firehose

Move over iBeacon—today Google is launching "Eddystone," an open source, cross-platform Bluetooth LE beacon format. Bluetooth beacons are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) trend. They're little transmitters (usually battery powered) that send out information about a specific point of interest, and that info is then passively picked up by a smartphone or tablet in range of the transmitter. A beacon-equipped bus stop could send out transit times, stores could send promotions to the customers currently in the store, or a museum could send people information about the exhibit they're standing in front of.

The name "Eddystone" might sound a little weird, but Google says it's named after the Eddystone Lighthouse in the UK. The motif is that beacons guide users and apps in the real world the same way lighthouses guide ship captains in the night. Being an open source project, they wouldn't want to name it "Google Beacon." It fits in well enough with the other non-obviously-branded open source Google projects like Android, Chromium, or Dart. This also isn't something they need to sell to the general public, just beacon OEMs and app developers.

We were able to talk with Eddystone's Product Manager, Matthew Kulick, and the Engineering Director, Chandu Thota, about the project. They described Eddystone as a "robust, extensible" beacon standard. "We have been working with many of the ecosystem partners to figure out the actual use cases, and we realized that existing solutions only partially address what is being asked for. We wanted to pull in businesses, developers, and the manufacturers and create an ecosystem that they can rally behind," Thota said. "There was a real desire from talking to them for a unified common ground that could be openly discussed, improved, and built on top of," Kulick told Ars.

A federal appeals court has ruled that AT&T may prohibit its unionized field technicians from wearing white T-shirts with black stripes displaying the phrase "Prisoner of AT$T."

The workers, based in Connecticut, were in a labor dispute in 2009 and wore the shirts to protest increasing healthcare costs. About 200 workers were suspended for refusing to remove the shirts. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had sided with the technicians from the Communications Workers of America in 2011, but a federal appeals court set aside that decision Friday.

According to the Friday ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit:

missinglinc:

Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man

harborwillow:

pdlcomics:

Goat

Me

dinosaurparty:

(via Silicon Valley struggles to hack its diversity problem - The Washington Post)

This is inexcusable.

“Diversity problem” uh step one, name it accurately: racism.

For about a year, comedian Kumail Nanjiani has been hosting The X-Files Files, a podcast in which he and a guest go through each episode of Fox’s beloved supernatural mystery show and discuss it. By all accounts, then, Kumail is one of the internet’s foremost X-Files fans, so when Fox announced that Community’s Joel McHale and Flight Of The Conchords’ Rhys Darby—two people who are definitely not Kumail—would be part of its X-Files revival, the whole world wondered if Kumail would get the same honor. We don’t know if there were petitions for it or anything, but it seemed like one of those rare internet movements that we could all get behind.

Then, yesterday morning, Kumail tweeted this mysterious message, the meaning of which could only be uncovered by someone in the basement of the FBI’s headquarters with an “I Want To Believe ...

A lawsuit accuses Comcast of robocalling a customer "an average of once or twice each day" for nearly nine months to collect an "unpaid" bill—even though the woman had actually paid in full.

Kia Elder of Philadelphia filed the lawsuit in US District Court in Pennsylvania, saying the calls began in late September 2014, when a collector called her about a $527 cable TV bill.

"Plaintiff informed Defendant that she had paid that debt in 2011 and told the collector that she wanted Comcast to stop calling her on her cellular telephone," the lawsuit states. Despite this, "from late September 2014, Defendant placed cellular calls to Plaintiff an average of once or twice each day" and the calls allegedly continued through June 18, 2015.

On Thursday, officials with the Federal Aviation Administration announced that there were 11 separate reported incidents of "laser strikes"—handheld lasers fired into the cockpits of aircraft—as commercial flights flew over New Jersey, according to CNN.

The FAA did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

Roughly half of the Wednesday night reports came from near Newark Liberty International Airport. However, a few other laser stikes happened elsewhere across the Garden State: down near the Pennsylvania border and out to Ocean City, along the coast.

Two weeks after online retailer Newegg filed a petition complaining about "excessive and unreasonable" delays in getting a final judgment in its patent case, the judge in that case has handed Newegg a big win.

In an order published yesterday afternoon, US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap ruled (PDF) that Newegg doesn't infringe a patent belonging to TQP Development, notwithstanding a 2013 jury verdict that granted $2.3 million to TQP, a "patent troll" with no business other than patent licensing.

TQP, which was owned by well-known patent asserter Erich Spangenberg, claimed that the 5,412,730 patent covered any website using the SSL together with the RC4 cipher, a common Web encryption scheme for retailers and other sites. Under Spangenberg's guidance, the TQP patent was used to sue more than 100 companies, garnering some $45 million in settlements by the time of the Newegg trial.

Leaked e-mails from the Italy-based computer and network surveillance company Hacking Team show that the company developed a piece of rugged hardware intended to attack computers and mobile devices via Wi-Fi. The capability, marketed as part of the company's Remote Control System Galileo, was shown off to defense companies at the International Defense Exposition and Conference (IDEX) in Abu Dhabi in February, and it drew attention from a major defense contractor. But like all such collaborations, it may have gotten caught up in the companies' legal departments.

In an e-mail summarizing a meeting in January, co-founder Marco Valleri outlined the roadmap for a number of Hacking Team's platforms, including its "Tactical Network Injector" or TNI. This piece of hardware was designed to insert malicious code into Wi-Fi network communications, potentially acting as a malicious access point to launch exploits or man-in-the-middle attacks. The bullet points included the creation of a "mini-TNI" tasked to Hacking Team employee Andrea Di Pasquale:

• Ruggedized
• Transportable by a drone (!)

The mini-TNI, marketed at IDEX as "Galileo," drew the attention of a representative from Insitu, a subsidiary of Boeing that builds small unmanned aircraft systems including the ScanEagle and RQ-21A "Blackjack" UASs used by the US Navy. In early April, Giuseppe Venneri—an Insitu intern and a graduate student at University of California, Irvine—was tasked with contacting Hacking Team's key account manager Emad Shehata, following up on a meeting at IDEX. "We see potential in integrating your Wi-Fi hacking capability into an airborne system and would be interested in starting a conversation with one of your engineers to go over, in more depth, the payload capabilities including the detailed size, weight, and power specs of your Galileo System," Venneri wrote.

Sean Gallagher

The TRS-80 Model 100, the "original laptop."

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A while ago, as we at Ars were discussing our first mobile computing experiences, I recalled the first "laptop" computer I was ever issued to use as a journalist: the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100. Back on my first field assignment for Government Computer News, I was given the only computing device in the company inventory that could be used to file a story from the field—via acoustic couplers and an MCI Mail account.

Overcome with nostalgia, I put a bid in on a Model 100 on an eBay auction shortly afterward—and then completely forgot about it. Or I forgot about it until about a week and a half ago, when I saw that I had the winning bid. And yesterday, my very own TRS-80 Model 100 arrived in a Priority Mail box (along with the Super Serial card for the Apple II Plus I recently inherited).

The Model 100 was the future of mobile computing when it arrived on the market in 1983. Bill Gates told the National Museum of American History in an interview that the Model 100 was "in a sense my favorite machine." He co-wrote the operating system for the Model 100 with Kyocera's Jey Suzuki. "Part of my nostalgia about this machine is this was the last machine where I wrote a very high percentage of the code in the product," Gates said.

On Thursday, reddit's new CEO Steve Huffman, a co-founder of the site, held an AMA (shorthand for “ask me anything”), promising that he would answer questions and use the time “to decide together what our values are,” in the wake of a “content policy update.”

Huffman, who goes by the username spez, posted a long note about how reddit would be moving forward, saying that its tagline, “the front page of the Internet,” was meant to be tongue-in-cheek and that while reddit "is a place to have open and authentic discussions,” sometimes those discussions must be moderated. “When our purpose comes into conflict with a policy, we make sure our purpose wins,” Huffman wrote.

The note from Huffman included a list of things that would no longer be allowed on the site and things that would continue to be barred from the site including: