Month: September 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Thomas Jackson)

The country's biggest Internet service providers and advertising industry lobby groups are fighting to stop a proposed California law that would protect the privacy of broadband customers.

AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Frontier, Sprint, Verizon, and some broadband lobby groups urged California state senators to vote against the proposed law in a letter Tuesday. The bill would require Internet service providers to obtain customers' permission before they use, share, or sell the customers' Web browsing and application usage histories. California lawmakers could vote on the bill Friday of this week, essentially replicating federal rules that were blocked by the Republican-controlled Congress and President Trump before they could be implemented. The text and status of the California bill, AB 375, are available here.

"This bill will create a cumbersome, uncertain, and vague regulation of Internet providers in California," Tuesday's letter to California senators said. "This single-state approach is antithetical to the forward-looking policies that have made California a world leader in the Internet Age."

Enlarge (credit: Oak Ridge National Lab)

Until fairly recently, the list of materials with which we might build a quantum computer have been notable because that list has one big exception: silicon. Silicon is, without doubt, an awesome material. Every semiconductor company in the world knows how to build stuff using it. Fabrication processes are so precise that features of just 50 atoms across are possible.

With these advantages, pretty much any time someone makes a new device, the first comment is: well that's very pretty and all, but can you do it in CMOS? CMOS is a silicon-based complementary metal oxide semiconductor, the industry-standard process. If the answer is no, then, unless the product is world-changing (think light emitting diodes and laser diodes), industry interest evaporates faster than spilled vodka.

Now, if a recent theoretical paper is correct, silicon-based quantum computing may be on the verge of making the leap from not-even-on-the-list to technology-to-beat, thanks to a clever new way of thinking about qubit structures.

SpaceX

SpaceX is famously not afraid to fail. "There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA,” company founder Elon Musk has said in the past. “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

In recent years, others in the aerospace industry have come to see the sense of this ethos, as SpaceX has tinkered with its Falcon 9 rocket to make it a mostly reusable booster, finally achieving reuse of the rocket's first stage earlier this year. To go further in space, at a lower cost, new things must be tried.

Everyone knows that toxic players can go a long way toward ruining a specific Overwatch match with trollish play or abusive chat language. But as Overwatch Director Jeff Kaplan points out in his latest developer update video, policing that kind of bad behavior also impacts the game as a whole by taking developer resources away from making actual new content.

While the Overwatch team is passionate about making new maps, heroes, and animated shorts for the game, Kaplan says "we're spending a tremendous amount of time and resources punishing people and trying to make people behave better... The bad behavior is not just ruining the experience for one another, but it's actually making the game progress in terms of developement at a much slower rate."

As one example of this problem, Kaplan pointed out that the Overwatch team members who recently implemented a player reporting system on consoles had to delay work on creating a match history and replay system for the game. Adding these tools for console players seems necessary, though; so far on the PC, over 70 percent of the 480,000 disciplinary actions taken against player accounts have been "a direct result of players using the reporting system," Kaplan said.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

The first public demo of Apple’s Face ID phone unlocking system didn’t go exactly as planned.

During the company’s big iPhone X reveal this week, Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi suffered a semi-cringeworthy moment when he was unable to unlock the new handset onstage using the new authentication tech. The device prompted Federighi to use a passcode instead, leading him to switch to a backup unit, which worked properly.

The mishap led some to immediately doubt the effectiveness of the Face ID setup—which completely replaces the usual Touch ID fingerprint scanner on the iPhone X—and, according to some reports, even led to a brief dip in Apple’s share price.

Hyperloop One, a startup that's working on building high-speed, low-pressure, tube-based rail transportation, announced Thursday morning that it had chosen 10 routes around the world that it will study as potential locations for a Hyperloop. The startup solicited route ideas back in May as part of what it called the "Hyperloop One Global Challenge."

One route, however, was chosen for a headliner feasibility study that will be conducted with Colorado's Department of Transportation (CDOT) and Aecom, a multinational engineering firm: Pueblo-Denver-Cheyenne. Hyperloop One says that route would span 360 miles and be accessible to about 4.8 million people. (This reporter lives in Denver and has been stuck in enough I-25 traffic that she would love to see an alternative for that artery up the Front Range, no matter how far-fetched.)