Month: October 2016

Enlarge (credit: John Lamparski via Getty Images)

Lucasfilm, the maker of the Star Wars movies, is unleashing its legal Death Star on the California owner of schools that teach lightsaber skills in New York, San Francisco, and at events across the country.

In a federal court lawsuit (PDF), Lucasfilm claims that participants might be confused that the program is affiliated with Lucasfilm, when it's not, and that the Lightsaber Academy's owner has not obtained any rights to use Lucasfilm trademarks.

Defendants regularly use the Lucasfilm Trademarks without authorization in connection with their businesses. Among other infringing activities, Defendants use a logo ("Defendants’ Infringing Logo") that is nearly identical, and confusingly similar, to Lucasfilm’s trademark Jedi Order logo. ...Defendants’ Infringing Logo, like Lucasfilm’s trademark Jedi Order logo, is round in shape, with six wing-like shapes curving upward (three per side), and an eight-pointed star featuring elongated top and bottom points stretched into a vertical line.

The suit said the classes, or "infringing activities," are promoted at lightsaberacademy.com, newyorkjedi.com, lightsaberguild.club, and lightsaberguild.com.

(credit: Dave Hanmer)

Sunday evening, Tesla announced that it would be partnering with Panasonic to create photovoltaic cells and modules at SolarCity’s new Buffalo, New York factory—if Tesla’s shareholders approve the company’s purchase of SolarCity, that is.

Tesla currently has a partnership with Panasonic to help build its Gigafactory outside of Reno, NV, and manufacture batteries in it. Last year, Tesla announced its foray into stationary battery manufacturing, which it said was a natural extension of its electric vehicle business. The Gigafactory has just begun churning out batteries for Tesla vehicles and so-called Powerwalls (7kWh stationary batteries for residential use), as well as battery systems for industrial use, which Tesla calls the Powerpack.

Panasonic has decades of experience building photovoltaic cells, and Tesla says if the SolarCity deal goes through, Panasonic will start manufacturing in the Buffalo facility sometime in 2017. “Tesla intends to provide a long-term purchase commitment for those cells from Panasonic,” the electric vehicle company said in a press release.

Enlarge / The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has just released iOS 10.0.3, a minor update to iOS 10 intended to fix cellular connectivity problems with the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. Unlike most iOS updates, this one is available exclusively for the newest iPhones, since older iPhones and iPads running iOS 10.0.2 don't seem to be affected.

The problem seems to affect US users on Verizon the most consistently, and most users' complaints say that the phones drop their LTE connections and either fall back to 3G speeds or lose connectivity altogether. Reports of similar connectivity problems have also come from AT&T users, and late last week, Bloomberg also reported on complaints from Chinese users who were losing their signals. Apple's release notes don't mention any particular countries or carriers, but iOS 10.0.3 will hopefully resolve the problems for everyone.

Apple is also working on a major update to iOS 10, version 10.1, which adds the "portrait mode" feature to the iPhone 7 Plus' dual-camera system and makes other tweaks. That update is currently in its third developer beta and will be released later this fall.

Enlarge (credit: Samsung)

The news hasn't been great for Samsung's smartphone division lately, but there is good news for the chipmaking arm of the company: Samsung announced today that it has started to mass-produce chips on its new 10nm LPE manufacturing process, a major improvement over its current 14nm process.

According to Samsung, 10nm chips can fit 30 percent more transistors within the same physical area as a 14nm chip. Chip designers will be able to create chips that are up to 27 percent faster or chips that use up to 40 percent less power, though most chips will probably do a little of both instead of maximizing one or the other.

A second-generation, 10nm LPP process will begin mass production in the second half of 2017, roughly one year from today. Other than the timing, we only know that this revision is intended to boost performance.

Enlarge / US Secretary of State John Kerry speaks in Kigali, Rwanda. (credit: IISD/ENB | Kiara Worth)

Because of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, NASA was able to call a video about the ozone layer “The World Avoided.” In a model for international agreements, the world’s nations came together in response to research revealing a dangerous trend of ozone destruction driven primarily by chlorofluorocarbons—used as refrigerants and, yes, propellants in aerosol cans. The agreement that ensued dealt with the problem.

There’s a common misconception that global warming and ozone depletion are one and the same, but they are separate phenomena with separate causes. The two phenomena do actually intersect with each other, however. Apart from destroying stratospheric ozone, some chlorofluorocarbons are tremendously potent greenhouse gases. The concentration of these gases in the atmosphere is very, very small, but their potency makes them more than a rounding error for climate change. That means the Montreal Protocol has also helped us avoid a bit of planetary warming.

Chlorofluorocarbons were largely replaced with hydrofluorocarbons, which are ozone-safe. Unfortunately, they're also extremely potent greenhouse gases. UN talks eventually started up again with the goal of pushing a second transition to chemicals that are safe on both counts. As more and more air conditioners come online in developing economies like India, the leakage of hydrofluorocarbons into the atmosphere has been growing rapidly, adding urgency to the talks.

Enlarge (credit: Overpass Light Brigade)

Some major video game publishers might have trouble finding top talent to voice their game characters starting Friday, October 21. That's when SAG-AFTRA—an actor's union boasting 150,000 active members across film, TV, radio, and games—is set to begin a strike targeting some of the biggest companies in the game industry.

The strike threat comes more than a year after SAG-AFTRA first publicly discussed a proposed strike, following the 2014 expiration of a contract with publishers including EA Games, Activision, Disney, Take Two, Insomniac, and Warner Bros. The union is seeking royalty payments for actors in games that sell at least two million copies, as well as stunt pay for "vocally stressful" recording sessions, among other demands.

If those demands aren't met, union members will be barred from all voice, motion-capture, and background work on games with 11 affected companies in total. The potential strike action was overwhelmingly approved last year by more than 96 percent of voting union members.

Enlarge (credit: 401(K) 2012)

A federal appeals court has found that law enforcement can, without a warrant, swipe credit cards and gift cards to reveal the information encoded on the magnetic stripe. It's the third such federal appellate court to reach this conclusion.

Last week, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of the government in United States v. Turner, establishing that it was entirely reasonable for Texas police officers to scan approximately 100 gift cards found in a car that was pulled over at a traffic stop. Like the previous similar 8th Circuit case that Ars covered in June 2016, the defendants challenged the search of the gift cards as being unreasonable. (The second case was from the 3rd Circuit in July 2015, in a case known as US v. Bah.)

In this case, after pulling over the car and running the IDs of both men, police found that there was an outstanding warrant for the passenger, Courtland Turner. When Turner was told to get out of the car and was placed in the patrol car, the officer returned to the stopped car and noticed an “opaque plastic bag partially protruding from the front passenger seat,” as if someone had tried to push it under the seat to keep it hidden.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

A pair of articles published on Monday by Bloomberg and Fast Company provide an interesting snapshot of the ongoing collision between the tech and automotive industries. In the former, Mark Gurman and Alex Webb provide a fuller exploration of Apple's ongoing "Project Titan" than we've read to date. The "so secret we can't talk about it" car R&D is believed to have been heavily scaled back—along with Apple's vehicular ambitions.

The once thousand-strong team has now lost hundreds of members, particularly those working on a car OS, as well as chassis and suspension design, Bloomberg reports. Perhaps Apple's scaled-back plans were inevitable; according to Bloomberg "Apple executives had imagined an electric car that could recognize its driver by fingerprint and autonomously navigate with the press of a button."

Meanwhile, Rick Tetzili at Fast Company takes a look at General Motors under Mary Barra's leadership. Like others in the car business, GM has realized its future is as much in technology as it is in building the vehicles themselves. It therefore has designs on the clever young brains that currently flock to Silicon Valley and so is doing its bit to make working at GM an appealing prospect.