Month: May 2016

(credit: valérie kuki)

This week brought confusion for General Motors and its German subsidiary Opel.

US-based General Motors told the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that it had misstated the fuel economy on some 130,000 Chevy Traverses, GMC Acadias, and Buick Enclaves from 2016, overestimating the cars' mileage by 1-2 miles per gallon. GM has said it will compensate customers for the miles per gallon they thought they were getting, possibly with gift cards. The automaker also halted the sales of another 60,000 affected vehicles.

GM said that the misstated mileage came from incorrect calculations made by the company when it was updating numbers for their 2016 models. The company said that new “emissions-related” hardware had changed the cars' miles per gallon, and GM failed to take that change into account. GM noted that its engineers discovered the error as they were working on the 2017 models.

Get ready, PS4 racers, because the world's best-selling racing game franchise is finally ready to return to our consoles. At a Thursday evening event in London, Polyphony Digital and Sony announced that Gran Turismo Sport will arrive on the PS4 on November 15th. And the companies released some footage of the new game to whet our appetites.

The game has been a long time coming, what with Gran Turismo 6 being released for the PS3 way back in December 2013. But Gran Turismo fans are probably used to long waits by now given the six long years between GT4 and the lackluster GT5.

The gameplay footage reveals quite a bit about the new game, which has been built to support PlayStation VR from the ground up. There are a ton of new photo locations, and you can stage multiple cars in those settings. There's a livery editor, so complex custom paint schemes are now possible.

Battelle's DroneDefender, a "directed RF weapon" for taking down drones.

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland—Anti-drone technology has been high on the shopping list of public safety and military organizations at least since a drunken federal employee crashed a drone onto the White House lawn. Two companies on hand at the Navy League Sea Air Space Exposition here this week had two slightly different approaches to the problem. One anti-drone device has already been deployed in the hands of federal law enforcement and the military, and a "street legal" version may be coming soon.

The drone "killer" getting the most attention at Sea Air Space was the DroneDefender, a system developed by researchers at the nonprofit research and development organization Battelle. DroneDefender is a two-pronged drone jammer—it can disrupt command-and-control signals from a remote operator or disrupt automatic GPS or GLONASS guidance, depending on which of the devices' two triggers is pulled.

Powered by a small backpack, DroneDefender looks like some futuristic over-under, radio-frequency shotgun-grenade launcher. Targeted through a simple optical sight, the device has a range of about 400 meters. Battelle calls it a "directed RF energy weapon"—it sends out a jamming signal in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands or global positioning bands in a 30-degree cone around the point of aim.

It's been seven weeks since Frontier completed a purchase of Verizon's fiber and copper networks in California, Florida, and Texas, and the company is finally explaining why so many former Verizon customers have been hit by service outages.

Bad data from Verizon is the culprit, Frontier West Region President Melinda White told lawmakers in California yesterday during a nearly-two-hour hearing held by the State Assembly's Utilities & Commerce Committee. Corrupted data prevented Frontier's network from communicating properly with equipment at customers' homes, making it impossible to provision service to everyone, she said.

Frontier is providing bill credits to customers who lost service.

As part of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update this summer, the Xbox One is being upgraded to support application development. In preparation for this change, Xbox One consoles enrolled in the preview program can be flipped into developer mode to allow development and experimentation to commence.

Whenever a system is newly opened up to developers, it's inevitable that it will soon be used to run either Windows 95 or Doom, and it appears that the Xbox One is no exception to this rule. The Dosbox emulator has been ported to the Universal Windows Platform, and that emulator has been used to boot and run Windows 95. Disappointingly, no Doom was attempted, but the shareware version of Duke Nukem 3D and the ZSNES emulator were both also demonstrated running.

The emulator is very slow, as it's using Dosbox's interpreted mode, wherein the processor is fully emulated in software. Dosbox has a faster dynamic mode that uses the host processor to execute as much code as possible, but the person who made the port, YouTube user vcfan, writes that this feature is currently suffering from some crashes in 64-bit mode. When enabled, vcfan says that the system "flies."

The standalone Android Auto interface.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA—Google is showing off a major Android Auto upgrade at Google I/O, and many of the features address long-standing user requests.

First up is the standalone Android Auto app. You can now get most of the Android Auto experience without needing a brand new car or going through the complicated process of ripping out your car stereo. The app can launch a revised version of the Android Auto interface right on your phone.

The phone version loads up big, chunky buttons with a simpler UI that should be easier to use while driving. On the Android Auto home screen, the navigation bar changes to an Android Auto-style app switcher with Maps, Music, and Phone icons. When you're not on the home screen, the navigation bar changes to show Back and Home icons. Notifications appear as huge, full-screen pop-ups with large, simple text strings.

Larry Ellison, then-CEO of Oracle Corp., leaves federal court in San Francisco after testifying during the 2012 trial. Ellison only appeared by video in the most recent legal clash with Google. (credit: Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—Presentation of evidence in the Oracle v. Google trial ended today, and US District Judge William Alsup has sent the jury home for a long weekend. On Monday, the jury members will come back to hear closing arguments and begin their deliberations.

The lawsuit began when Oracle sued Google in 2010 over its use of 37 Java APIs, which Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems. In 2012, a judge ruled that APIs can't be copyrighted at all, but an appeals court disagreed. Now, unless a jury finds that Google's use of APIs was "fair use," Oracle could ask for as much as $9 billion in damages.

The final hours of court time today were filled with a short Google rebuttal case, in which the company called two witnesses.

(credit: Uber)

One day, the Uber that comes to fetch you might not have anyone in the driver's seat. On Thursday, Uber announced that it will begin testing an autonomous Ford Fusion hybrid on the streets of Pittsburgh, home to Uber's Advanced Technology Center.

Drivers in Pittsburgh should have no problem spotting the research vehicle—it's carrying an array of sensors on its roof that includes a radar, lidar, and cameras. The Uber test car will actually be mapping its surroundings in addition to testing out autonomous driving—although there will be a human operator in the driver's seat at all times to take over at a moment's notice.

We've known for some time that Uber has had an interest in autonomous vehicles. In the past, the company had been working with Google, but that relationship apparently deteriorated last year. It's not the only ride-sharing service looking to ditch the human aspect, either. In January, we reported that General Motors invested $500 million in Lyft with the goal of developing a network of self-driving taxis.