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Bluetooth Won't Replace the Headphone Jack -- Walled Gardens Will (theverge.com) 380

Posted by msmash from the real-reason dept.
Last year, when it was rumoured that the then upcoming iPhone models -- 7 and 7 Plus -- won't have the 3.5mm audio jack, The Verge's Nilay Patel wrote that if Apple does do it, it would be a user-hostile and stupid move. When those iPhone models were official announced, they indeed didn't have the audio jack. Earlier this week, Android-maker Google announced the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones that also don't feature the decades-old audio jack either, a move that would likely push rest of the smartphone makers to adopt a similar change. The rationale behind killing the traditional headphones jack, both Apple and Google say, is to move to an improved technology: Bluetooth. But there is another motive at play here, it appears. Patel, writes for The Verge: As the headphone jack disappears, the obvious replacement isn't another wire with a proprietary connector like Apple's Lightning or the many incompatible and strange flavors of USB-C audio. It's Bluetooth. And Bluetooth continues to suck, for a variety of reasons. Newer phones like the iPhone 8, Galaxy S8, and the Pixel 2 have Bluetooth 5, which promises to be better, but 1. There are literally no Bluetooth 5 headphones out yet, and 2. we have definitely heard that promise before. So we'll see. To improve Bluetooth, platform vendors like Apple and Google are riffing on top of it, and that means they're building custom solutions. And building custom solutions means they're taking the opportunity to prioritize their own products, because that is a fair and rational thing for platform vendors to do. Unfortunately, what is fair and rational for platform vendors isn't always great for markets, competition, or consumers. And at the end of this road, we will have taken a simple, universal thing that enabled a vibrant market with tons of options for every consumer, and turned it into yet another limited market defined by ecosystem lock-in. The playbook is simple: last year, Apple dropped the headphone jack and replaced it with its W1 system, which is basically a custom controller chip and software management layer for Bluetooth. The exemplary set of W1 headphones is, of course, AirPods, but Apple also owns Beats, and there are a few sets of W1 Beats headphones available as well. You can still use regular Bluetooth headphones with an iPhone, and you can use AirPods as regular Bluetooth headphones, but the combination iPhone / W1 experience is obviously superior to anything else on the market. [...] Google's version of this is the Pixel Buds, a set of over-ear neckbuds that serve as basic Bluetooth headphones but gain additional capabilities when used with certain phones. Seamless fast pairing? You need Android N or higher, which most Android phones don't have.

Submission + - New Zealand Supreme Court rules operation against Kim Dotcom was illegal (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by Mashiki
Mashiki writes: New Zealand supreme court rules that spying against Kim Dotcom was illegal, that GCSB violated the law, including the observation of citizens and residents within the country. It was also determined by the courts that the operation had gone on longer then was stated by both the police and GCSB. This may, leave the extradition case up in the air since the methods used to gain the information have been ruled illegal, in turn this makes the arrest illegal, along with the seizure of his equipment illegal. "“The GCSB has now admitted that the unlawfulness was not just dependent upon residency issues, it went further. The reason it went further was because it didn’t have authorization to carry out the kind of surveillance that it was carrying out under the legislation, as it was at that time”" The GCSB has said that it was impossible to plead the case as it would jeopardize national security.

Submission + - NASA looks at reviving atomic rocket program (newatlas.com)

Submitted by Big Hairy Ian
Big Hairy Ian writes: When the first manned mission to Mars sets out, it may be on the tail of an atomic rocket engine. The Space Race vintage technology could have a renaissance at NASA after the space agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama signed a contract with BWXT Nuclear Energy to develop updated Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) concepts and new fuel elements to power them.

The Apollo missions to the Moon demonstrated many things. They showcased human ingenuity, determination, and courage. They proved what American engineering and industry could accomplish in short order when let loose on a goal and demonstrated that humankind need no longer be confined to a single planet.

Unfortunately, it also showed the fact that chemical rockets, even at the dawn of the conquest of space, had reached their technical limits. True, they could send astronauts to the Moon, but only by using a disposable rocket the size of a skyscraper of which only a capsule with the roominess of an SUV returned. And even this was in no shape for anything except a museum.

At the very least it looks much more feasible than Project Orion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Submission + - Kaspersky Lab Has Been Working With Russian Intelligence (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Internal company emails obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek show that Kaspersky Lab has maintained a much closer working relationship with Russia’s main intelligence agency, the FSB, than it has publicly admitted. It has developed security technology at the spy agency’s behest and worked on joint projects the CEO knew would be embarrassing if made public.

The previously unreported emails, from October 2009, are from a thread between Eugene Kaspersky and senior staff. In Russian, Kaspersky outlines a project undertaken in secret a year earlier “per a big request on the Lubyanka side,” a reference to the FSB offices. Kaspersky Lab confirmed the emails are authentic.

Submission + - Fedora 26 Linux distro available for download (betanews.com)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Today, Fedora 26 sheds its pre-release status and becomes available for download as a stable release. GNOME fans are in for a big treat, as version 3.24 is default. If you stick to stable Fedora releases, this will be your first time experiencing that version of the desktop environment since it was released in March. Also new is LibreOffice 5.3, which is an indispensable suite for productivity. If you still use mp3 music files (Iâ(TM)ve moved onto streaming), support should be baked in for both encoding and decoding.

âoeThe latest version of Fedoraâ(TM)s desktop-focused edition provides new tools and features for general users as well as developers. GNOME 3.24 is offered with Fedora 26 Workstation, which includes a host of updated functionality including Night Light, an application that subtly changes screen color based on time of day to reduce effect on sleep patterns, and LibreOffice 5.3, the latest update to the popular open source office productivity suite. For developers, GNOME 3.24 provides matured versions of Builder and Flatpak to make application development for a variety of systems, including Rust and Meson, easier across the board,â says the Fedora Project.

Submission + - Let's Encrypt: Wildcard Certificates Coming January 2018 (letsencrypt.org) 1

Submitted by jawtheshark
jawtheshark writes: Let’s Encrypt will begin issuing wildcard certificates in January of 2018.

A wildcard certificate can secure any number of subdomains of a base domain (e.g. *.example.com). This allows administrators to use a single certificate and key pair for a domain and all of its subdomains, which can make HTTPS deployment significantly easier.

Submission + - CNN critic who posted on Reddit may have been threated with revealing identity (theintercept.com) 16

Submitted by evolutionary
evolutionary writes: CNN appears to be giving veiled threats at a Reddit user who posted critical comments about the media giant. After an apology was given by the Reddit user (possibly under fear upon discovering CNN had his identity) CNN stated "CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change."

Submission + - So Begins The Era of Cheap Space (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by pacopico
pacopico writes: Elon Musk and SpaceX kicked off the New Space era with low-cost, reusable rockets. But now there's something just as dramatic brewing with really, really cheap rockets and really, really cheap satellites. Bloomberg has just profiled Peter Beck, a self-taught rocket engineer from New Zealand, who has built a $5 million rocket that will be taking cubesats from Planet Labs and others to space in the next few weeks. The story talks about a new type of computing shell being built around the Earth and all the players trying to fill it up.

Submission + - Solar Energy's Dirty Little Secret, Discarded solar panels. (nationalreview.com)

Submitted by Templer421
Templer421 writes: Discarded solar panels are piling up all over the world, and they represent a major threat to the environment. A new study by Environmental Progress (EP) warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat. The Berkeley-based group found that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear-power plants. Discarded solar panels, which contain dangerous elements such as lead, chromium, and cadmium, are piling up around the world, and there’s been little done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment.

Submission + - California has so much solar power that other states are paid to take it (latimes.com) 2

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power.

Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren’t using to avoid overloading its own power lines.

It happened on eight days in January and nine in February as well. All told, those transactions helped save Arizona electricity customers millions of dollars this year, though grid operators declined to say exactly how much. And California also has paid other states to take power.

No single entity is in charge of energy policy in California. This has led to a two-track approach that has created an ever-increasing glut of power and is proving costly for electricity users. Rates have risen faster here than in the rest of the U.S., and Californians now pay about 50% more than the national average.

Submission + - SSD Drives Vulnerable to Rowhammer-like Attacks That Corrupt User Data (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NAND flash memory chips, the building blocks of solid-state drives (SSDs), include what could be called "programming vulnerabilities" that can be exploited to alter stored data or shorten the SSD's lifespan. According to research published earlier this year, the programming logic powering of MLC NAND flash memory chips (the tech used for the latest generation of SSDs), is vulnerable to at least two types of attacks.

The first is called "program interference," and takes place when an attacker manages to write data with a certain pattern to a target's SSD. Writing this data repeatedly and at high speeds causes errors in the SSD, which then corrupts data stored on nearby cells. This attack is similar to the infamous Rowhammer attack on RAM chips.

The second attack is called "read disturb" and in this scenario, an attacker's exploit code causes the SSD to perform a large number of read operations in a very short time, which causes a phenomenon of "read disturb errors," that alters the SSD ability to read data from nearby cells, even long time after the attack stops.

Submission + - 16 Years Of GPS Space Weather Data Made Publicly Available

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over 16 years of GPS space weather data has been released to the public for the first time, in a bid to help boost understanding around radiation threats to Earth’s satellites, communications networks, and aircraft. The ‘unprecedented’ collection of data, released by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, comes from space weather sensors onboard Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, which measure charged particles in Earth’s magnetic field. The detailed measurements are expected to provide an invaluable resource for space weather research and for understanding how best to protect our critical infrastructure. Prior to the public release, GPS data has long remained a U.S. military asset, with a “general hesitancy to broadcast even fairly innocuous things out to the broad community.”

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