Month: May 2016

If you're in the Bay Area this fine evening, we'd love for you to join us for the filming of our second episode of Ars Technica Live, a monthly interview series with fascinating people who work at the intersection of tech, science, and culture. We're meeting tonight, May 18, in Oakland, California, from 7 to 9pm for a discussion with law professor Elizabeth Joh about technology, surveillance, and law enforcement.

Filmed before a live audience in Oakland tiki bar Longitude (347 14th St., Oakland, California), each episode of Ars Technica Live is a speculative, informal conversation between your fine hosts Annalee Newitz and Cyrus Farivar and an invited guest. The audience—that would be you—is also invited to join the conversation and ask questions. These aren’t soundbyte setups; they are deep cuts from the frontiers of research and creativity.

This month's event is about the legal and ethical implications of how police use surveillance technology. Guest Elizabeth Joh is a UC Davis law professor who has done extensive research on how police use surveillance technology, including body cams. She's also interested in DNA databases.

Getty Images | ullstein bild

The proposed layout of the track is superimposed onto this aerial photograph of Castle Nürburg and its surroundings.

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The Nürburgring is a place with few equals. A ribbon of tarmac and concrete a little over 16 miles (just under 23km) long, it snakes its way around the hills surrounding the town (and medieval castle) of Nürburg in Germany's Eifel Mountains. Many people think it's the planet's most challenging race track, a combination of long straights (and therefore high speeds), plenty of blind corners, and an extremely unforgiving nature. And perhaps uniquely, it's a real-life place intimately familiar to tens of millions of people who have never set foot on it thanks to its inclusion in a number of best-selling video games.

It's hard to think of another real place that's featured in so many games and simulated with such depth. Between its inclusion in Gran Turismo (from GT4 onwards) and Forza Motorsport, more than 50 million digital Nürburgrings have been shipped for consoles since the mid-2000s.

It's unlike any track that would be built today—unlike any track that anyone has built for the last half-century, in fact. Opened in 1927, it was the brainchild of Dr Otto Creutz, a local administrator. Car races had been held on closed public roads in the area, but Creutz figured that a purpose-built track would do just as well at drawing in tourists without the annoying road closures and disruption.

What games have proven worth fiddling with all this hardware? (credit: Kyle Orland)

For years now, we've been hearing dueling predictions about the eventual fate of high-end, consumer-grade virtual reality. Will the technology cause a revolution in gaming and computer interaction? Will it quickly become a faddish flop? Or are we looking at something in between?

It will likely take years to fully answer those questions. But a month after the launch of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, software sales estimates from Ars Technica's Steam Gauge project can at least give us some idea of how quickly one branch of PC-based virtual reality is getting off the ground. The answer, it seems, is a small, slow, and steady start for an HTC Vive market that's still quite limited by lack of hardware in players' homes.

We'll note right up front that Steam Gauge doesn't give precise sales or gameplay data for Steam games. Instead, it generates estimates for gameplay and ownership based on random sampling of public data from Steam's own API. While there may be a small margin of error from actual sales numbers, this data should be accurate enough to provide a general view of the market. More details on the Steam Gauge methodology and its limitations can be found in our initial write-up.

The screen is actually too bright and too colorful to really capture. (credit: Peter Bright)

Honestly, I thought I fell into some kind of a wormhole and traveled back in time. While recently using Samsung's definitely new Galaxy TabPro S—the company's take on the Surface concept of a tablet with a keyboard cover accessory—I lost myself in a specific moment. Suddenly, I couldn't tell if it was 2016 or 1996.

Some context: Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 was released on August 24, 1996. It updated various parts of Windows 95, including Internet Explorer 3, FAT32 filesystem support, Firewire support, and DirectX 2.0a. The release also introduced support for OpenGL 3D graphics. To showcase this new capability, Microsoft offered a handful of 3D screensavers.

In those days, screensavers were an important part of the computing landscape. We all used them because we had to: burn-in was a serious problem for the then-ubiquitous cathode ray tubes (CRTs). The phosphor compounds used in CRTs lose their luminance over time. Extended displays of static images on the screen cause uneven wear of the phosphors, and this degradation can result in faint "ghost images" of degraded phosphors being permanently burned into the screen.

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Civilization VI! Check out that art style.

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2K Games and Firaxis have just announced Civilization VI, the latest entry in the long-running 4X strategy franchise. There's only a small handful of info for now, but the most important piece is the release date: October 21, 2016, on PC.

One of the biggest changes is the art style, which is definitely more "cartoony" than Civ V or Beyond Earth. The land, buildings, and units are drawn in bright, primary colors. The terrain textures almost look like a painting with brush strokes as opposed to the realistic style depicted in Civ V. Longtime Civ fans might be having traumatic flashbacks to the console-only Civilization Revolution, but Civ VI looks like it will still keep the deep and addictive gameplay the series is known for.

On the gameplay side of things, Civ VI seems to keep Civ V's hexagonal tile layout. Players will still be warring over territories displayed via big, bright division lines that cut through the landscape. There will be some gameplay changes, though. The "One unit per tile" rule has been tweaked, with the press release saying that "support units can now be embedded with other units, like anti-tank support with infantry or a warrior with settlers." Similar units can also be combined together to form "Corps" units.

Google's Adwords platform includes rules to prohibit some advertising campaigns, and it employs a "limited," targeted approach for products and services that it deems "legally or culturally sensitive." Its list of outright banned topics grew one larger on Wednesday with a call from Google to ban all ads for payday loans and "related products."

The ban, which will go into effect on July 13, puts specific conditions on the types of loans that can be advertised on Adwords. To clarify the definition of a "payday loan," Director of Global Product Policy David Graff announced that an ad cannot be placed if the loan requires full repayment within 60 days or if its annual percentage rate (APR) is 36 percent or higher.

"When reviewing our policies, research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users, so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that," Graff wrote in the announcement. After quoting a critic who opposed "predatory lending," Graff mentioned that the ban's effectiveness will be "reviewed" over time.