Month: December 2016

Enlarge / A DJI Phantom 2 Vision+; Apple is said to be using drones from DJI, Aibotix, and others for its mapping project. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

The Apple Maps experience today is dramatically better than it was when the product first launched with iOS 6 in 2012, but Apple is still looking for ways to improve its data collection and compete with Google Maps. According to a report from Bloomberg, the next stage in this effort is to use a fleet of drones from DJI, Aibotix, and others to look at street signs, track road construction, and examine other changes. It's not clear if these drones will replace or merely augment the data already being collected by Apple Maps minivans.

Apple was granted an exemption by the Federal Aviation Administration in March of 2016, allowing the company to commercially fly drones to gather data. Current rules for unmanned aircraft systems (PDF) restrict drone flights to daylight hours and insist that pilots maintain line-of-sight with the drones at all times, among many other rules. The company is said to have hired someone from Amazon's "Prime Air" drone delivery project to head up its drone team, which is currently being assembled in Seattle rather than at Apple's Cupertino, California, headquarters.

The initial versions of Apple Maps hadn't been vetted thoroughly enough, and the initial backlash to the product led to changes across the company. CEO Tim Cook publicly apologized for Apple Maps in 2012, and longtime iOS software lead Scott Forstall's refusal to sign that apology was one of the reasons he left the company. In an interview earlier this year, Cook, Software Engineering SVP Craig Federighi, and Internet Software and Services SVP Eddy Cue said that the Maps problems had led directly to Apple's public beta programs for macOS and iOS.

Enlarge / Squad goals.

For years now, gamers have argued that letting PC and console players face each other in first-person shooters would result in a ridiculously unbalanced playing field—that the superior precision and quickness of mouse aiming would utterly dominate the competition using slower, touchier analog sticks, all things being equal. This weekend, Microsoft is rolling out a public crossplay test for Gears of War 4 that could help settle that argument once and for all.

Community Manager OctusTC posted in the Gears of War forums yesterday that cross-platform play would be open between Friday, December 2 and Monday, December 5. The event is being referred to as a "special test weekend... conducted to evaluate the potential of a more permanent crossplay solution in the future to allow Windows 10 and Xbox One gamers to play together in Versus outside of Private Matches" (cross-platform play is already allowed in public co-operative matches).

"Crossplay is divisive in any Versus experience, and Gears of War 4 is no different," OctusTC continues. "From the beginning, we stated our intention to keep both platforms separate in non-cooperative game modes in order to preserve competitive balance. Conserving a fair, competitive environment remains a top priority for us."

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A new variant of Shamoon, the malware that wiped hard drives at Saudi Aramco and other energy companies in 2012, has struck multiple organizations in Saudi Arabia in a new campaign that researchers call a "carefully planned operation." The new variant, which is almost identical to the version used in the 2012 attacks, has replaced the message it previously displayed—which included an image of a burning American flag—with the photo of the body of Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian refugee boy who drowned as his family tried to cross from Turkey to Greece.

Bloomberg reports that digital forensics by Saudi officials indicated that the attacks were launched from Iran. Several Saudi government agencies were among the organizations attacked.

New versions of Shamoon, also known as Disttrack, have been detected by multiple information security companies, including McAfee, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, and FireEye. It isn't yet clear how the malware's "dropper" has gotten into the networks it has attacked. But once on a victim's Windows system, it determines whether to install a 32-bit or 64-bit version of the malware. According to a report from Symantec, the latest Shamoon attack was configured to automatically start wiping the disk drives of computers it had infected at 8:45am local time on November 17.

(credit: Arthur Caranta)

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed leaving in place fuel economy standards that would gradually increase the average miles per gallon requirements for cars to 54.5mpg by 2025. The Wall Street Journal notes that that translates to about 40mpg during real-world driving.

The fuel economy standards were set by the Obama administration in 2012 with the approval of automakers. The agency promised to reevaluate the standards at a later date, at least by 2018. The date of that reevaluation was flexible, and with the EPA’s proposal this week, a final decision could come down by December 30 after the public comment period has passed. That would make it harder for a Trump administration to dismantle the standards.

The agency denied to The Detroit Free Press that it was trying to block future challenges to the rule, and in a statement on the EPA website, Administrator Gina McCarthy wrote that the decision was based on an extensive technical report released earlier this year, which determined that automakers could meet the standards by 2025 given new technologies available to them. McCarthy added that the analysis showed that, given today’s prices, it will be less costly for automakers to meet those fuel economy standards by 2025 than the EPA estimated in 2012.