Month: February 2016

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick at a press conference in Beijing earlier this year. (credit: Getty Images)

VANCOUVER, BC—Travis Kalanick, founder and CEO of Uber, came to TED 2016 to talk about the “future of human-driven transportation.” How can we cut traffic, congestion, and parking using technology? Kalanick suggested the problem isn’t so much technology; it's regulations. And Kalanick believes that history is on his side. 

There was “an Uber before there was Uber,” Kalanick said during his presentation today. He referenced a service called the jitney, a shared ride endeavor that was popular more than 100 years ago (the word “jitney” was slang for “a nickel” at the time). In 1914, an enterprising LA man grew tired of very long trolley lines and simply put a sign on his car advertising five cent rides. It exploded. As difficult as it may be to believe, Kalanick said Uber does as many rides in LA per day in 2016 as the jitney did in 1915.

Clearly it was something people really wanted then, but the jitney wouldn’t last. The urban transportation monopoly at the time was the trolley industry. Trolley owners and operators hated jitneys, and they lobbied across the country to slow down the service. Although LA’s nascent jitney service climbed to 50,000 rides in a single day, trolley operators were eventually successful in shutting them out. The ride-sharing pioneer died out entirely in just five years.

Enlarge / The Monopoly Ultimate Banking Edition replaces all cash with a battery-powered ATM and scannable cards. (credit: Hasbro)

Before Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride and Pandemic, there was Monopoly. I don't have the statistics in front of me, but it's safe to say that Hasbro's Depression-era riff on The Landlord's Game has caused more familial strife than all other board games combined.

No small part of that fighting has been caused by abusive bankers, unscrupulous individuals whose theft and double-dealing no doubt served as an inspiration for the modern US banking system. Hasbro now wants to cut down on this sort of cheating with the Monopoly Ultimate Banking Edition, which replaces all of the game's cash with credit cards and a battery-powered ATM that does all the math for you.

The difference between this game and past attempts to take Monopoly paperless is that everything in the game is swipeable or scannable—players' debit cards, property cards, and Chance cards all get swiped, too (Community Chest cards, for whatever reason, are no more in this edition). Gizmodo also reports that some of these Chance cards can also affect the cost of rents and other things in the game, on-the-fly modifications that are easier to pull off when you don't need to constantly remind your little brother how to calculate percentages.

Gotta catch 'em all in post-war Boston. (credit: Bethesda Game Studios)

We knew Fallout 4 DLC was coming, as evidenced by Bethesda launching a paid "season pass" voucher alongside the giant game in November, but we had no idea exactly what to expect in terms of add-ons. A Tuesday update on the developer's blog confirmed the game's first wave of 2016 paid content—and promises of so much that the price of a season pass will soon go up.

In a first for a major Bethesda game, Fallout 4 will also allow its PC players to access its DLC content early and for free, provided they become approved beta testers. Bethesda doesn't mean a limited-time free access, where you get into a beta and then lose the content and your progress in it; the developer says that approved DLC beta testers will get to keep all content for free and retain both progress and achievements as the DLC content is patched and approved ahead of retail launch. You'll want to sign up quickly at bethesda.net.

As of right now, three bunches of DLC have been announced, with only one having a description that sounds like a major plot-driven release. "Far Harbor" will launch in May at a $25/£20 price point, and it will ask players to hit the seas in search of a Valentine Detective Agency case on a new island. The other DLC, March's "Automatron" and April's "Wasteland Workshop," will focus largely on companion-related upgrades—dealing with robots and trappable pets, respectively—for the price of $10/£8 and $5/£4.

The sulfer-coal-burning John E. Amos Power Plant in West Virginia. (credit: Cathy)

Four days before Justice Antonin Scalia died on Saturday, the 79-year-old justice and the court's four other conservatives blocked one of President Barack Obama's centerpiece packages—his climate change initiative requiring a 32-percent reduction in power plant emissions by 2030.

More than two dozen states and energy companies are suing to thwart the plan, claiming that Obama's carbon regulations announced in October are an abuse of power and will "unlawfully impose massive and irreparable harms upon the sovereign states, as well as irreversible changes in the energy markets." The Supreme Court's decision to block the plan from taking force ahead of June 2 oral arguments before a federal appeals court was viewed as an ultimate death blow of sorts to the plan. The 5-4 conservative majority sided with the states and essentially said that the regulations are shelved until the Supreme Court lifts its stay.

Coal-burning plants generate about a third of the nation's power and are the hardest hit by Obama's regulations. West Virginia and Kentucky, two of the states that rely heavily on coal for power and jobs, initiated the legal challenge to the Clean Power Plan. Utilities are the nation's largest source of carbon emissions.

(credit: Kenn White)

Researchers have discovered a potentially catastrophic flaw in one of the Internet's core building blocks that leaves hundreds or thousands of apps and hardware devices vulnerable to attacks that can take complete control over them.

The vulnerability was introduced in 2008 in GNU C Library, a collection of open source code that powers thousands of standalone applications and most distributions of Linux, including those distributed with routers and other types of hardware. A function known as getaddrinfo() that performs domain-name lookups contains a buffer overflow bug that allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code. It can be exploited when vulnerable devices or apps make queries to attacker-controlled domain names or domain name servers or when they're exposed to man-in-the-middle attacks where the adversary has the ability to monitor and manipulate data passing between a vulnerable device and the open Internet.

Maintainers of glibc, as the open source library is called, released an update that patches the vulnerability. Anyone responsible for Linux-based software or hardware that performs domain name lookups should install it as soon as possible. For many people running servers, patching will be a simple matter of downloading the update and installing it. But for other types of users, a fix may not be so easy. Some apps that were compiled with a vulnerable version of glibc will have to be recompiled with an updated version of the library, a process that will take time as users wait for fixes to become available from hardware manufacturers and app developers.

The words don't lie! Unless they do. A GameStop statement seems to counter this specific slide about PlayStation VR shown off by Sony's Shu Yoshida in March 2015. (credit: Kyle Orland)

Since its formal announcement nearly two years ago, Sony's unreleased virtual reality system has become more defined in the form of improved hardware, more game announcements, and a "final" product name. One older detail about PlayStation VR has remained unchanged since a major March 2015 event, however: a vague launch window of "the first half of 2016."

That time frame may have changed by way of an official comment from gaming retailer GameStop. A Monday morning segment on the Fox Business Channel included a guest spot from GameStop CEO Paul Raines, who spoke about the broad state of the gaming industry. During the discussion, he claimed that his chain's retail shops would begin selling PlayStation VR hardware "this fall."

Even if Raines' statement checks out, that's not to say the system has officially been delayed. PlayStation VR could launch elsewhere beforehand—perhaps through an online-only presale, much like Oculus did to allocate its "first shipments" of headsets on March 28. Still, unless Sony announces a hard release window soon, it's not clear how the company will manage to meet that "first half" window at this point in 2016.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a number of deals to extend your Presidents' Day shopping spree. Dell is offering its Venue 7000 tablet series (specifically the 8-inch and 10-inch models) for half price, making them $199 and $299, respectively. You can also save on a gaming console—get an Xbox One bundle with Gears of War and a $100 Dell gift card for just $349.

Shop the full list of deals featuring TVs, laptops, and accessories below.

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