Month: March 2016

(credit: Sandy/Chuck Harris)

In colder climes, signs of spring can lift a heavy weight from a tired, frozen spirit. Trees bud, flowers bloom, and migratory species trickle in to announce the approach of summer. In the US, one of those species is a floppy orange gem: the monarch butterfly. These insects winter in amazingly dense clusters in Mexican forests before making a staggeringly long journey (one that spans multiple generations, in fact) to summer homes to the north.

But in recent years, the population of monarchs that stay east of the Rockies has dropped like a rock. Precise population numbers are difficult to come by, but estimates kept by the US Fish and Wildlife Service show about an 80 percent decline over the last decade.

Unfortunately, it appears that humans are responsible. The life cycle of the monarch is tightly linked with the milkweed plant. Females lay almost all of their eggs on these plants, and the larvae happily munch on them when they hatch. Milkweed tends to pop up in areas where the soil has been disturbed, like farm fields.

(credit: Getty Images)

US District Judge Charles Breyer told Volkswagen and regulators that they have until April 21 to present a plan to bring over 600,000 Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche diesel vehicles into compliance with emissions regulations.

VW Group was supposed to have presented a detailed explanation of how it will fix its diesel vehicles to the San Francisco-based judge today, but Judge Breyer granted the company a month extension. VW’s diesel models made after 2009 were discovered to be equipped with illegal software that circumvented the cars’ emissions control system, allowing the cars to spew between up to 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) permits.

Judge Breyer will preside over the lawsuit that VW Group faces from the Department of Justice, as well as a consolidated class action suit that represents more than 500 separate lawsuits against Volkswagen. The judge said that he permitted the extension because former FBI director Robert Mueller, who Breyer appointed to oversee negotiations between air regulators and Volkswagen, assured Breyer that the two parties, "had made substantial progress toward a resolution that would get the polluting cars off the road,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Street Fighter V's first DLC character, Alex, will be on offer as a free trial download—because Capcom still hasn't figured out how to launch a paid-DLC store. (credit: Capcom)

As good as Street Fighter V's core fighting play felt when it launched last month, everything else surrounding the game felt sorely lacking—and the designers at Capcom have finally admitted as much. Even so, the company's Thursday announcement of a long-awaited patch update went so far as to delay one of the game's major new elements: its paid download store.

"We have taken a long hard look at this part of the store, and after much review, have decided it is not ready to launch just yet," Capcom announced on its official blog. "As Zenny [the series' new paid currency] is purchased with real money, we wanted to be extra careful and make sure it’s fully tested and optimized before launching it."

The download store matters because this Street Fighter sequel will live on as a DLC-powered service, as opposed to the old model of Capcom releasing Super-Ultra-Chibi-Whatever disc editions down the line. The delay may boil down to Street Fighter V existing on both PlayStation 4 and Windows PCs (and allowing cross-platform multiplayer), which means Capcom has to build an internal marketplace that supports both platforms playing nicely with each other.

For anyone designing Android apps, Google just released a tool that will help make your apps more accessible for all users. The company's new Accessibility Scanner looks at any Android app and will call out aspects of it that could be improved, particularly for differently-abled users. The app will even suggest ways you can alter things for the better

It seems pretty simple to use: just download the Accessibility Scanner to your mobile app, go to Settings and Accessibility, and turn on the Accessibility Scanner tool. You can then open the app you want to test and press the small blue button appearing on the screen. The tool scans that screen and then provides ways you could improve design element all over that screen, including larger text, color choices, navigational tools, and more.

Google's Accessibility Scanner at work, highlighting parts of an app that could be improved. (credit: Google)

Long-pressing the button will let you move it to a different screen in the app, and you can keep scanning from there. These improvement suggestions are meant for both developers and users alike, since you could benefit from simply increasing your mobile device's text size or something similar.

Nine months ago, Microsoft killed off its "Modern" Metro-style Skype app in favor of a new strategy. For desktop users, the plan was to keep the existing Win32 app. For mobile and tablet users, the plan was to create a series of decoupled Skype apps, one each for voice, messaging, and video. Those separated apps are included in Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile, while full functionality remains restricted to the old desktop app.

Today, Microsoft reversed course. While the naming and much of the design has changed, the company announced that it is developing a new-style Universal Windows Platform app that will run both on desktops, tablets, and phones. Unlike the old Metro app that had limited features, Microsoft's intent is that the new UWP will be a fully functional client that will one day be able to replace the Win32 desktop app.

However, the decoupled apps will remain. What Microsoft discovered is that the decoupled apps are preferred on the phone—phone usage tends to be more task-oriented, and the decoupled apps mimic the approach taken on, for example, iOS, where Phone, iMessage, and Facetime are all separate. On the desktop, by contrast, the all-in-one app fits the way people use their PCs better. The all-in-one app is more amenable to multitasking, switching back and forth between conversations and moving conversations from text to speech to video and back again.

FBI Director James Comey testifies to the House Judiciary Committee on March 1. (credit: C-Span3)

James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, is defending the agency's legal battle with Apple, saying it is about fighting terrorism and not about setting legal precedent.

The director's comments, published Wednesday afternoon in the letters section of the Wall Street Journal, comes amid a slew of attacks against the agency for its handling of what is arguably the biggest legal showdown in modern tech history. The verbal assaults on the FBI are coming from the blogosphere, the rank-and-file public, and even the WSJ itself. The arguments essentially boil down to assertions that the FBI lied when stating that it could not open the iPhone used by San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook and that it needed Apple's assistance in a court of law to set a legal precedent. The scheme asserts that because Congress won't adopt crypto-backdoor legislation or laws requiring companies like Apple to write code that undermines their own security, the FBI concocted a legal strategy to get the courts to do what lawmakers have refused to do.

Comey emphatically denied this idea and repeated that the FBI did not have the ability to access Farook's phone. Instead, he believes that the FBI decided to tentatively retreat once it was presented with a possible viable solution—which happened to come on Monday, just one day before the court hearing.