Month: December 2016

Enlarge (credit: Tesla)

In a recent update, Tesla seems to have changed Autopilot to make sure its cars obey the speed limit exactly while using Autosteer on surface roads and undivided highways. Tesla vehicles in Autopilot used to have a 5mph buffer in such situations, but that no longer seems to be the case, according to Electrek.

If the Tesla is on a highway, however, the enforced speed maximum in Autopilot mode is still 90mph.

In a November earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised to restrict people from doing “crazy things” while they’re driving Teslas in Autopilot mode.

Enlarge / A Hollerith machine used in the 1890 US Census. Hollerith's company later merged with three others to create the company that later became known as IBM, and similar machines were instrumental in organizing the Holocaust. (credit: Marcin Wichary)

Since Donald Trump's election, many in the tech industry have been concerned about the way their skills—and the data collected by their employers—might be used. On a number of occasions, Trump has expressed the desire to perform mass deportations and end any and all Muslim immigration. He has also said that it would be "good management" to create a database of Muslims, and that there should be "a lot of systems" to track Muslims within the US.

In the final days of his presidency, Barack Obama has scrapped the George W. Bush-era regulations that created a registry of male Muslim foreigners entering the US—the registry itself was suspended in 2011—but given Trump's views, demands to create a domestic registry are still a possibility.

As a result, some 2,600 tech workers (and counting) have pledged both not to participate in any such programs and to encourage their employers to minimize any sensitive data they collect. The goal is to reduce the chance that such data might be used in harmful ways.

(credit: mkhmarketing)

Over the past year, there has been much hue and cry about Facebook's fake news problem. The company deferred dealing with it first by saying that a better machine-learning model will fix the problem and then by saying it will rely on third-party fact checkers to flag "disputed" stories when they are shared. Both of these ideas are OK, but they are missing one crucial ingredient. That ingredient, as Charlton Heston screams in Soylent Green, is people.

Economist Brad DeLong has been saying for a while that robots may take over many jobs, but there are some things robots cannot do alone. Humans will always be needed to make decisions that require a nuanced understanding of how culture works, especially in political and social debates where context is everything. An algorithm might be able to learn some of the signs of fake news—certain hashtags perhaps, or a viral reach that starts with shares happening at bot-like speed. But a human is always going to be needed at some point to determine whether those signs point to fake news or real news that's blowing up organically because it's actually important. And these humans need to be well-trained in media analysis themselves, able to spot hoaxes and lies better than an average reader.

In short, Facebook needs a team of trained editors. But wait, you are saying. Facebook already had a group of editors the company fired earlier this year. So obviously human workers couldn't solve the problem, right? Wrong. Very few of Facebook's editors were highly experienced, nor were they full-time employees. They were contract workers, treated like outsiders at Facebook and given very little in-depth training or decision-making power. Not surprisingly they grew disgruntled with their work, and a few who had been fired talked about Facebook's slapdash editorial policies in a tell-all with Gizmodo. The point is, Facebook has never made an honest, concerted effort to create an internal team of humans devoted to making the News Feed a good experience for users.

Enlarge / The Huawei Watch running Android Wear 2.0. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Google isn't giving up on smartwatches. After two-and-a-half years of leaving the hardware up to third-party manufacturers, Google will finally produce its first "flagship" Android Wear device. In an interview with The Verge, Android Wear Product Manager Jeff Chang confirmed earlier rumors that Google was developing a pair of smartwatches in-house.

Interestingly, the report says the device will not use Google's unified "Pixel" branding and would instead be branded by the (unnamed) company that is manufacturing the devices for Google. In the interview, Chang "likened the partnership to Google’s Nexus smartphone program."

We first heard about two "Google" watches from Android Police, which says they are codenamed "Angelfish" (a larger, LTE-enabled watch) and "Swordfish" (a smaller watch without LTE). According to the interview, the watches will be the first to launch with Android Wear 2.0, which was recently delayed into 2017. In addition to a total interface redesign, Wear 2.0 will finally bring Android Pay support to Google's wearables.

Enlarge (credit: United Soybean Board)

After the Supreme Court ruling clarifying that the EPA had an obligation to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency developed the Clean Power Plan to target greenhouse gases. That’s not the only pollutant that is reduced by cutting emissions and moving away from coal for power generation, though. Limiting the rest of the stuff that comes out the smokestack has health an economic benefits, as well—“co-benefits” in the policy lingo.

One type of pollution on that list is the compounds that react to produce ozone in the lower atmosphere. While ozone up in the stratosphere shields us from skin-burning UV radiation, ozone at the surface is a lung irritant. It harms plants, as well, reducing the uptake of CO₂ that fuels growth.

A recent study led by Drexel University’s Shannon Capps and Syracuse University’s Charles Driscoll examines the impact that the Clean Power Plan would have on yields of several susceptible crops and  the growth of a handful of tree species.

Enlarge / Just some of the prizes you can win in our Charity Drive Sweepstakes.

As of this writing, just over 500 entrants have donated a bit more than $15,000 to this year's Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes. That's well under the $38,861 record Arsians set during last year's epic charity drive.

That's the bad news. The good news—both for breaking the record and for those that want a chance to win some of the awesome swag we're giving away—is that there are still a couple of weeks left before the January 3 entry deadline.

I know this year's batch of Ars Technica readers is much more generous than the readers we had last year (those miserly cheapskates). Let's prove it by digging deep and adding more donations to the EFF or Child's Play using the directions listed below.