Month: July 2016

OK Pikachu, get in the ball. Just get in the ball. GET IN THE DAMN BALL YOU FREAKING ELECTRIC RAT!

At the early levels, it's relatively easy to advance in Pokémon Go without spending any money. Provided you're not in a Pokémon-light rural area (or, er, a black neighborhood), it's pretty simple to just keep farming Pidgeys and nearby Pokéstops and gyms for the resources you need to watch your in-game numbers go up.

Now that the game has been out for more than a week in many regions, though, some of the first players to hit the game's higher levels are running into a wall that's halting that easy advancement. In a detailed Reddit thread discussing his "late game" progress in Pokémon Go, user Riggnaros discusses a few ways the game grinds progress to a halt once players hit level 25 or so.

For instance, Riggnaros says, once you reach a level in the "mid 20s," low-powered Pokémon you encounter in the game start to "have an abnormally high chance to evade capture." That means players will need to start wasting a lot more Pokéballs to capture the most abundant monsters, which are key to gaining the experience points needed for that next level. Getting enough Pokéballs to keep up with all those escaping Pokémon means spending real money or spending inordinate amounts of time farming free Pokéballs from those slowly refilling Pokéstops.

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

For the third time in less than a year, a Brazilian judge has ordered (Google Translate) messaging app WhatsApp to be blocked by the country’s five major mobile phone companies.

According to Reuters, Judge Daniela Barbosa Assunção de Souza in the state of Rio de Janeiro did not give a reason for the blockade due to legal secrecy in an ongoing case and said it "will only be lifted once Facebook surrenders data."

It is likely that Brazilian investigators have been frustrated by end-to-end encrypted messages on the Facebook-owned app.

Jonny Smith's Flux Capacitor is one of the quirkiest (but most interesting) electric vehicles on the road today. Smith, a British automotive journalist, took an old Enfield 8000 electric city car (built in small numbers in the 1970s) and has transformed it into something a lot wilder. Out went the array of 12v batteries and 8hp (6kW) electric motor, to be replaced by an altogether more potent powertrain. And on July 16th, Smith and the Flux Capacitor entered the record books as the world's fastest street legal EV, running the quarter-mile in 9.87 seconds.

When last we checked in with Smith, the Flux Capacitor was only Europe's fastest street-legal EV, with a sub-11 second 1/4-mile time under its (bright orange) belt. Since then, the existing 144-cell Hyperdrive Innovation lithium-ion battery pack has been supplemented by an extra 44 cells located in the trunk. That upgrade has boosted the car from 370v to 400v, and together with lower gearing on the differential, the times at Santa Pod Raceway in the UK began to fall.

"The combination of big voltage amps and phenomenal grip gave us early ten-second quarter miles, and when we braved the RPM limit of the motors, we managed a nine [second run]," Smith told Ars. "Despite all of this power and speed, the little Enfield still felt smooth, stable, and happy, which is unbelievable given that it was designed to do 40 miles an hour."

(credit: demonsparkx)

A Fresno-area man who initially made a baffling attempt to explain to law enforcement how his laser pointer repeatedly hit a California Highway Patrol aircraft multiple times—"It just shot upward from my pocket and hit the plane"—has now been sentenced to six months in prison. He pleaded guilty to endangering an aircraft with his laser earlier this year.

"I keep thinking this offense was committed by a 12-year-old. But it was not," US District Judge Lawrence J. O’Neill told defendant Jeremy Scott Danielson during the Monday sentencing hearing, according to a statement sent to Ars. "You could have brought the CHP plane down by blinding the pilot. You jeopardized their eyes and their safety."

Despite the judge's claim, a plane has never been brought down due to a laser strike. However, for more than a decade, federal authorities have been concerned that terrorists or other ne'er-do-wells might try to. Under the Obama administration, federal penalties for laser strikes have been strengthened.

Although Yahoo reported decent earnings in its Q2 2016 financial call yesterday, the embattled company reported yet another write down on its $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition. Yahoo is in the process of soliciting bids for its core businesses as well as downsizing significantly, but the company still didn’t have anything to share about a potential buyer on its call, with the third and final round for bids due on Monday.

Yahoo said it had lowered its projections for Tumblr’s performance, writing down $482 million in “impairment charges.” Last quarter, Yahoo similarly took a $230 million write down on the social media platform. CNN Money notes that Yahoo has now written down about half the value of its original investment in Tumblr, “rendering [CEO Marissa] Mayer's biggest acquisition to date effectively worthless.”

When Yahoo acquired Tumblr in 2013, the company put out a press release to placate angry and worried Tumblr users, promising “not to screw it up.”

(credit: Fitbit)

A proposed class-action lawsuit accusing Fitbit of misrepresenting the ability of its wearable fitness products to track sleep can move forward, a federal judge has ruled.

The San Francisco federal lawsuit claims that Fitbit materially misrepresented on its packaging the ability of the Flex product to track users' hours slept, times woken up, and sleep quality. The suit alleges false advertising, unfair trade practices, fraud, and a host of other claims.

US District Judge James Donato did not rule on the merits of the case but instead refused to toss the lawsuit as Fitbit had wanted. Now Fitbit, which claimed the allegations were based on "bad science," according to the judge, must mount another defense to the allegations. The case could still be dismissed at a later stage, and it might also go to a trial or settle.