Month: November 2017

(credit: Mike Mozart)

AT&T is reportedly abandoning its attempt to stop a Louisville ordinance that helped draw Google Fiber into the city.

In February 2016, AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky to stop an ordinance that gives Google Fiber and other ISPs faster access to utility poles. A US District Court judge dismissed AT&T's lawsuit in August of this year, when he determined that AT&T's claims that the ordinance is invalid are false.

There was still the question of whether AT&T would appeal the ruling, but WDRB News and Louisville Business First both quoted AT&T spokespeople as saying that the company has decided not to appeal. (We contacted AT&T today to confirm this but haven't heard back yet.)

(credit: US Department of Transportation)

The Trump administration is notoriously unfriendly to red tape; one of its earliest actions in January was aimed at slashing the number of government regulations. According to an AP report on Wednesday morning, the vehicle-to-vehicle communications (V2V) mandate is among the deceased. This may not mark the death of V2V, but if true, it's yet another nail in the coffin of the technology, which uses a dedicated band of radio spectrum for short-range alerts between vehicles.

Hopes have long been pinned on V2V as a way to cut traffic fatalities, which have been on the rise the past two years. Long before self-driving car fever took hold, the benefits of V2V were being touted as just around the corner—literally. Cars would not need line-of-sight the way human drivers do, instead communicating with each other at ranges of up to 984 feet (300m) to warn each other of unseen hazards, as Sean Gallagher discovered at CES a few years ago.

But the safety protocol's story is long and tortuous. More than a decade passed between the allocation of a dedicated band of spectrum by the Federal Communications Commission and the agreement on the 802.11p protocol in 2010. From there, several more years passed while the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration deliberated on how best to implement V2V—a draft rule wasn't released until December 2016. If implemented, car makers would have two years to start fitting V2V systems to new cars, meaning an even longer lag until enough V2V-equipped vehicles were on the roads for the tech to start really paying off.

Enlarge / A solar farm under construction in Punta Gorda, Florida, in 2016. (credit: KERRY SHERIDAN/AFP/Getty Images)

The International Trade Commission (ITC) issued its recommendations for solar panel component tariffs on Tuesday, a month after it decided that US manufacturers of cells and modules had been harmed by cheap equipment imports. The commissioners offered three different recommendations, but it will be up to President Trump to decide on which recommendation to follow—or to make a completely new recommendation.

The president has 60 days to make a decision. High tariffs could mean more solar panels built domestically, but tariffs would also cause a contraction in the solar installation market as the cheapest imported panels are no longer available.

On the high end of the recommendations made by the ITC (PDF), the commission's chairperson recommended a 35-percent tariff on all imported solar modules, as well as a four-year tariff of 30 percent on solar cell imports exceeding 0.5 gigawatts and a 10-percent tariff on cell imports under that limit. The tariffs would decline over the years.

Enlarge / Ubisoft says detailed imagery like this, and not DRM, is pushing CPUs to their limits.

Ubisoft is pushing back against reports that the DRM used in Assassin's Creed: Origins is eating up significant CPU cycles and causing performance problems for many people playing the PC version of the game.

The explosive accusation comes from noted game cracker Voksi, who tells TorrentFreak that an analysis of Origins' binaries shows the game adds a protection method called VMProtect on top of well-known (and now easily cracked) Denuvo DRM. As the VMProtect webpage explains, its software protects crucial game code from cracking via mutation (i.e., obfuscating code with "garbage" commands and misdirected jumps) and virtualization (i.e., running the code in a self-contained "non-standard" virtual machine that is harder to analyze and modify).

Voksi alleges that Origins uses VMProtect's virtualization protection, which "tank[s] the game’s performance by 30-40%, demanding that people have a more expensive CPU to play the game properly, only because of the DRM. It’s anti-consumer and a disgusting move." In a Reddit thread, Voksi further detailed how breakpoint debugging of the code showed VMProtect's code being "called non-stop" in the game's core control loop.

Enlarge

For most Americans, a self-driving car is a rare sight. Things are different in the Phoenix area.

"I live in Chandler. You see Waymo units all over the damn place," one Redditor wrote. Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car company, is running trials of a self-driving taxi service in the Phoenix suburb. Cars from Uber are also ubiquitous in the region, residents told Ars, and other companies have cars there, too.

A number of factors have drawn technology companies to the Phoenix area. Phoenix's sunny weather means companies don't have to worry about the complexities of rain, ice, or snow. The region has a lot of wide, well-maintained suburban streets.