Month: April 2016

(credit: Niklas Morberg)

A young American boy is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging his and others' placement on a government terrorist watchlist.

According to the civil complaint filed in federal court in Virginia on Tuesday, the boy had been given an “SSSS designation indicating that he had been designated as a ‘known or suspected terrorist'" while going through airport security.

Since he was a seven-month-old, Baby Doe, as he is referred to, was subject to “extensive searches,” including rifling through all of his diapers.

(credit: eGames)

So you want to get into e-sports, but you're worried that the myriad existing popular competitions can't match the grandeur and incorruptible respectability of something like the Olympic games. The UK government has a potential solution, today announcing the eGames as "an international gaming tournament where national pride is the prize."

That pride is apparently the only prize... the announcement makes it clear that "the eGames will be a medal only competition, with no prize money, but the opportunity to take home gold for your country." That might be a hard sell in a space that routinely attracts competitors with prize pools that can easily surpass $18 million, but it does line up with the lack of international prize money for Olympic athletes (local Olympic committees often give cash to gold medal winners, though).

The new eGames will be looking to bask in some reflected glory from the upcoming Rio Olympic Games, hosting its first competition as a two-day "pop up" in Rio during the Summer Olympics in August. Any nation will be welcome to field an "eTeam" (their term, not ours) in the eGames, but so far only four countries are confirmed as participants: Britain, Canada, Brazil, and the US.

(credit: Florival fr )

Tesla has "no current plans to open a factory in Europe,” a spokesperson for the company told Ars. But that hasn’t stopped French Energy and Environment Minister Ségolène Royal from saying that her best idea for repurposing an old nuclear power plant in northeastern France is to try to convince Tesla to build a factory there for its electric vehicles.

The Fessenheim plant, which sits on the France/Germany border, went into operation in 1978 and is currently operated by French energy company EDF. Today, it’s the oldest working nuclear power plant in France, but after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the French government decided to close the facility by 2017 in the interest of safety. German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported earlier this week that in 2014, a water leak was discovered coming from one of the reactors, but jammed control rods forced EDF to shut the reactor down using unconventional methods. Deutsche Welle says that the incident was played down by EDF in 2014.

Still, many people oppose the closure of the power plant, with Royal noting in previous interviews that the nuclear plant supports some 2,000 jobs. France currently relies on nuclear power to supply 75 percent of its electricity nationwide, but the French government has said it wants to reduce this share to 50 percent by 2025, according to Deutsche Welle.

It's bash, and it's on Windows. (credit: Microsoft)

The first Windows 10 Insider Preview build that includes support for native Linux bash on Windows is now out. This was some of the biggest news to come out of Build last week, as Microsoft works to make Windows even more attractive to developers.

The full install process is described on Microsoft's blog post, but the important part is that in order to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux, the system will have to be put into developer mode through the Settings app (instead of its default sideloading mode). Then the feature will need to be added from Windows Features, and finally the runtime environment will have to be fetched from the store. This process is a little convoluted, but it underscores that Microsoft is positioning the Linux support as a developer feature, not meant for production deployments yet.

The new build looks to be the most significant update since the release of the November Update last year. In addition to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, a bunch of other changes are included. Cortana is smarter, able to sync phone status and notifications between Windows and Android phones and Windows on the PC. She can also help you find your phone by making it ring when you've lost it, and if you look up directions on your PC, she can beam them to your phone for you.

The view near Pavillion, Wyoming. (credit: EPA)

In late 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency published a draft report on an investigation of groundwater contamination near Pavillion, Wyoming, where fracking had jump-started an oil and natural gas field that includes the Wind River Reservation. It's an unusual geologic setting, with little separation between the drinking water aquifer and the rocks being fracked for gas. Add poorly sealed gas wells, the draft report concluded, and you get fracking contamination that appeared to have reached the drinking water aquifer.

Controversy ensued, and the EPA withdrew from the investigation before the report was ever finalized, giving the state of Wyoming control.

One of the EPA scientists leading the investigation, Dominic DiGiulio, subsequently took a job at Stanford University. Along with Stanford colleague Rob Jackson, DiGiulio has tabulated all the EPA data that was sitting in scientific limbo—DiGiulio even went as far as using a Freedom of Information Act request to access EPA data from a couple of water samples that weren’t published.

(credit: Adam Fagen)

A federal class action essentially asking whether Uber drivers should be classified as employees instead of contractors was dealt a major blow when a federal appeals court put the brakes on the closely watched lawsuit. The Tuesday move (PDF) by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals will set aside a June trial representing as many as 240,000 current and former Uber drivers in California that was scheduled in San Francisco federal court.

Uber had appealed a federal judge's decision last year certifying the class, saying the ruling paved the way for a "runaway class action." The ride-hailing company, based in San Francisco, said riders agreed to arbitration clauses as a condition of employment. If Uber prevails, that means each driver likely would have to independently arbitrate their claims in a bid to be treated as an employee instead of a contractor. That would amount to a major victory for Uber and a big blow to Uber drivers. In its one-page order, the 9th Circuit cited a 2005 precedent that said appeals courts should intervene in class-action certification decisions if they are "manifestly erroneous." The appeals court said it would hear the challenge this summer.

The California Labor Commission in June set a precedent and sided with a single Uber driver that complained she should be classified as an employee.

One of the most important features of mobile platforms is notifications. Our phones, and sometimes even our watches, are forever buzzing and bleeping to tell us that someone, somewhere, has done something that we should know about, right now. Whether you use iOS, Android, or even Windows Mobile, there's a common theme to these notifications: they're deeply annoying. We get notifications when we can't do anything about them, we get too many notifications, and we get notifications that we just don't care about.

This problem is just getting worse, too. Instagram users are begging their followers to turn on notifications for their accounts so that they ensure their pictures are seen in spite of the use of an algorithmic timeline. Even when we think we have our notification settings at just the right balance, an unexpected event—a tweet going viral and getting retweeted all over the Internet, say—can throw things off.

A new startup, Projector, which today announced that it had received $4.5 million in seed financing, is hoping to give mobile app developers the tools to make their notifications actually good by making them a whole lot smarter. The Projector service sits between existing application servers and the notification servers, providing a place for rules and machine learning to be applied to the notifications. There's also a client-side library for displaying and reacting to the notifications.