Month: May 2017

Enlarge / From Daimler's press page: "Federal Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel in a conversation with Dieter Zetsche (Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz Cars) and two employees of Accumotive accompanied by Minister President of Saxony Stanislaw Tillich as well as Markus Schäfer (Member of the Divisional Board of Mercedes-Benz Cars, Production and Supply Chain) and Frank Blome (Managing Director Deutsche Accumotive GmbH & Co. KG)." (credit: Daimler)

On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the site of a future lithium-ion battery factory in the eastern German town of Kamenz. The factory is being developed by Mercedes-Benz manufacturer Daimler, which will devote approximately €500 million (or $562 million) to churning out batteries for electric vehicles and stationary storage.

If the project seems similar to Tesla’s Nevada-based Gigafactory, you wouldn’t be alone in making that comparison. Tesla and Panasonic partnered to devote $5 billion to building a lithium-ion battery factory outside of Reno, Nevada, and the electric-car maker has said it hopes to produce 35 gigawatt-hours of auto and stationary batteries by 2018.

Daimler didn’t give any projections for its factory’s potential capacity, but it did say that its investment would quadruple the size of an existing battery factory on the site, which is run by Accumotive, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Daimler. The German automaker is also pledging another €500 million to expand battery production worldwide. And if all goes well at the Kamenz site, Daimler says it will “go into operation in mid-2018.”

Enlarge / All those Lawbreakers characters had better be playing on the same platform...

After years of online gaming being strictly segregated by platform, recent months have seen a resurgence in the idea of playing with friends and rivals on different hardware. That includes some hesitant attempts by game makers to cross the PC/console barrier with cross-play between players using a mouse/keyboard and those using handheld controllers, even in first-person shooters.

At least one major developer is not a fan of the emerging trend, though. "We made the decision not to do cross-play, and there are a lot of people with this pipe dream of PC and console cross-play," Lawbreakers lead developer Cliff Bleszinski told PCGamesN while announcing a PS4 port of what was formerly a PC exclusive. "It's like, 'No, be the best console game you can be, or be the best PC game you can be.' Because then you get PC players getting angry that there's aim assist on console, or with balance issues."

The announcement follows on a Eurogamer interview Bleszinski gave a year ago, in which he commented on a then-theoretical console version. "The thing about the controller is it's going to be tricky," he said at the time. "We've played around with the controller a little bit and, thing is, if we get around to doing console ports, I don't want to do cross-play. Some people think that's the holy grail for a lot of games, and I'm like, 'no.' If you have somebody with a keyboard and mouse versus somebody with a controller, I'm sorry, but the person with the keyboard and mouse is going to win nine times out of 10."

Enlarge / Little touches like these, before and after fights, really give the game personality. (credit: NetherRealm Studios)

There’s a lot going on in Injustice 2—maybe more than the game itself can keep track of, at times. But thanks to developer NetherRealm’s ongoing commitment to making the most accessible fighting games this side of Divekick, Injustice 2 is only occasionally overwhelming.

That permissiveness begins with Injustice 2’s single-player campaign, which just might set a new gold standard for such modes in fighting games. Granted, that’s a low bar to clear, and NetherRealm is mostly competing with itself. But the cinematic unfolding of alternate-universe comic-book antics in Injustice 2 is wildly fun in its own right.

In the Injustice-verse, Superman is a villain. The first Injustice ended with the last son of Krypton locked up and awaiting trial for murdering both criminals and “potential” wrongdoers without hearings of their own. Just as Batman and his “no-kill club” allies are returning things to normal, a Superman-level threat invades Earth in the form of Brainiac. The alien machine-man wants the Kryptonian for his own personal collection, and perhaps the only one that can stop the invasion is Superman himself. Punching ensues.

The launch of a Pukguksong-2 solid-fuel missile from a mobile launcher on May 21 may signal a new level of worries for the US, Japan, and South Korea. (credit: KCNA (North Korean state media))

On Sunday, the North Korean military conducted a second, successful test of the Pukguksong-2, a solid-fuel intermediate range ballistic missile based on a design derived from the country's submarine-launched ballistic missile. While this might seem like just more saber-rattling from Pyongyang's leadership given the relatively continuous chain of test launches since President Donald Trump's inauguration (a total of 10 so far this year), this launch and the launch on May 13 carry a bit more weight.

According to North Korea's government media, Sunday's test shows that the Pukguksong-2 is now ready to be "mass-produced." If true, that development would substantially increase the threat posed by North Korea's missile force—the Pukguksong-2 can be deployed on tracked mobile launchers, and it uses a "cold-launch" system that requires much less preparation time, which provides much less of an opportunity for the US and allies to detect an impending attack. The tracked launchers also increase the potential number of locations from which the missile could be launched. And the range of the missile appears to be greater than originally estimated.

Sunday's missile test was tracked by US Pacific Command. The test missile flew in a high-lofting path from North Korea's west coast across the country and toward Japan, landing in the Sea of Japan. The missile flew approximately 500 kilometers (310 miles) and reached an altitude of about 560 kilometers (about 350 miles). It has an estimated range of 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) or more. If launched from within North Korea, the missile could potentially strike all of Japan, South Korea, and even US forces in Guam. By comparison, the Pukguksong-1 submarine-launched missile is believed to have a 1,000 kilometer (620 mile) range.

Historic Harrison County Courthouse. Marshall, Texas. (credit: Joe Mullin)

The US Supreme Court ruled (PDF) today on how to interpret the patent venue laws, and the controversial business of "patent trolling" may never be the same.

In a unanimous decision, the justices held that the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which handles all patent appeals, has been using the wrong standard to decide where a patent lawsuit can be brought. Today's Supreme Court's ruling in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods enforces a more strict standard for where cases can be filed. It overturns a looser rule that the Federal Circuit has used since 1990.

The ruling may well signal the demise of the Eastern District of Texas as a favorite venue for patent lawsuits, especially those brought by "patent trolls," which have no business outside of licensing and litigating patents.

Audi

There's a danger with SUVs, but not the kind you might suspect. Should any lingering doubts exist that SUVs have inherited the automotive Earth, chew on this: Audi, the most recent luxury brand to the SUV playpen in the US, now counts 24 percent of all its USA sales from the Q5 column. But that's not dangerous. One other luxury car brand offers a staggering five different SUV models. But even that's not dangerous.

The danger is that, through better suspension (including sophisticated electronics that change to your whim or situational input) and better tires, SUVs are getting closer and closer in performance level to sports sedans. The danger is that even though the SUV already killed the American station wagon market, it's not satisfied. The SUV is coming after the hot sports sedan.

Enlarge (credit: BenGrantham)

For years, Yahoo Mail has exposed a wealth of private user data because it failed to update widely used image-processing software that contained critical vulnerabilities. That's according to a security researcher who warned that other popular services are also likely to be leaking sensitive subscriber secrets.

Chris Evans, the researcher who discovered the vulnerabilities and reported them privately to Yahoo engineers, has dubbed them "Yahoobleed" because the vulnerabilities caused the site to bleed contents stored in server memory. The easy-to-exploit flaws resided in ImageMagick, an image-processing library that's supported by PHP, Ruby, NodeJS, Python, and about a dozen other programming languages. One version of Yahoobleed was the result of Yahoo failing to install a critical patch released in January 2015. A second Yahoobleed vulnerability was the result of a bug that ImageMagick developers fixed only recently after receiving a private report from Evans.

The vulnerability discovered by Evans could be exploited by e-mailing a maliciously manipulated image file to a Yahoo Mail address. After opening the 18-byte file, chunks of Yahoo server memory began leaking to the end user. Evans called this version of the attack "Yahoobleed1." "Yahoobleed2" worked by exploiting the vulnerability fixed in January 2015.