Month: October 2016

Enlarge / Cogisen's co-founder and CEO was an engineer with Ferrari during one of their F1 heydays in the early 2000s. (credit: Getty Images | Christian Fischer/Bongarts)

A frequent topic on these pages concerns Silicon Valley and its ongoing attempt to disrupt the car industry. But over in Europe, a former Ferrari F1 engineer has some thoughts of his own on the matter and thinks his company—Cogisen—has a better way of doing things. Christiaan Erik Rijnders spent several years in the early 2000s working on Ferrari's simulator, simulations, and vehicle dynamics, during which time Ferrari utterly dominated the sport.

Through that work, he absorbed a few important lessons on the way successful R&D programs should run, and they're lessons he's been applying more recently to the problem of image processing. In particular, Cogisen has some very cool gaze-tracking algorithms (earning the startup a Horizon 2020 grant from the European Union) that may have an important role to play in autonomous vehicles. We spoke to Rijnders recently to find out more about his time at the Scuderia and to talk about where he thinks most traditional tech startups are going wrong.

"On the inside [of Ferrari], it was everything it was cracked up to be; you really got to see what proper engineering is and proper management is," he told Ars. "You'd have world-class engineers who were all very strong in theoretical fundamentals of what engineering is, who would all share data in a climate where risk taking was encouraged, where nobody was afraid to make decisions and they were made very well, especially on a strategic level by Ross Brawn, on a political level by Jean Todt, and on a technical level by Rory Byrne."

It's not every day that we see a story come down the pike that combines topical news of exploding cell phones, game modifications, and issues of copyright legality into a single cocktail of pure Ars catnip. Today is one of those days, though, since phone maker Samsung has issued a seemingly frivolous DMCA takedown notice for a video showing a Grand Theft Auto V mod that features a Galaxy Note 7 as an explosive weapon.

As Techdirt reports, the video titled "GTA 5 MOD - Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (bomb)" is "no longer available due to a copyright claim by Samsung Electronics America, Inc. and its affiliates," according to its YouTube page. Before the takedown, the video appears to have been a simple gameplay recording of this "Samsung Galaxy Note 7 [Bomb]" mod, from modder HitmanNiko, which replaces Grand Theft Auto V's sticky bombs with a 3D model of the famously defective (and now discontinued) phone.

It's not clear if the takedown was automated or manually requested by the phone maker, but you can still find plenty of other videos on YouTube showing that mod in action, so Samsung doesn't appear to be casting a wide net over all such videos as of yet.

Enlarge / The expansive dunes of BF1's Sinai level give way to a more populated military outpost.

If you want to rent a fully customizable server for your Battlefield 1 matches, be prepared to pay just over $300 a year. That's how much publisher Electronic Arts will be charging for its rental server program starting in November, according to an announcement on the Battlefield forums today.

The total cost varies by platform (PC players pay a roughly 50 percent premium over console players) and the length of the rental, as follows:

PC
1 day: $2.99
7 days: $11.99
30 days: $42.99
90 days: $99.99
180 days: $149.99

PS4/Xbox One
1 day: $1.99
7 days: $7.99
30 days: $26.99
90 days: $64.99
180 days: $99.99

Battlefield 1 players will still be able to play for free on EA's standard servers, which will host a variety of vanilla game modes for both ranked and unranked play for up to 64 players. Those who shell out to host a rented server will be able to give players full control over details like map rotation, game modes, and gameplay settings like bullet damage and weapon availability. While EA says it "might restrict number of game modes available at launch and gradually enable them based on feedback and other circumstances," the company promises additional customization options will be added through 2016 and beyond.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Last week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign team released a plan to address "the cyber," as the candidate had promised to do in a speech he gave earlier this month.

Like most of his other policies, Trump's cybersecurity plan is frustratingly thin on details. It calls for an "immediate review of all US cyber defenses and vulnerabilities, including critical infrastructure, by a Cyber Review Team of individuals from the military, law enforcement, and the private sector."

What that would look like in practice, how much it would cost, how it would be funded, and how it would be different from what the government already does remains murky.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple has confirmed the news that went around yesterday—the company is in fact having an event at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern/6pm UK on October 27 at its campus in Cupertino. Per usual, Apple's invitation doesn't give much away, but the event is widely expected to focus on new Macs.

Apple took a year off from its normal October events last year; in 2014, the company introduced the 5K Retina iMac alongside the iPad Air 2 on its town hall campus. This will be the first event to focus on Mac hardware since March of 2015, when the 12-inch MacBook was originally announced. Refreshes since then have been done quietly via press releases and private meetings.

New MacBook Pros are widely expected, and we've been hearing about their new design all year. They're said to get thinner and lighter and migrate to USB Type-C, though unlike the MacBook, they're expected to have multiple ports. A long, thin OLED display bar is said to replace the row of function keys that change dynamically depending on what you're doing. TouchID support is also said to be coming, and the updated internals will allegedly include GPUs from AMD's Polaris family.

Enlarge (credit: Klaus with K)

An alleged Russian hacker arrested in the Czech Republic following an FBI-coordinated tip-off is suspected of taking part in a 2012 breach of LinkedIn that resulted in the theft of more than 117 million user passwords, representatives of the professional networking site said Wednesday.

"Following the 2012 breach of LinkedIn member information, we have remained actively involved with the FBI's case to pursue those responsible," company officials said in a statement. "We are thankful for the hard work and dedication of the FBI in its efforts to locate and capture the parties believed to be responsible for this criminal activity."

Word of the arrest came on Tuesday evening in a brief statement issued by Czech Republic officials. It said an unnamed man was arrested in Prague on suspicion of committing unspecified hacks on targets located in the US. The raid was carried out in collaboration with the FBI. According to The New York Times, the suspect was captured on October 5, about 12 hours after authorities learned he was in the country. His arrest was kept a secret until Tuesday "for tactical reasons," the paper reported.

Enlarge / Monkey One: "Smash! Bash! Crunch!" Monkey Two: "What is life?" (credit: M. Haslam)

On the rocky slopes of Brazil's Serra da Capivara National Park, a group of small monkeys called capuchins are pounding rocks together. One grabs a sizable stone, grips it in both hands, and pounds it down like a hammer on another stone. Then the monkey bends down and delicately licks the pulverized quartz left behind. After a few minutes, this hammering shatters the stone, producing a few shards, called "flakes," that look almost exactly like the sharp-edged stone knives and scrapers created by humanity's ancestors millions of years ago.

University of São Paolo zoology researcher Tiago Falótico saw the whole thing and got it on video. This monkey behavior had never been observed before, so he passed it to his colleague Tomos Proffitt at the University of Oxford's Primate Archaeology Group. In a paper for Nature, they describe the astonishing discovery that monkeys are capable of making the equivalent of hominin Stone Age tools, albeit unintentionally.

Previous researchers had seen the capuchins pounding stones but had assumed it was a form of aggression, meant to scare off enemies. But the videos gathered by Proffitt and his colleagues show something very different. "It wasn't an aggressive behavior and seemed instead to be aimed at pulverizing the quartz into dust so that it could be ingested and rubbed onto the skin," Proffitt told Ars via e-mail.