Tag: vanity-fair

New Kepler analysis finds many Earth-like planets; total 3,500 exoplanets

Sun-like stars are bright enough that their habitable zones are pushed close to the edge of where Kepler is able to detect planets. NASA Although NASA’s Kepler probe has entered a semi-retirement , discoveries from the data it collected continue. Scientists are currently gathered to discuss these results, and they held a press conference today to announce the latest haul. As of today, the Kepler team is adding 833 new exoplanet candidates to its existing haul, bringing the total up to over 3,500. So far, 90 percent of the candidates that have been checked have turned out to be real. The number of planets in the habitable zone has gone up to over 100. In conjunction with the press conference, PNAS is releasing a paper that performs an independent analysis of Sun-like stars. This finds that over 20 percent of these host a planet less than two times the size of Earth’s radius. Within Kepler’s field of view, 10 of them receive an amount of light similar to that reaching Earth. A status update Kepler spots planets by watching them transit in front of their host star. This creates a characteristically square-shaped dip in the amount of light reaching Earth. This method of detection, however, isn’t considered definitive. The sightings are considered candidates and need to be confirmed by another method. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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New Kepler analysis finds many Earth-like planets; total 3,500 exoplanets

Just six people got insurance through HealthCare.gov on day one

HealthCare.gov, as it looked to the few who saw it on the first day of operation. We now know how many people were able to get through the bugs in HealthCare.gov the first day and register for insurance: six. That’s according to meeting notes from a “war room” meeting on the afternoon of October 2 at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance (CCII), the organization inside the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) responsible for oversight of the Affordable Care Act insurance program. The notes, which were released October 31 by Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee , detail the woes the site experienced on its first day. The six lucky people who scored insurance on day one managed to succeed because their unique circumstances didn’t run into a fine sieve of feature problems that blocked most who tried from getting through the front door and derailed others quickly afterward. The litany of woes detailed in the meeting: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Just six people got insurance through HealthCare.gov on day one

New HIV antibodies show potential

The structure of an antibody latched on to a protein found on the surface of HIV. NIAID/National Institutes of Health The dream of an HIV vaccine has been thwarted again and again because the virus evolves so rapidly that the immune system can’t keep up. But the results from a new trial in monkeys suggest that certain antibodies have a powerful enough therapeutic effect that they may warrant clinical trials. Many researchers had given up on antibodies, which are used by the immune system to identify the signature proteins on the outside of invading cells, targeting them for destruction. The HIV virus changes so rapidly that any antibodies that target the virus only work for a little while—the virus stays one step ahead while the immune system struggles to play catch-up. But researchers discovered antibodies that target the converse part of the virus’s structure—the features that are critical to its function and don’t change much over time. These antibodies were discovered in HIV-infected people whose immune systems seemed to keep most strains of HIV in check. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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New HIV antibodies show potential

Mysterious Google barge is a massive showroom, “party deck”

Google’s four-story shipping-container product marketing paradise. KPIX5 The mysterious Google barge discovered floating in San Francisco Bay will be used as a party space and showroom just for Google’s Glass and “other gadgets,” according to sources speaking to KPIX5 in San Francisco. The boat will be stationed near Google’s campus in Mountain View, CA and will host “invitation-only clients.” The existence of Google’s watercraft—one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast in Portland, ME—has been a topic of discussion over the past week. The barges are held under an LLC called By And Large, apparently a reference to Pixar’s “ Buy n Large ” of WALL·E, which is itself a reference to the phrase “by and large.” It is not uncommon for high-profile companies like Google to take cover under an LLC to prepare a secret project. Google filed a patent in 2009 for a floating data center, leading outlets like CNET and AllThingsD to believe that the structures might be Google’s first attempt at realizing this idea. The second theory was that the barges were going to be retail presences for Google Glass as the date of the product’s commercial launch nears. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Mysterious Google barge is a massive showroom, “party deck”

iPad Air’s A7 chip is identical to the iPhone’s, just faster

The iPhone 5S (shown above, in system board phone) and the iPad Air share the exact same SoC. That doesn’t mean there aren’t differences. iFixit When Apple announced its new iPad Air and Retina iPad mini in San Francisco last week, one of the most surprising revelations was that the tablets would both be powered by the same Apple A7 chip used by the iPhone 5S. Since the third-generation iPad was released in early 2012, the vastly different display resolutions of the phones and tablets (1136×640 for iPhones, 2048×1536 for iPads) meant that different chips were needed. Smaller chips like the A5 and A6 were used to meet the power requirements of the phones, while the A5X and A6X picked up more powerful GPUs and wider memory interfaces to drive the tablets’ larger displays. Early reviews of the iPad Air were posted last night, and as usual Anand Shimpi of AnandTech had the most detailed information to share about the tablet’s innards. The short version? For the first time since the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S shared the A5 SoC back in 2011, the flagship iPhones and iPads are using the same silicon. Making the numbers add up Let’s begin with Apple’s performance promises. Apple said that the A7 in the iPhone 5S could often double the CPU and GPU performance of the A6 in the iPhone 5, and our review bore these observations out. Apple also said that the A7 in new iPad Air and the Retina iPad mini could deliver roughly double the CPU and GPU performance of the A6X in the fourth-generation iPad. And yet, the A6X offers roughly twice the GPU power of the A6—our biggest question coming out of the iPad announcement last week was just how all of these statements could be true if the iPhone and iPad were using the same chip. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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iPad Air’s A7 chip is identical to the iPhone’s, just faster

Database hacking spree on US Army, NASA, and others costs gov’t millions

Marcus W Federal prosecutors have accused a UK man of hacking thousands of computer systems, many of them belonging to the US government, and stealing massive quantities of data that resulted in millions of dollars in damages to victims. Lauri Love, 28, was arrested on Friday at his residence in Stradishall, UK following a lengthy investigation by the US Army, US prosecutors in New Jersey said. According to prosecutors, the attacks date back to at least October 2012. Love and other alleged hackers are said to have breached networks belonging to the Army, the US Missile Defense Agency, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others, in most cases by exploiting vulnerabilities in SQL databases and the Adobe ColdFusion Web application. The objective of the year-long hacking spree was to disrupt the operations and infrastructure of the US government by stealing large amounts of military data and personally identifying information of government employees and military personnel, a 21-page indictment said. “You have no idea how much we can fuck with the US government if we wanted to,” Love told a hacking colleague in one exchange over Internet relay chat, prosecutors alleged. “This… stuff is really sensitive. It’s basically every piece of information you’d need to do full identity theft on any employee or contractor” for the hacked agency. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Database hacking spree on US Army, NASA, and others costs gov’t millions

Review: Tesla Motors all-electric Model S is fast—but is it a good car?

This is the first of two pieces we’re publishing on the all-electric Tesla Model S. The other is a video that documents our journey from Houston to Austin and back in the car, and it can be viewed right here . My videographer Steve uttered a single strained curse as inertia’s invisible hand pushed us back into the leather with enough force to knock the camera mount out of alignment. The Tesla’s acceleration was instant, ludicrous, neck-snapping—more appropriate for a roller-coaster than a car. The camera’s point of view was now skewed sideways from this morning’s careful alignment, but Steve didn’t reach for it because we had just gone from 70 miles per hour to north of 100, and we were still going strong. I should have slowed down, because I-10 out west of Houston is the natural habitat of humorless state troopers, but I didn’t. The breathtakingly flat torque curve of the Model S begs to be explored. The pedal under my right foot was just pure magic . No shifting of gears or howling engine here—the only sound was the ever-increasing rush of air as we hurtled toward the car’s 130 mph limiter. And as we accelerated, my prejudices about electric cars were forcibly rearranged. Read 104 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Review: Tesla Motors all-electric Model S is fast—but is it a good car?

Zynga almost breaks even in Q3, but user base still contracts

On Thursday, Zynga released its third quarter results and showed a loss of only $68,000—far better than the embattled gaming company’s losses of $52 million this time last year. And, because that loss was small, beating Zynga’s own expectations for Q3, its shares got a 12 percent boost in after-hours trading on Wall Street, Thursday evening. Still, that modicum of good news is just a sugar coat on an otherwise dismal earnings statement. Zynga’s Q3 revenue was only $203 million, which constitutes a decrease of 36 percent year-over-year, and a decrease of 12 percent from the quarter before. Also, Daily and Monthly Active Users were both down for Zynga. The company lost almost a quarter of its Daily Active Users compared to Q2 2013 (and that statistic is becoming a bit of a trend: we saw that exact headline on last quarter’s earnings report, too). And Zynga lost nearly 30 percent of its Monthly Active Users from Q2 2013. From Q3 2012, the statistics were down 49 percent and 57 percent, respectively. But it looks like Zynga will be progressing conservatively from here. For the fourth quarter of 2013, the company projected revenue in the range of $175 million to $185 million (a substantial decrease from this quarter’s earnings) and a net loss in the range of $31 million to $21 million. After a summer in which the company laid off 18 percent of its workforce and shuttered Omgpop , a games company it acquired for $200 million, Zynga’s next few months will be watched carefully to see how (and whether) the company will weather 2014. Read on Ars Technica | Comments        

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Zynga almost breaks even in Q3, but user base still contracts

Hackers compromise official PHP website, infect visitors with malware (updated)

Wikipedia Maintainers of the open-source PHP programming language have locked down the php.net website after discovering two of its servers were hacked to host malicious code designed to surreptitiously install malware on visitors’ computers. The compromise was discovered Thursday morning by Google’s safe browsing service , which helps the Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers automatically block sites that serve drive-by exploits. Traces of the malicious JavaScript code served to some php.net visitors were captured and posted to Hacker News here and, in the form of a pcap file , to a Barracuda Networks blog post here . The attacks started Tuesday and lasted through Thursday morning, PHP officials wrote in a statement posted late that evening . Eventually, the site was moved to a new set of servers, PHP officials wrote in an earlier statement . There’s no evidence that any of the code they maintain has been altered, they added. Encrypted HTTPS access to php.net websites is temporarily unavailable until a new secure sockets layer certificate is issued and installed. The old certificate was revoked out of concern the intruders may have accessed the private encryption key. User passwords will be reset in the coming days. At time of writing, there was no indication of any further compromise. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Hackers compromise official PHP website, infect visitors with malware (updated)

Microsoft posts record Q1 revenue, increased operating income

Robert Scoble / flickr Microsoft has posted its results for the first quarter of its 2014 financial year. Compared to the same quarter last year, revenue is up 16 percent to $18.529 billion, operating income is up 19 percent to $6.334 billion, and earnings per share is also up, rising 17 percent to $0.62. The way Microsoft is reporting its financials has changed as a result of the reorganization that started earlier this year . Broadly, the results are split into two main parts: a “Devices and Consumer” division, which spans all sales that are end-user facing, including OEM Windows licensing, retail software, Xbox, Windows Phone (including related patent licensing), and Bing advertising; and a “Commercial” division, which spans volume license sales, server products, and consulting. This means that under the new reporting system, some products have their revenue split. Office, Office 365, and Windows, in particular, have both consumer and commercial sales. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Microsoft posts record Q1 revenue, increased operating income