Month: March 2016

A former Volkswagen Group employee has sued the auto company, saying he was fired after he told VW’s in-house lawyers and its information technology manager that data was being illegally automatically deleted off the company’s system in the aftermath of a Notice of Violation from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The plaintiff, Daniel Donovan, had been a technical project manager at Volkswagen since 2008, working out of the company’s Michigan office. After the EPA announced that it had discovered illegal defeat devices meant to spoof emissions control systems on VW Group’s diesel vehicles, Donovan received notice from his immediate supervisor that Volkswagen had to stop deleting data “effective immediately pursuant to a Department of Justice hold,” according to Bloomberg.

However, Donovan says deletion of data did not stop until three days after that hold was put in place. He also alleges that additional backup disks of the information were not preserved as Volkswagen was required to do, according to the Wall Street Journal. As Courthouse News Service reports, Donovan was fired after he "refused to take part” in activities that could lead to “significant legal sanctions" and took his concerns to a supervisor.

Rockwell Collins and Elbit Systems' joint—a helmet that can see through planes without making the pilot throw up—can also break their necks if they eject. (credit: Lockheed Martin)

The F-35 Joint Program Office is about to begin testing a prototype for a new helmet for pilots of the Joint Strike Fighter—a critical upgrade to the aircraft's control systems. The current Generation III helmet, which acts as a heads-up instrumentation and night vision display for the pilot, was discovered last year to be so heavy that it snapped the neck of smaller test dummies during ejection testing.

The Gen III helmet, which is essential to the operation of the F-35 in all its variations, has pushed forward the art of augmented reality. Combined with optic and infrared sensors on the aircraft, it essentially allows the pilot to look through the plane—a feature much desired by the Marine Corps for precision vertical landing of the F-35B. It also allows pilots to track, designate, and fire weapons at targets by looking in their direction—without having to turn the aircraft toward them. But the helmet has encountered multiple growing pains, including problems with image "jitter" early on in testing that could cause pilots with the strongest of stomachs to get motion sickness.

The mass of the approximately 5-pound, $400,000 Gen III helmet could push the pilot's head down during the acceleration of ejection and cause both neck and back injuries to pilots. When combined with the sudden forces exerted by the opening of the ejection seat's parachute, particularly when the seat pitches to the point where it is nearly upside-down when the parachute opens, it could be enough to break the neck of lighter pilots.

Rocket League, which gains Xbox One to PC multiplayer.

Microsoft's efforts to court indie developers continued today at the 2016 Game Developers Conference with a pair of announcements designed to make the Xbox One a more attractive platform for indie gaming.

Microsoft is opening up the Xbox One to enable cross-platform multiplayer. This feature will most obviously support play between the console and Windows 10 PCs, but Microsoft isn't stopping there. Developers can also support multiplayer against non-Microsoft multiplayer networks. While Microsoft never actually names names, the announcement opens the door to Xbox games that support play against PlayStation gamers or those who bought PC titles on Steam.

One of the first games to gain the feature will be Rocket League. The game already supports play between PlayStation 4 and PC owners; it will now also support games between Xbox One and PC owners, with Microsoft saying that there's an "open invitation" for other networks to get involved. Reading between the lines, this statement suggests that Sony has some prohibition against PlayStation 4 to Xbox One connectivity and that it's now up to the Japanese company to lift the restrictions.

(credit: Alyx Dellamonica)

Some of the impacts of climate change are conceptually complex, such as weather extremes, storm tracks, and ecosystem shifts. But one impact that's easy to imagine is sea level rise. When the ocean comes up, stuff ends up underwater. So one way to project the future consequences is to simply calculate how many people and buildings are below a given height above the current sea level.

But sea level isn’t the only thing changing—so are the people and buildings. A new study led by the University of Georgia’s Mathew Hauer looks at population trends around the coastal US for a better estimate of how many people would be affected by rising ocean waters by the end of this century.

The researchers took census data from 1940 to 2010 for coastal counties, and they extrapolated the trends through 2100. Then they ran the results through two scenarios of future sea level rise: one in which it rises 0.9 meters by 2100 and one in which it increases fully 1.8 meters. Those numbers correspond to reasonable estimates if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow unabated and show the upper end of the potential range of sea level rise.

Acura

The wait is finally over—there's a new NSX in town.

6 more images in gallery

Press impressions of Acura's long-awaited second-generation NSX are starting to show up online. We've seen the two-seat, mid-engined hybrid at a couple of auto shows now, but a couple of weeks ago Honda and Acura started giving out a bit of seat time in production cars. (Ars wasn't at the event, but you can read impressions from Roadshow and SlashGear.)

The original NSX was built from 1990-2005, and it showed the world that Honda could build a better mid-engined sports car than Ferrari. Extensive use of aluminum and other lightweight materials kept the weight down, and its naturally aspirated engine was a gem of a power plant. The handling was reportedly honed by Ayrton Senna, who benefited from Honda power in his McLaren Formula 1 car. Automotive purists made it something of a cult car, especially the more focused Type R.

The new NSX is much more complex under the skin than the previous model. It still has a mounted V6 between the cockpit and the rear wheels (longitudinally rather than transversely), but the V6 has a pair of turbochargers—and 500hp (373kW). There are three electric motor/generator units; one for each front wheel (36hp/27kW) and third (47hp/35kW) that feeds into the same 9-speed dual-clutch transmission as the engine.

Update: Microsoft now claims that the FAQ update was "a mistake," and that bitcoin support isn't going anywhere after all.

Original story: A little over a year ago, Microsoft rolled out Bitcoin support for Microsoft accounts, enabling the crytpocurrency to be used to buy games, apps, music, and video on Xbox Live, Windows Store, and (as it was then) Xbox Music and Xbox Video.

Bitcoin users could add up to $100 to their accounts at a time, with BitPay providing the necessary back-end support.

Don't get too excited—this is just Remix OS. Imagine something similar, though.

One of Android N's headline features is a new split-screen mode that lets you run two apps side by side. It's a great multitasking feature for tablets, but it looks like Google is gearing up to take things one step further. We haven't been able to get it to work, but hidden in the code of Android N are references to an "experimental freeform windows" mode.

There are several references to this mode in "framework-res.apk"—a major Android system file. The most obvious references are these strings, which are meant for the settings screen:

<string name="enable_freeform_support">Enable freeform windows</string>
<string name="enable_freeform_support_summary">Enable support for experimental freeform windows.</string>

In the framework file, these strings are listed next to other settings in the "Developer Settings" screen, but we haven't been able to get the checkbox to actually appear. These exact strings pop up in a few other places, too, like the SystemUI and SetupWizard. The framework seems to be the main location, though. The framework also contains references for the new "close" and "maximize" buttons that a feature like this would require. The SystemUI gets in on the fun, too, with references to a "recents freeform workspace" (probably referencing the recent app list).

A small supermarket chain in Florida says that it has been ready for the shift to chip-based cards—but it can't get certified. (credit: Mike)

A Florida-based supermarket and liquor store chain has sued a variety of card networks and card issuers (PDF)—including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Wells Fargo, and a number of others—over a recent shift in credit card technology that took place in the US last fall.

While the rest of the world has been migrating from insecure, magnetic stripe cards to relatively more secure chip-embedded cards for more than a decade, card networks and card-issuing banks in the US are only now demanding that retailers stop running mag stripe cards in favor of EMV cards. (EMV is eponymous for EuroPay, MasterCard, and Visa, the three corporations that developed the chip card standard.) The card networks decided years ago that by October 1, 2015, all retailers had to accept chip cards. If retailers couldn’t accept chip cards, then any time someone fraudulently used a card to make a purchase at that retailer, the retailer would have to pay for the chargeback instead of the issuer paying for the chargeback, as is common.

The liability shift was supposed to be the stick that would incentivize business owners to buy new terminals to accept chip cards. But Florida’s B&R Supermarket, which owns Milam’s Market and Grove Liquors, says it did all that—it bought new NCR Equinox L5300 card readers “well prior to the Liability Shift," installed them, and trained its staff to use them. But it never got “EMV certified” by the card-network consortium that has been managing the rollout, despite having notified the card networks and issuers that B&R Supermarket companies were ready to be certified. B&R Supermarket charges that this delay is part of MasterCard and Visa’s plan to make small businesses pay for fraud liability as long as possible.