued by problems with warning signs that did not meet the minimum legal requirements.” And at least 62,000 tickets were given during the summer “when school activity is so limited that drivers are left to guess whether school is in session or not.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chicago issued $2.4 million in bogus traffic tickets from speed cameras

Single course of antibiotics can mess up the gut microbiome for a year

(credit: Global Panorama/Flickr ) In a battle against an infection, antibiotics can bring victory over enemy germs. Yet that war-winning aid can come with significant collateral damage; microbial allies and innocents are killed off, too. Such casualties may be unavoidable in some cases, but a lot of people take antibiotics when they’re not necessary or appropriate. And the toll of antibiotics on a healthy microbiome can, in some places, be serious, a new study suggests. In two randomized, placebo-controlled trials of healthy people, a single course of oral antibiotics altered the composition and diversity of the gut microbiome for months, and in some cases up to a year. Such shifts could clear the way for pathogens, including the deadly Clostridium difficile . Those community changes can also alter microbiome activities, including interacting with the immune system and helping with digestion. Overall, the data, published Tuesday in the journal mBio , suggests that antibiotics may have more side effects than previously thought—at least in the gut. In the mouth, on the other hand, researchers found that microbial communities fared much better, rebounding in weeks after antibiotic treatments. The finding raises the question of why the oral microbiome is less disturbed by drugs. It could simply be because of the way that antibiotics, taken orally, circulate through the body. Or, it could imply that oral microbiomes are innately more resilient, a quality that would be useful to replicate in microbial communities all over the body. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Single course of antibiotics can mess up the gut microbiome for a year

AT&T expands gigabit fiber to 23 cities starting at $70 (or $110)

AT&T’s updated GigaPower coverage map. (credit: AT&T ) AT&T yesterday announced expansions of its gigabit fiber Internet service into parts of 23 cities and towns. The new markets are mostly in the suburbs of big cities where AT&T already offered its fastest broadband. For example, AT&T previously brought its “U-verse with GigaPower” service to Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Nashville, and Orlando. The expansion this week brings the service into a bunch of cities and towns within the larger metro areas. Pricing for the Internet-only 1Gbps package is either $70 a month or $110 a month, depending on where you live. As we’ve reported previously, AT&T tends to match Google Fiber’s $70 pricing , but not in areas where Google isn’t offering service. Besides that, AT&T’s lowest price in each city requires customers to opt into “Internet Preferences ,” which gives the company permission to examine each customer’s Web traffic in order to serve personalized ads. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T expands gigabit fiber to 23 cities starting at $70 (or $110)

Microsoft considers blocking SHA-1 certificates after cost of collisions slashed

Microsoft may phase out support for TLS certificates that use the SHA-1 hashing algorithm as early as June 2016 . The decision comes in the wake of recent calculations that suggest generating collisions is quicker and cheaper than previously anticipated. SHA-1 is a hash algorithm, used to derive a 128-bit value from an arbitrary input. Its intent is for collisions—different inputs that hash to the same 128-bit value—to be hard to generate. As compute power has steadily grown over the years, it becomes quicker and cheaper to generate collisions. It was previously projected by Bruce Schneier , based on the observed growth of compute power, that creating SHA-1 collisions would be within reach of criminals by 2018 at a cost of about $173,000. On this basis, Microsoft intended to cease supporting the use of new SSL/TLS certificates using SHA-1 on January 1, 2016 and all SHA-1 SSL/TLS certificates on January 1, 2017. The new cost and performance estimates, however, suggest that the cost is both drastically lower—$75,000 to $120,000—and that the compute resources are immediately available through cloud services such as Amazon EC2. This has given browser vendors little option but to reconsider the previous 2017 timetable for retiring support of SHA-1. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft considers blocking SHA-1 certificates after cost of collisions slashed

First-of-its-kind gene-edited cells treat baby’s leukemia

(credit: Sharon Lees/Great Ormond Street Hospital ) With genetic tweaks and snips, researchers created cancer-busting immune cells that, so far, seem to have wiped out a life-threatening form of leukemia in a one-year-old girl. The new cells are one-size-fits-all, beating out earlier cell-based cancer therapies that required custom engineering of each patient’s own immune cells. If proven effective in more trials, the new, generic cells could offer an easy, off-the-shelf treatment for life-threatening forms of leukemia. “It is something we’ve been waiting for,”  said Stephan Grupp, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the research. Previous methods requiring engineering cells, specifically T cells, from every single patient could be slow, costly, and impossible in some patients with low T cell counts. “The innovation here is gene-editing T cells so that one person’s T cells could be given to another even if they are not a donor match,” he said in a statement. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First-of-its-kind gene-edited cells treat baby’s leukemia

Vast, uncharted viral world discovered on human skin

A transmission electron microscopy image of a bunch of bacteriophages. (credit: ZEISS Microscopy/Flickr ) In the microbial metropolises that thrive in and on the human body, underground networks of viruses loom large. A closer look at human skin has found that it’s teeming with viruses, most of which don’t target us but infect the microbes that live there. Almost 95 percent of those skin-dwelling virus communities are unclassified, researchers report in mBio . Those unknown viruses may prune, manipulate, and hide out in the skin’s bacterial communities, which in turn can make the difference between human health and disease. The finding highlights how much scientists still have to learn about the microscopic affairs that steer human welfare. Past attempts to unmask the viruses on the human body have been hindered by technical difficulties. Viral genomes are much smaller than those of bacteria, making them hard to identify and sift from contamination. In the new study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used an advanced method to specifically isolate the DNA of virus-like particles from skin swabs. The researchers also screened viral DNA found on swabs that never touched human skin, allowing them to quickly identify and toss contaminating viruses from their analysis. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Vast, uncharted viral world discovered on human skin

OEMs to stop selling PCs with Windows 7 by October 31, 2016

In February last year , Microsoft said that it would give a one year warning of when systems with Windows 7 preinstalled would no longer be available from OEMs. That time has finally come to pass. As spotted by Ed Bott , there’s now a date after which Windows 7 OEM preinstalls will no longer be available: October 31, 2016. That same date will also apply to Windows 8.1. Windows 8 preinstalls will end a few months earlier than that, June 30, 2016. This means that after October 31 next year, the only version of Windows that will be available on a new system from a PC builder will be Windows 10. Right now, OEMs can still offer Windows 7 Professional (though not any of the other versions), Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10. Windows 7 will remain supported until January 10, 2020. It left mainstream support earlier this year, so it’s no longer eligible to receive non-security fixes or extra features but still has many years of security updates. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OEMs to stop selling PCs with Windows 7 by October 31, 2016

How to use Tor Messenger, the most secure chat program around

(credit: Samuel Huron ) On Thursday, the Tor Project released its first public beta of Tor Messenger , an easy-to-use, unified chat app that has security and cryptography baked in. If you care about digital security, you should ditch whatever chat program you’re using and switch to it right now. The app is specifically designed to protect location and routing information ( by using Tor ) and chat data in transit (by using the open source Off-The-Record, or OTR, protocol ). For anyone who has used a similar app (like Pidgin or Adium), Tor Messenger’s interface will be fairly self-explanatory, but there are two notable quirks. First, by default, it will not allow you to send messages to someone who doesn’t support OTR—but there is an option to disable that feature. (We’ll get to that in a minute.) Second, unlike Pidgin or Adium, Tor Messenger cannot log chats, which is handy if you’re privacy-minded. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How to use Tor Messenger, the most secure chat program around

Low-cost IMSI catcher for 4G/LTE networks tracks phone’s precise locations

Enlarge (credit: Shaik, et al. ) Researchers have devised a low-cost way to discover the precise location of smartphones using the latest LTE standard for mobile networks , a feat that shatters widely held perceptions that it’s immune to the types of attacks that targeted earlier specifications. The attacks target the LTE specification , which is expected to have a user base of about 1.37 billion people by the end of the year. They require about $1,400 worth of hardware that run freely available open-source software. The equipment can cause all LTE-compliant phones to leak their location to within a 32- to 64-foot (about 10 to 20 meter) radius and in some cases their GPS coordinates, although such attacks may be detected by savvy phone users. A separate method that’s almost impossible to detect teases out locations to within an area of roughly one square mile in an urban setting. The researchers have devised a separate class of attacks that causes phones to lose connections to LTE networks, a scenario that could be exploited to silently downgrade devices to the less secure 2G and 3G mobile specifications. The 2G, or GSM, protocol has long been known to be susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks using a form of fake base station known as an IMSI catcher  (like the Stingray). 2G networks are also vulnerable to attacks that reveal a phone’s location within about 0.6 square mile . 3G phones suffer from a similar tracking flaw . The new attacks, described in a research paper published Monday, are believed to be the first to target LTE networks, which have been widely viewed as more secure than their predecessors. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Low-cost IMSI catcher for 4G/LTE networks tracks phone’s precise locations