Month: January 2016

On Thursday a German newspaper reported that Volkswagen Group "assumes it will have to buy back about 115,000 cars in the United States," according to Reuters.

Volkswagen officials have been working with US regulators to come to an agreement about how best to fix the nearly 600,000 diesel vehicles in the US that were discovered to illegally include software—generically called a defeat device—that thwarts the emissions control system. Defeat devices helped some of Volkswagen Group’s cars pass emissions tests in a lab, but allowed the cars to pollute more heavily when driving under normal conditions. In the 2.0-liter engine diesel cars especially, models were found to give off 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) as is permitted by federal law.

The scandal eventually extended to Europe and then to global Volkswagen markets, with the company admitting that 11 million diesel passenger cars could have defeat devices on them. In Europe, at least, fixing the cheat was relatively easy for Volkswagen Group, with the approved fix taking under half an hour in most Volkswagen and Audi models.

Luckey offered no apologies for his appearance on the cover of Time this summer...

With this morning's revelation that the Oculus Rift VR headset would sell for $599, many potential customers and industry observers experienced some sticker shock. Where was the consumer unit "in the ballpark" of the $350 DK2 dev kit that Oculus founder CEO Palmer Luckey talked about as recently as October?

In a Reddit AMA interview tonight, Luckey apologized for that comment and for "assuming we had been clear enough about setting expectations" for the headset's price. "I handled the messaging poorly," Luckey said plainly in the AMA thread.

Defending the company to some extent, Luckey pointed to comments from last May, when Oculus executives started saying that the Oculus Rift and a capable PC would cost $1,500 combined (Oculus will indeed start selling pre-orders for the Rift bundled with "Oculus ready" PCs for that price in February). That should have set accurate expectations for most potential Rift owners, Luckey said. "For that vast majority of people, $1,500 is the all-in cost of owning Rift. The biggest portion of their cost is the PC, not the Rift itself."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's 2007 "dancing baby" case dates back to a takedown of a home video of a toddler. An appeals court ruled that content owners must consider fair use, but also suggested that takedown software would pass muster.

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the law that allows content owners to remove copyrighted material from the Internet, and it's made just about no one happy. Content owners are bitter that their material tends to keep popping up, even when they've asked for it to be removed hundreds or even thousands of times. Internet platforms that host large amounts of user-generated content must cope with millions of infringement allegations, mass-produced by software. When those algorithms make mistakes, it's often users who pay the price—told they're copyright scofflaws because there was background music in their home video or they shared a photo of a toy they bought.

If you're feeling down about the DMCA this winter—or feeling just skippy about it—there's a government agency that wants to hear from you. On December 31, the US Copyright Office said it intends to take public comments about the effectiveness of the DMCA and its "safe harbor" provisions.

The comments will be part of a "public study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the safe harbor provisions" of the DMCA. Questions that the office wants to consider include:

Martin Shkreli, chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC, exits federal court in New York, US, on Thursday, December 17, 2015. Shkreli was arrested on alleged securities fraud related to Retrophin Inc., a biotech firm he founded in 2011. (credit: Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Despite receiving fiery comments from Martin Shkreli, former CEO of the infamous Turing Pharmaceuticals and struggling KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, RZA has no hard feelings towards the beleaguered Wu-Tang Clan fan.

Reports last month revealed that Shkreli had purchased the sole copy of the Wu-Tang album, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, for $2 million. But after Shkreli’s arrest on charges of securities fraud, RZA, the de facto leader of the Wu-Tang, appeared to distance the group from Shkreli.

The move quickly drew scorn from the former-CEO. In an exclusive interview with HipHopDX, Shkreli said: “If I hand you $2 million, fucking show me some respect. At least have the decency to say nothing or ‘no comment.’” He went on to imply during the interview that the comments could spark a violent feud.

Double Fine founder Tim Schafer celebrates a $3.3 million crowdfunding success for Psychonauts 2. (credit: Fig)

Nearly four years after gaming studio Double Fine Productions broke Kickstarter records with its first crowdfunding campaign, the company announced on Wednesday that its latest, nostalgia-fueled cash request had proven successful.

Production on a sequel to cult classic platforming game Psychonauts will now officially commence thanks to the game maker raising over $3.3 million from fans. That amount matches how much Double Fine raised in March 2012 to create the point-and-click adventure game Broken Age—though anybody familiar with that game's beleaguered, cash-strapped creation (which was chronicled at length by way of a Two Player Productions documentary) will be heartened to hear that the crowdfunded amount is only one part of the game's minimum budget.

As Double Fine founder Tim Schafer announced last month, following Psychonauts 2's reveal at The Game Awards 2015, the new game's development budget will be propped up by three major pillars: crowdfunding, "an external partner" (who has yet to be publicly identified, but is almost certainly not Marcus "notch" Persson), and Double Fine's own coffers. This follows other major gaming crowdfunding requests, particularly Yu Suzuki's Shenmue 3, acknowledging their own private investors and admitting that crowdfunding alone hasn't covered the game's production costs.

Enlarge (credit: Jjpwiki)

Tech-support scams, in which fraudsters pose as computer technicians who charge hefty fees to fix non-existent malware infections, have been a nuisance for years. A relatively new one targeting Dell computer owners is notable because the criminals behind it use private customer details to trick their marks into thinking the calls come from authorized Dell personnel.

"What made the calls interesting was that they had all the information about my computer; model number, serial number, and notably the last item I had called Dell technical support about (my optical drive)," Ars reader Joseph B. wrote in an e-mail. "That they knew about my optical drive call from several months prior made me think there was some sort of information breach versus just my computer being compromised."

He isn't the only Dell customer reporting such an experience. A blog post published Tuesday reported scammers knew of every problem the author had ever called Dell about. None of those problems were ever discussed in public forums, leading the author to share the suspicion that proprietary Dell data had somehow been breached.

SAN FRANCISCO—A federal judge on Wednesday said that a monkey that swiped a British nature photographer's camera during an Indonesian jungle shoot and snapped selfies cannot own the intellectual property rights to those handful of pictures.

US District Judge William Orrick was tasked with hearing a lawsuit brought by the People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The Animal rights group was trying to represent the 6-year-old monkey, Naruto, in a case brought against the human photographer, David Slater, and his self-publishing platform, Blurb of San Francisco.

The monkey—via PETA's intervention—was seeking monetary damages for copyright infringement from Slater and the Blurb, the platform Slater used to publish the selfies. The US Copyright Office says Slater cannot own the rights to the handful of images snapped in the Tangkoko reserve on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in 2011. Works "produced by nature, animals, or plants" cannot be granted copyright protection, the US Copyright Office said in 2014.