Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Sergio Marchionne speaks at an event in Michigan on August 26, 2016. (credit: Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is joining forces with BMW and Intel to develop self-driving car technology, the company announced on Wednesday. FCA is joining an existing alliance between BMW and Intel that also included Mobileye, the self-driving technology company Intel announced it was acquiring in March.

FCA is the smallest of Detroit's Big Three automakers, and its approach to the self-driving car revolution has been less ambitious than rivals GM and Ford. GM paid $1 billion for self-driving car startup Cruise last year and is hoping to develop its own self-driving car technology. Ford invested $1 billion in the self-driving car startup Argo AI earlier this year and has also opened a technology subsidiary in Silicon Valley.

By contrast, FCA seems content to rely more on partners to supply the self-driving technology it will need to make its vehicles competitive in the coming decade.

Fight for the Future

Pro-net neutrality activist group Fight for the Future has put up a series of billboards shaming Republican members of Congress who want to eliminate the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules and classification of broadband providers as common carriers.

The billboards in the lawmakers' home states urge people to contact their elected officials and say a net neutrality repeal will lead to "slower, censored, and more expensive Internet." They were paid for by hundreds of small donations, the group said. Broadband providers Comcast, Verizon, and Charter get shoutouts on the billboards as well.

Enlarge / Liquid captain "KuroKy" hoists the Aegis of Champions for the first time. (credit: Valve)

2017 was a year of firsts for The International Dota 2 Championships (TI). It was the first time a defending champion didn’t participate. It was the first time fan-favorite team Na'Vi failed to qualify or garner a direct invitation from Valve. By the end, it was also the first International with a clean, 3-0 victory across the best-of-five grand finals.

It is said that Dota 2's "meta"—the call-and-response tactics that govern how players react to each other, especially at the pro level—has never been more stable. But it's clear that the expectations regarding who wins, who loses, and which players you'd even recognize on The International main stage are very much in flux. With that instability, however, there was plenty of room for new teams and players to carve paths at this year's event, and it has been a good year for that new blood.

This year's victor, for example, was Team Liquid. Once a mostly North American brand, the team transitioned into a truly "international" lineup in 2015. Captained by Na'Vi alum Kuro “KuroKy” Takhasomi, Liquid was something of a dark horse (appropriate, given that that's their logo) in a year that seemed ready to be dominated by China.

Enlarge (credit: National Park Service/J Schmidt)

Spider silk has some amazing material properties, so there's lots of enthusiasm for the prospect of using it to make something useful. Unfortunately, spiders aren't domesticated, and attempts to make the silk proteins in other organisms haven't been entirely successful. And then there's the matter of what to do with silk once you have it. It doesn't always cooperate with modern manufacturing techniques.

But some researchers in India figured out a way to get spider silk to play nicely with lasers. Under the right conditions, the silk itself helps amplify a laser's power, to the point where it can either cut the silk in specific locations, or soften it to the point where it can be bent or welded.

The work relies on a physics effect termed "nonlinear multiphoton interactions." In the simplest terms, the effect allows two photons of a given energy to act as a single photon of twice the energy (higher combinations are also possible). It's a nonlinear effect, since it involves a sudden jump in energy; you don't end up with any photons in between, at 1.5x the original energy.

Apple Music on iOS 10, with Senior VP Eddy Cue. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

As the battle to create original content for online video services continues, we get a glimpse into Apple's plans for the coming year. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Apple has a budget of $1 billion to spend in 2018 to "procure and produce" original content. The iPhone maker could acquire and produce up to 10 shows next year with this money, which will be largely left in the hands of new Apple hires Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg. Erlicht and Van Amburg are former presidents from Sony Pictures Television that moved to Apple in June to oversee video content strategy and production.

The $1 billion budget signals how serious Apple is about boosting its original programming, the newest of which lives on its Apple Music subscription service. This is Apple's first major push into original content, but $1 billion less than the money spend on content by rival companies. HBO spent about double last year on content (it reportedly costs $10 million to produce one episode of Game of Thrones), and Netflix may spend upwards of $6 billion this year. Apple's starting budget is similar to Amazon's when it first got into original programming in 2013 with Prime Video; Amazon could spend $4.5 billion on original content in 2017.

Original programming is the way to go, as it has proven to be a big driver in the growth of streaming services. Netflix's business benefited immensely from original hits like House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, and Stranger Things. Those kinds of shows—scripted comedies and dramas—are expensive to produce, and we've seen Netflix's annual budget for original programming increase over the past few years to accommodate that. Apple's first original series, Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke, both just became available to Apple Music subscribers, and critics' reviews have been mixed.

Enlarge (credit: Susan Melkisethian)

Earlier this week, the infamous hate site the Daily Stormer lost control of the "dailystormer.com" domain after two domain registrars—first GoDaddy, then Google's domain service—refused service to the company. The companies were responding to a social media campaign against the Daily Stormer after a post on the site attacking Heather Heyer, who died in protest-related violence in Charlottesville this weekend.

The decisions of Google and GoDaddy made the site inaccessible on Tuesday. But by Wednesday morning, the Daily Stormer was back online with a new, Russian domain name: "dailystormer.ru." In a post announcing the site's return, editor Andrew Anglin credited Internet troll turned neo-Nazi Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, the Daily Stormer's administrator, for getting the site back up and running.

The Daily Stormer has also set up a .onion address, ensuring that it will be accessible over the censorship-resistant Tor network even if it loses its new domain name.