Month: February 2016

(credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lila_Tretikov_April_2014_(5)_crop.jpg#/media/File:Lila_Tretikov_April_2014_(5).jpg)

The head of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia and related websites, has unexpectedly resigned. Lila Tretikov said Thursday in a statement that "with great respect," she has tendered her resignation as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "The Board tasked me with making changes to serve the next generation and ensure our impact in the future," Tretikov wrote. "Driving these changes has been challenging, and I have always appreciated the open and honest discourse we have had along the way."

Tretikov's resignation comes at a time of unprecedented tension between the community of editors and the Board of Trustees that runs the Wikimedia Foundation. Last month, a newly appointed board member stepped down after hundreds of editors signed a "vote of no confidence."

Following that resignation, a second uproar arose over a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to help Wikimedia Foundation create a "knowledge engine" that would improve search. Some activist Wikipedia editors had been asking to see documentation about the Knight Foundation grant for several months, but Wikimedia was not forthcoming with the details.

The new Aston Martin DB11. You'd be forgiven for thinking you'd seen it before.

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The Geneva Auto Show has just gotten underway in Europe, and we should have a full report on all the stars of the show later this week. But ahead of the show, images have leaked of two of its expected stars, Porsche's new 911R, and Aston Martin's DB11.

First up is the "new" Porsche, which is actually new version of an existing model. When the latest 911 GT3 debuted in 2014, it drew a bit of criticism from purists because it meant the loss of a manual gearbox. Even though racing Porsches have been semi-automatic for years, many driving enthusiasts want nothing to do with flappy paddles. The 911R should satisfy them—or at least it will if it becomes a regular model in the lineup. If recent history is anything to go by, though, it will more likely be a limited edition that sells out instantly and then commands a hefty premium on the used car market.

Underneath that sloping rear deck—bereft of wings or spoilers other than the retractable one fitted to the regular 911—is a 4L naturally aspirated flat-six engine from the GT3 RS, giving the 911R almost 500hp. Compared to the bewigged GT3 and GT3 RS, the 911R—named for an old Porsche road-legal racer—is meant to be focused on driver enjoyment rather than all-out lap times.

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, the 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 to push other critical software updates.

NASA wants to build a new series of X-planes to increase fuel efficiency and reduce noise and pollution from commercial aircraft. (credit: NASA)

NASA wants to build a new series of X-planes to increase fuel efficiency and reduce noise and pollution from commercial aircraft. After years of flat or declining budgets in aeronautics research, NASA will seek a substantial increase for the coming fiscal year and beyond. The agency’s administrator, Charles Bolden, will speak more about this request later today at Reagan National Airport in Washington DC, but Ars has learned details of the plan.

The proposed budget increase of $3.7 billion over the next decade would allow NASA to work on dramatically improving both subsonic and supersonic flight. In an interview, Jaiwon Shin, the associate administrator for NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, told Ars that the agency has been working with industry and academic partners to research several “revolutionary” technologies. To take the next step and begin actually flying these concepts, however, NASA needs to build a new generation of X-planes. And that costs money.

Shin said the design-and-build phase will take about four to five years, after which time the planes would be tested at Armstrong Flight Research Center in California and Langley Research Center in Virginia. If successful, these concepts might be incorporated into commercial fleets within about a decade, and through fuel savings, noise, and emission reductions, they could save the aviation industry as much as $255 billion over 25 years, NASA estimates.

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BARCELONA—After trying out VR porn for the first time, the obvious next port of call was the other barb of the early-adopter pincer attack: VR games. At MWC in Barcelona there were myriad virtual reality gaming demos, from on-rails shooting games, to full VR-and-HOTAS Elite: Dangerous setups, to whacky HTC Vive stuff. But there was one game that really intrigued me, way out in the hinterlands of Hall 7: Lost Cities VR, the world's first VR board game.

Lost Cities, developed by Campfire Union, is a game for Gear VR that's based on a board game of the same name. The board game itself is fun, simple, and very popular. Both versions of the game are played in exactly the same way, except the board game allows for up to four players and the VR game only supports two (for now).

I won't go into the exact rules of the game, but it's pretty straight forward. Each player starts with a hand of cards (see image above). You take it in turns to pick one card from your hand, strategically place the card in one of five areas in front of you, and then pick up another card from a shared stack of cards. When all the cards have been drawn, the game ends, the scores are tabulated, and one of you wins. It's one of those games that's incredibly simple to pick up, but a huge strategic game-space opens up once you play it a bit.