Month: August 2016

(credit: Björn Láczay)

On Tuesday, investigators in Japan released a report attempting to explain how Japanese automaker Mitsubishi was able to falsify its fuel economy numbers on certain cars sold in Japan. The three-month-long investigation pointed to a “collective failure,” at an executive level, to deal with concerns that employees brought up.

The automaker’s cheating was discovered earlier this year when Nissan, which rebrands some of Mitsubishi’s cars and sells them in Japan, found discrepancies in emissions rates between reported and real-world mileage. Mitsubishi later admitted to having falsified data for over 25 years, in some cases overstating fuel economy by 16 percent, according to CBS News. Nissan’s discovery crushed Mitsubishi’s share price. Since then, Nissan scooped up 34 percent of Mitsubishi for a bargain $2.2 billion (¥237 billion).

In an unrelated discovery in March, Japan’s Department of Transportation publicly called out Mitsubishi, as well as Toyota and Nissan, for selling diesel cars with higher-than-allowed nitrogen oxide (NO_x) emissions in Japan, echoing the scandal that has embroiled Volkswagen since last September in the US.

Out of all of Elon Musk's recent "Master Plan Part Deux," the part that really caught our eye was a short paragraph about a Tesla semi. Much of the rest—solar, autonomous driving, ride-sharing—wasn't exactly unforeseen. But the idea of a heavy duty Tesla electric vehicle took us by surprise and left us scratching our heads. Tesla isn't the only company going after this market; Wrightspeed, Proterra, and BYD are already building heavy duty urban electric vehicles, and Mercedes-Benz is about to enter the fray. The Nikola Motor Company (no connection to Tesla Motors) already has 7,000 orders for a zero-emission heavy duty freight hauler that won't be revealed until December. To find out if our confusion over the Tesla Semi is unwarranted, we spoke to some of the big players in the heavy duty EV market.

Even though heavy duty vehicles only account for about eight percent of US carbon emissions (light duty vehicles make up roughly 20 percent), Wrightspeed CEO Ian Wright says electrifying that sector makes more economic sense. In fact, Wright doesn't think the economics work in favor of electric passenger vehicles. "A Nissan Leaf is twice the price of a Versa and you only save $800 a year," he told Ars, "that's a 20-year payback time."

Wright goes on:

Crazy 3D dragon, courtesy of Tilt Brush.

Every virtual-reality tester at Ars Technica has a favorite app on either the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive, especially when it comes to introducing newbies to the format. For my money, Audioshield is the most breathtaking for musically inclined users (and our own Lee Hutchinson might agree), but that rhythm-action game can be too stressful and movement-heavy for casual testing.

Now, I have a new feather in my VR-demo cap: Tilt Brush's new "Audio Reactor" mode. This update, which was added to the HTC Vive's best-known paint-sculpting app for free on Tuesday, lets VR creators add PC audio sensitivity to any of the app's strokes of paint. Certain Tilt Brush creations now react to the rhythm and dynamics of whatever song is being played on your VR computer. This means different types of paint strokes will glimmer or animate in time with the music.

Enabling Audio Reactor's music feature is a little clunky right now since Tilt Brush has neither its own dedicated MP3 interface nor a convenient YouTube search tool. Currently, you'll need to alt-tab out of Tilt Brush, turn on your music-playing interface of choice, and make sure it's playing on Windows' "default playback device" before switching back to your VR window. Thankfully, Steam includes a music-playing interface in its VR "chaperone" system, but it's a bit inelegant since it requires going into Steam's menus.

Enlarge / FTC Chief Technologist Lorrie Cranor speaking at PasswordsCon 2016, part of the Bsides security conference in Las Vegas.

Shortly after Carnegie Mellon University professor Lorrie Cranor became chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission in January, she was surprised by an official agency tweet that echoed some oft-repeated security advice. It read: "Encourage your loved ones to change passwords often, making them long, strong, and unique." Cranor wasted no time challenging it.

The reasoning behind the advice is that an organization's network may have attackers inside who have yet to be discovered. Frequent password changes lock them out. But to a university professor who focuses on security, Cranor found the advice problematic for a couple of reasons. For one, a growing body of research suggests that frequent password changes make security worse. As if repeating advice that's based more on superstition than hard data wasn't bad enough, the tweet was even more annoying because all six of the government passwords she used had to be changed every 60 days.

"I saw this tweet and I said, 'Why is it that the FTC is going around telling everyone to change their passwords?'" she said during a keynote speech at the BSides security conference in Las Vegas. "I went to the social media people and asked them that and they said, 'Well, it must be good advice because at the FTC we change our passwords every 60 days."

(credit: Brian Brown)

For many, taking the time to floss every day is a bother. But for dentists, taking the time to properly research flossing over the course of a century is apparently even more inconvenient.

Despite being dentist-recommended since the early twentieth century, researchers have yet to conduct sufficient, reliable studies to support the claim that flossing effectively prevents cavities and gum disease.

This stain on the dental profession was cracked wide open last year when the Associated Press asked federal agencies for the data behind its recommendation that Americans floss. After the AP filed Freedom of Information Act requests, the government admitted that it didn’t have adequate data to back the recommendation—something it is required to have by law.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a bunch of great deals to share today. Anyone looking for a versatile business notebook, take note: you can now get a Dell Latitude 13 7000 2-in-1 notebook for just $499. In addition to having a great three-year warranty, this model features a 1080p IPS touchscreen display, a full-sized backlit keyboard, 128GB SSD, Dell's data protection suite and TPM, and best of all—no bloatware. Latitudes are very popular business notebooks, and getting a hybrid one like this for such a low price is a deal you don't want to miss.

Check out the full list of deals below.

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If you want to fly Dragons, you've got to get close to the fire.

In recent years, former SpaceX employees have said that the company forced them to work long hours for relatively low pay. Some even filed lawsuits alleging that the Hawthorne-based rocket company violated California labor law. What seems clear is that the rocket company is a demanding employer, hiring the best and brightest and expecting them to work hard toward solving some very difficult problems—like landing rockets on boats in the ocean.

However, during a revealing Reddit AMA on Tuesday with Brian Bjelde, head of human relations at SpaceX, the engineer pushed back against the notion that the company overworks its employees. "We recruit people who are incredibly driven by our mission, but it’s a myth that most of our employees are working 100 or even 80 hour weeks on a regular basis," Bjelde wrote. "Sometimes you have incredibly tight schedules that you need to keep, and that just goes along with launching rockets. But we want our employees to be productive over the long term and that means working at a pace that’s sustainable."

According to Bjelde, SpaceX turnover rates are "below average" for the industry, although he didn't specify the rate. "We have lots of employees, like me, who have been here more than 10 years and have made a fantastic career with SpaceX!" he wrote. "Getting to Mars is a long term mission so we seek to attract employees, and retain them, for the long term."

(credit: US Air Force)

The US Air Force today announced that its first operational squadron of F-35A Lightning II fighters is ready for combat duty. The announcement was made just a day into the five-month period that the Air Force had been given to reach operational levels with the 34th Fighter Squadron, based at Hill Air Force Base in Utah.

The "initial capability" declaration comes after two Air Force F-35As joined two Marine Corps F-35s at July's Royal International Air Tattoo at the United Kingdom's Fairford Royal Air Force base and after an accelerated pace of operational tests for the 34^th over the past few months. The first F-35A aircraft were delivered to the 34^th in September of last year. They've been modified several times after delivery, including getting software updates to the avionics that have eliminated some of the "instability" problems previously experienced (including radar system crashes that required reboots while in flight). Since the most recent software upgrades, the squadron has flown 88 individual aircraft sorties without a software problem, according to an Air Combat Command statement.

The system, the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), combines diagnostics and repair functions with part inventory and verifies that the correct parts have been installed properly. In earlier versions of the software, a bug in ALIS prevented aircraft from flying even when properly maintained. ALIS 2.0.2, the latest version, won't be available to the Air Force until October at the earliest.