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London to NYC in just 3.4 hours? A roundtrip will set you back $5,000

An artist’s conception of the Boom aircraft at London’s Heathrow Airport. (credit: Boom) After more than a decade of dormancy commercial supersonic flight may soon return to the skies. The Soviet Tupolev supersonic aircraft flew just a few dozen flights back in 1977, and the Concorde, flown by British Airways and Air France, retired in 2003 after a fatal accident three years earlier that compounded economic problems. But now Richard Branson and his Virgin empire are ready to try it again. According to   The Guardian , Branson has signed a deal with an American firm to bring commercial supersonic travel to the airways, beginning with trans-Atlantic flights between London and New York City. The agreement brings Branson’s Virgin Galactic into a partnership with Colorado-based Boom, founded by Amazon executive Blake Scholl. Virgin Galactic, according to a company spokeswoman, will provide engineering, design, operations, and manufacturing services, along with flight tests at Virgin’s base in Mojave, Calif. It will then have an option to buy the first 10 airframes from Boom. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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London to NYC in just 3.4 hours? A roundtrip will set you back $5,000

10 more OEMs pledge to make auto-braking standard in new cars

(credit: Ford) The number of car makers committed to making automatic emergency braking a standard feature on all new cars has doubled this week. On Thursday the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety announced that 20 manufacturers are now onboard with the plan, which will see AEB systems installed throughout their model range by 2022. In September of last year, we reported that 10 OEMs had already made the pledge. In the past, government mandates were needed to spread advanced driver safety aids like airbags or electronic stability control systems beyond the luxury cars in which they first appeared. In this case, the auto industry has gotten ahead of possible NHTSA regulation and looks set to implement AEB itself. Speaking at an event last Fall , NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said that NHTSA wanted to see OEMs implement AEB as quickly as possible. “Safety,” he said, “should not be a luxury item. Its an obligation for all of us.” Whether 2022 qualifies as “quickly” may be a matter of opinion, but may be reasonable given the long product development lifecycles of new vehicles. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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10 more OEMs pledge to make auto-braking standard in new cars

Off-switch for overeating and obesity found in the brain

Littermates were injected with either a control virus (right) or a virus that knocked out O-GlcNAcTransferase (OGT) (left) in a subpopulation of cells in the hypothalamus in the brain. OGT knock out made the mouse eat twice as much as its sibling. This photo was taken about five weeks after virus injection. (credit: Olof Lagerlof ) After tediously tracking calories and willfully shunning cravings, many a dieter has likely dreamt of simple switch that, when thrown, could shut down hunger and melt away pounds—and scientists may have just found it. When researchers knocked down a single enzyme in the brains of mice, the rodents seemed to lose the ability to tell when they were full. They ate more than twice their usual amount of food at meal times and tripled their body fat within three weeks. And—most strikingly—when the researchers reversed the experiment, the mice just quickly stopped eating so much . Data on the enzymatic switch, published Thursday in Science , suggests a possible target for future drugs to treat obesity in humans. The enzyme is O-GlcNAc transferase, or OGT, which is known to work in a chemical pathway controlled by nutrients and metabolic hormones, particularly insulin. That pathway has long been linked with obesity. But researchers knew almost nothing about the how the pathway linked to the metabolic disorder or OGT’s specific role. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Off-switch for overeating and obesity found in the brain

Encrypted WhatsApp messages frustrate new court-ordered wiretap

(credit: Hernán Piñera ) The US Department of Justice has opened another legal front in the ongoing war over easy-to-use strong encryption. According to a Saturday report in  The New York Times , prosecutors have gone head-to-head with WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook. Citing anonymous sources, the  Times  reported that “as recently as this past week,” federal officials have been “discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp’s encryption.” The case, which apparently does not involve terrorism, remains under seal. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Encrypted WhatsApp messages frustrate new court-ordered wiretap

Man hacks Tesla firmware, finds new model, has car remotely downgraded

The image that hacker Jason Hughes found hidden in Tesla’s latest Model S firmware. (credit: Jason Hughes) It seems Tesla is set to bump the battery capacity of its Model S sedan up to a hefty 100kWh some time in the near future. We know this thanks to the work of a white-hat hacker and Tesla P85D owner named Jason Hughes. Hughes—who previously turned the battery pack from a wrecked Tesla into a storage array for his solar panels—was poking around in the latest firmware of his Model S (version 2.13.77) and discovered an image of the new car’s badge, the P100D. Hughes let the world know via a cryptic tweet: @elonmusk @teslamotors #tesla I know your secret. SHA256 of best part: 5fc38436ec295b0049f186651ebba5fd55e8d7b81eb61cbd00d3f1bf18dd9c81 — Jason Hughes (@wk057) March 4, 2016 That message was soon decrypted by enthusiasts on the Tesla Motors Club forum, at which time Hughes posted a copy of the picture: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Man hacks Tesla firmware, finds new model, has car remotely downgraded

SQL Server for Linux coming in mid-2017

Apparently. (credit: Microsoft) It’s not April 1. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group, announced today that next year Microsoft will be releasing a version of SQL Server that runs on Linux . A private preview is available today that includes the core relational database features of SQL Server 2016. The announcement implies two things. Either there is a large number of Linux-using corporations out there that are desperate for SQL Server’s feature set (as opposed to open source databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MaxDB, or the proprietary ones such as IBM’s DB2 and, of course, Oracle’s Oracle), or there is a large number of SQL Server-using organizations out there that are keen to ditch the cost of their Windows licenses but happy to continue to pay for their SQL Server licenses. Neither seems obvious to us. The Windows version will go into general availability later this year, with a wave of launch-related events starting on Thursday. SQL Server 2016 boasts new in-memory database capabilities that can make some workloads 30-100 times faster and support for encryption for data at rest, in memory, and on the wire. It also offers analytics support using R. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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SQL Server for Linux coming in mid-2017

Stretchable, glowing capacitors used to make a touch-sensitive robot

(credit: Larson, et. al., Science) For many of us, the term “robot” still evokes an image of R2D2 or a terminator-style collection of metal parts. But there’s no reason to limit our construction materials to hard parts. A number of labs are working on soft-bodied robots, and have shown they can do some rather interesting things, like squeezing through narrow spaces . A team of researchers from Cornell and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia have taken a soft-bodied robot and made it glow. Their method of producing the light, however, has some interesting side effects: it allows the robot to determine how much it has flexed, and it makes the robot responsive to touch. These days, “glow” is usually synonymous with “LED.” But the authors used a very different technique, relying on what’s called an electroluminescent phosphor—basically, something that glows when it’s place in an alternating electric field. The phosphors (zinc sulfide, in this case) can be embedded in a silicone gel, making them stretchable and bendable. Different dopants in the phosphor will cause it to glow in different colors. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Stretchable, glowing capacitors used to make a touch-sensitive robot

Largely undetected Mac malware suggests disgraced HackingTeam has returned

Enlarge (credit: Patrick Wardle ) Researchers have uncovered what appears to be newly developed Mac malware from HackingTeam, a discovery that’s prompting speculation that the disgraced malware-as-a-service provider has reemerged since last July’s hack that spilled gigabytes worth of the group’s private e-mail and source code . The sample was uploaded on February 4 to the Google-owned VirusTotal scanning service , which at the time showed it wasn’t detected by any of the major antivirus programs. (Ahead of this report on Monday, it was detected by 10 of 56 AV services.) A technical analysis published Monday morning by SentinelOne security researcher Pedro Vilaça showed that the installer was last updated in October or November, and an embedded encryption key is dated October 16, three months after the HackingTeam compromise. The sample installs a copy of HackingTeam’s signature Remote Code Systems compromise platform, leading Vilaça to conclude that the outfit’s comeback mostly relies on old, largely unexceptional source code, despite the group vowing in July that it would return with new code. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Largely undetected Mac malware suggests disgraced HackingTeam has returned

OS X blacklist accidentally disables Ethernet in OS X 10.11

Enlarge / An errant update may have disabled your Mac’s Ethernet port recently. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) If you’re having problems with your Mac’s Ethernet port this morning, the culprit may be an errant automatic update that Apple published over the weekend. Luckily, the damage isn’t permanent: an Apple support article posted yesterday will walk you through diagnosing and fixing the problem, which involves connecting to your network via Wi-Fi and running a software update command in the Terminal. If you’re reading this and your Ethernet port is working fine, odds are good that you’ve already installed the follow-up update released to fix the problem. The culprit is an update for the System Integrity Protection feature for OS X, the El Capitan feature that protects some system folders and keeps unsigned or incorrectly signed kernel extensions (or “kexts,” roughly analogous to drivers in a Windows or Linux machine) from loading. In this case, the kext used to enable the Ethernet port on Macs was blacklisted—if you restarted your Mac after applying this update but before your computer had a chance to download the quickly issued fix, you’ll find yourself without an Ethernet connection. This blacklist isn’t updated through the Mac App Store like purchased apps or OS X itself. Rather, it uses a seamless auto-update mechanism that executes in the background even if you haven’t enabled normal automatic updates. Apple uses a similar mechanism to update OS X’s anti-malware blacklist, a rudimentary security feature introduced in 2011 following the high-profile Mac Defender malware infection and occasionally used to push other critical software updates . Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X blacklist accidentally disables Ethernet in OS X 10.11

Next-gen Ultra HD Blu-ray discs probably won’t be cracked for a while

DVDFab, a software tool for ripping and decrypting DVDs and Blu-ray discs, will not be upgraded to support newer Ultra HD (4K) Blu-ray discs. Fengtao Software, which makes DVDFab, said in a statement that it “will not decrypt or circumvent AACS 2.0 in the days to come. This is in accordance with AACS-LA, (which has not made public the specifications for AACS 2.0), the BDA [Blu-ray Disc Association] and the movie studios.” AACS-LA is the body that develops and licenses the Blu-ray DRM system. Curiously, Fengtao’s announcement comes just a day after SlySoft—the company that makes the ripping tool AnyDVD—ceased operations and vanished from the Web . All that’s left is a cryptic message on SlySoft’s website: “Due to recent regulatory requirements we have had to cease all activities relating to SlySoft Inc.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Next-gen Ultra HD Blu-ray discs probably won’t be cracked for a while