Month: August 2016

(credit: Rimac Automobili)

As its legion of online fans never cease to remind us, the Tesla Model S P90D is a fast car. Actually, that's selling the electric vehicle a little short. In Ludicrous mode, it's about as quick in a straight line as a McLaren 650S, no mean feat considering that the McLaren weighs 1,800lbs (815kg) less. Until now, if you wanted to go any faster in an EV, you needed to roll your own, Flux Capacitor-style. But even Jonny Smith's quarter-mile EV record may be under threat, courtesy of Rimac's Concept_One.

You may not have heard of Rimac Automobili, but the Croatian company has been impressing us for a while now. We first saw the Concept_One in the paddock at last year's Formula E race in Miami. More recently, we met up with some of its engineers in Colorado at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb; the four-wheel torque vectoring powertrain in Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima's car is a test-bed for the Concept_One. And Rimac has also been working with Konigsegg on the batteries and power distribution units going into the latter's Regera hybrid hypercar.

We always knew the Concept_One would be fast; it's hard to argue with 1072hp (800kW) and 1180ft-lbs (1600Nm) after all. But thanks to British YouTuber Archie Hamilton, we now know just what that means. Hamilton traveled to Rimac in Croatia and brought along a Tesla Model S P90D (yes, with Ludicrous mode) as well as a rather rarer beast—a Ferrari LaFerrari hybrid:

It takes a while to adjust to life down here, in the murk and swill of Abzû's underwater palaces. The world feels fundamentally different when your movements are slowed and made heavy by water resistance. And then, as a kind of compensation perhaps, you are given the freedom of flight: upwards and downwards you soar in slow-mo, through the teeming fish. You play as an adept diver, with strong legs, fat flippers, and a head-mounted torch but, even so, it's hard to shake the sense that you are an interloper in a foreign realm. Your get-up cannot disguise the fact that your body was not made for a place like this. You are not welcome here.

It takes time to adjust to Abzû in other ways too. This is a fashionably chic independent game, with no ugly and intrusive HUD elements to spoil your view of its watery domain. But it bucks many other expected contemporary game-design conventions too. There's no map, for example, and no blinking mission-marker drawing you toward your next objective. There are, in fact, few objectives at all, at least in the usual video game sense. There's no health bar, no experience points, nor ways to level up your character's abilities. A single button is used to interact with the world, one catch-all interface used to free shoals of fish from meshes of imprisoning fronds, or to send orbiting mechanical devices to cut a window through the coral, or to loose a shark from some collapsed masonry.

While, much later, there are dangers in the form of unexploded mines which will go off if you drift too close, it's not possible to die in Abzû. At worst you get an electric shock that sends you tumbling through the water for a few seconds until you recover and rediscover your bearings. No, this is a wistful, thoughtful kind of a game: a digital sightseeing tour of an underwater realm, which allows you to marvel at the watery vistas and swim eye-to-eye with great whales. Like Flower and Journey, two contemplative PlayStation games on which Abzû’s creator Matt Nava has previously worked, this is a game about experience rather than challenge, about the journey rather than the destination.

At times Abzû has the ambiance of a magical Disneyland ride, an on-rails tour through vivid scenes where, each time through, you're free to pick out new details and wonders. The feeling of enchantment is compounded by Grammy-nominated composer Austin Wintory's stirring soundtrack, which calls to mind Disney's 1940 film Fantasia, which famously blended animated imagery with classical music. As you drift into and out of jet streams, through billowing curtains of seaweed, and over old bones licked white by the salt, the violins rise and fall to match your movements. As you breach the water alongside a display team of dolphins, a choir provides triumphant accompaniment. Reach the deepest parts of the sea and the soundtrack retreats, leaving nothing but the deep grumble of the tides, and the low popping of swaying bubbles leaked from the seabed. Abzû’s soundtrack, both musical and natural, is exemplary.

Starting this autumn, when you're stopped at some traffic lights, new Audi Q7 and A4 cars will show a real-time time-to-green-light countdown on the driver's information cluster. Now you'll know exactly when to start revving like a hooligan.

The tech, which Audi has imaginatively dubbed the Traffic Light Information System, receives traffic light timing data via the car's cellular modem. In this case, rather than getting the data directly from nearby traffic lights, the data is being broadcast by some kind of city-wide traffic management system.

As you have probably surmised, there are not yet many of these city-wide systems. Audi says that the green light timer will work in select cities in the US this autumn, but declined to say which cities those might be. UK, European, and Asian cities will surely follow, though no timeline has been given. If you have a 2017 Audi A4, A4 allroad, or Q7 built after June 1, with a cellular connectivity package, you will be able to use the feature (in cities where it's enabled)

Just under a year since Nvidia brought the full desktop version of the GTX 980 to laptops, it is beginning to put an end to cut-down laptop chips altogether. Starting today, the desktop versions of the GTX 1080, GTX 1070, and GTX 1060—with some very slight tweaks—are inside laptops from the likes of MSI, Asus, Alienware, Lenovo, and Razer, to name but a few. They're even overclockable. Yes, if you want the very best graphics card outside of a Titan X inside something you can carry around with you to LAN parties, Nvidia has you covered.

Well, I say carry around, but just like laptops kitted out with a desktop GTX 980, those with a GTX 1080 inside aren't exactly thin-and-light ultrabooks. Indeed, most laptop makers are reusing the same chassis as they did for the GTX 980, resulting in systems that are insanely thick, heavy, and about as portable as carrying around a sack of bricks. Oh, and don't forget the power adaptor, which—as I saw with some models in performance demos—is literally the size of a brick. But hey, at least if someone tries to mug you for your expensive laptop, you'll have something to clobber the assailant with.

Still, stuffing a desktop GTX 1080 inside a laptop is an impressive technical achievement. The mobile GTX 1080 is based on the same 16nm Pascal architecture GP104 chip as its desktop counterpart, and features the same 2560 CUDA cores, the same 256-bit memory interface, and the same 8GB of GDDR5X memory running at 10GHz for 320GB/s of bandwidth. It's available in both the MXM form factor as well as integrated solutions. The GTX 1080 supports everything the other Pascal cards support too, including recent inventions such as Simultaneous Multi-Projection and Ansel (which you can read more about in our GTX 1080 review), as well as old standbys like G-Sync and GameStream.

A law professor has filed a formal legal complaint on behalf of three advocacy organizations, arguing that stingray use by law enforcement agencies nationwide—and the Baltimore Police Department in particular—violate Federal Communications Commission rules.

The new 38-page complaint makes a creative argument that because stingrays, or cell-site simulators, act as fake cell towers, that law enforcement agencies lack the spectrum licenses to be able to broadcast at the relevant frequencies. Worse still, when deployed, cell service, including 911 calls, are disrupted in the area.

Stingrays are used by law enforcement to determine a mobile phone's location by spoofing a cell tower. In some cases, stingrays can intercept calls and text messages. Once deployed, the devices intercept data from a target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity. At times, police have falsely claimed the use of a confidential informant when they have actually deployed these particularly sweeping and intrusive surveillance tools. Often, they are used to locate criminal suspects.

At Google I/O 2016, Google announced two new and separate communication apps: Allo, a new instant messenger app, and Duo a video calling app. Today Google announced Duo is finally rolling out to the masses on Android and iOS.

Google Duo is a video calling app and just a video calling app—it does one-to-one video calls and nothing else. It's also only available for mobile phones—there are no Web, Chrome, or desktop clients. It doesn't even require a Google Account—Google says that "all you need is your phone number and you’ll be able to reach people in your phone’s contacts list."

Duo has two features. The first is that the video calling is claimed to be "fast and reliable" even with limited bandwidth. It can switch between Wi-Fi and cellular data without dropping the call and can "gracefully degrade" the video when bandwidth gets low. The other feature is called "Knock Knock," which shows live video from your contact on the incoming call screen before you even answer the call. Knock Knock doesn't work on iOS right now. On the security side of things, Google notes that "all Duo calls are end-to-end encrypted."