Month: November 2017

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. While Black Friday and Cyber Monday proper are gone, more than a few of the deals they brought are still active, including discounts on Amazon's Echo Dot, Sonos speakers, Bose's QuietComfort 25, and various Dell and Lenovo laptops. You can take a look at the full list below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Featured Deals

Enlarge / Side view of a Tesla Semi. (credit: Megan Geuss)

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart, JB Hunt Transportation Services, and Ryder System Inc. had placed deposits to reserve the first Tesla Semis. On Tuesday, German shipping company DHL announced that it, too, would place reservation deposits with Tesla for 10 trucks. This week, the WSJ also reported that reservation deposits for the Semi had jumped from $5,000 to $20,000.

The companies will be early adopters of the all-electric truck that Tesla announced in mid-November. On paper, the specifications for the Semi seem impressive—just last week, Tesla posted “expected prices” that exceeded expectations. The company seems to be targeting $150,000 for a truck with a 300-mile range and $180,000 for a truck with a 500-mile range, with both trucks due out in 2019. That said, those prices can change, and Tesla doesn’t have a great track record with meeting deadlines.

We also should remember that the specs/lineup of products can change, too. When the Powerwall was announced in 2015, Telsa offered a “backup battery” at 10kWh and a “daily cycle” battery at 7kWh. But the 10kWh battery was eliminated shortly after the company started delivering its batteries.

Enlarge (credit: Marvel Studios)

Unsurprisingly, this holiday season of movies has been met with the first-ever trailer for the most anticipated summer blockbuster of 2018: Avengers: Infinity War.

If Wednesday's trailer is any indication, we'll have to wait for a continued trickle of information to see what the heck will happen in the movie, but for now, at least we know that roughly 40 gazillion Marvel characters will be in this one. Also, none of them appears to be happy.

Scarlett Witch and Vision get closest with a calm, moonlit embrace. Otherwise, every Marvel character in the trailer is either writhing in pain, staring intently, or charging into battle. The full cast of both Avengers films can be seen here, with the exception of Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye being conspicuously absent from the trailer. Black Widow has gone blonde, and to show her up, Captain America opts for a beard. Show-off. (We also hear a shout from Black Panther suggesting that someone "give him a shield," which may or may not be about the Cap.)

Enlarge / 10K is a lot of pixels. (credit: HDMI Forum)

Back in January, the HDMI Forum—the trade association that develops the HDMI spec for video interconnects—outlined its plans for HDMI 2.1. That specification has now been finalized, giving a definitive view of what's in store for our video hardware.

In spite of a version number that suggests it's only a minor update, the spec represents a significant step up from HDMI 2.0. Underpinning everything is a new cable, the Ultra High Speed HDMI Cable, that supports data transfer rates of 48 gigabits per second. The new cables are backward compatible with older HDMI specs—they use the same actual plugs and sockets—but support substantially faster connections than the 18Gb/s of HDMI 2.0, let alone the 10.2Gb/s of HDMI 1.4.

What can you do with all that bandwidth? More resolution, higher frame rates, and more color depth. With the new cabling, HDMI can support uncompressed 4K video at up to 120 frames per second, with high dynamic range color with up to 12 bits per channel. Cut back in one or more areas and you can push further in others; limit your framerate to 30fps, and the spec will support uncompressed 8K 12-bit video; use chroma subsampling and it can hit 60fps at the same resolution and color depth.

Dump out your snacks, block your boss' tracker. (credit: Doctorhawkes - camera, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53235787)

A 60-year-old electrician in Perth, Western Australia had his termination upheld by a labor grievance commission when it was determined he had been abusing his position and technical knowledge to squeeze in some recreation during working hours. Tom Colella used mylar snack bags to block GPS tracking via his employer-assigned personal digital assistant to go out to play a round of golf—more than 140 times—while he reported he was offsite performing repairs.

In his finding against Colella, Australia Fair Work Commissioner Bernie Riordan wrote:

I have taken into account that Mr Colella openly stored his PDA device in an empty foil “Twisties” bag. As an experienced electrician, Mr Colella knew that this bag would work as a farady cage, thereby preventing the PDA from working properly—especially the provision of regular GPS co-ordinate updates… Mr. Colella went out of his way to hide his whereabouts. He was concerned about Aroona tracking him when the Company introduced the PDA into the workplace. He protested about Aroona having this information at that time. Mr Colella then went out of his way to inhibit the functionality of the PDA by placing it in a foil bag to create a faraday cage.

Colella, an employee of the Western Australia water management joint venture Aroona Alliance, fashioned empty foil packets of Smith's Twisties into crude Faraday cages, blocking the signals from GPS satellites as he ducked out to the links. Snack packets are made with a foil that combines aluminum and mylar plastic, making them electrically conductive and ideal as a temporary electromagnetic shield for mobile devices—as long as the packet is closed and grounded—and you don't mind a few crumbs on your device.

Enlarge (credit: 3dom)

Uber has logged another quarter of record-breaking losses, losing $1.5 billion in the third quarter of 2017. For comparison, Uber lost $2.8 billion in all of 2016 and lost $1.1 billion in the second quarter of 2017.

The worsening financial picture is not a surprise. Founder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick resigned in June, leaving the company leaderless for much of the third quarter. Uber's legal battle with Waymo has not been going well for Uber, and Uber is facing up to three federal investigations into the company's practices.

Uber's money-losing business continues to grow, with gross bookings rising from $8.7 billion in the second quarter to $9.7 billion in the third quarter.

Enlarge (credit: Mike Mozart)

We wrote earlier this week about how Comcast has changed its promises to uphold net neutrality by pulling back from previous statements that it won't charge websites or other online applications for fast lanes.

Comcast spokesperson Sena Fitzmaurice has been claiming that we got the story wrong. But a further examination of how Comcast's net neutrality promises have changed over time reveals another interesting tidbit—Comcast deleted a "no paid prioritization" pledge from its net neutrality webpage on the very same day that the Federal Communications Commission announced its initial plan to repeal net neutrality rules.

Starting in 2014, the webpage, corporate.comcast.com/openinternet/open-net-neutrality, contained this statement: "Comcast doesn't prioritize Internet traffic or create paid fast lanes."

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

Yesterday we learned that Apple had made a serious security error in macOS—a bug that, under certain conditions, allowed anyone to log in as a system administrator on a Mac running High Sierra by simply typing in "root" as the username and leaving the password field blank. Apple says that vulnerability has now been fixed with a security update that became available for download this morning on the Mac App Store. Further, the update will automatically be applied to Macs running High Sierra 10.13.1 later today.

Apple's brief notes for this security update (Security Update 2017-001) explain the bug by saying, "A logic error existed in the validation of credentials," and claims the problem has been addressed "with improved credential validation."

Apple shared the following statement with Ars: