Month: December 2017

Enlarge (credit: The Matrix / Aurich)

Coinbase stunned the cryptocurrency world on Tuesday evening by announcing that it would add full support for Bitcoin Cash, a payment network that split off from the mainstream bitcoin network in August. Coinbase users can send and receive Bitcoin Cash coins, and they'll soon be able to buy and sell them as well.

The news sent the value of Bitcoin Cash soaring more than 30 percent, from $2,800 to $3,800 per coin. Trading on Coinbase's cryptocurrency exchange, GDAX, briefly showed a much bigger gain, with Bitcoin Cash prices as high as $8,500 before trading was suspended. Other exchanges have not shown Bitcoin Cash prices that high, suggesting that these high prices may have merely been a technical glitch. At publication time, the price of Bitcoin Cash was around $3,300.

Meanwhile, the price of conventional bitcoins fell from $17,800 to less than $16,000—a decline of 10 percent—in the wake of the Coinbase announcement. It has since regained some ground and is now worth $16,800.

Sony Interactive Entertainment

Should you need to stock up on delightful nerd-documentary fodder for holiday-week hibernation—and you've already watched Ars' Apollo video series—let me recommend the latest entry from the gaming-history video producers at Noclip: Chasing the Horizon: The Story of Zero Dawn. The Patreon- and Kickstarter-funded documentarians at Noclip have just released their latest, hour-long piece, and it centers on the Amsterdam game studio Guerrilla, makers of this year's stellar Horizon: Zero Dawn.

To tell the Horizon story, Noclip rewinds the clock to the studio's early days with first-person shooters. In this rewind, Guerrilla finally tells the story behind a notorious moment for the studio and Sony: the first reveal of Killzone 2. As it turns out, the whole thing was "bullshot"—a term used to describe when fake, touched-up imagery is sold to fans as an actual game.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

Update: Apple has shared the following statement with TechCrunch confirming the functionality and its reasoning:

Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.

Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future.

Original story: Based on anecdotal observation, many iPhone users have long believed that older iPhones get slower over time. Generally, people have assumed that this is because of new features and additions in new versions of iOS that are better optimized for the latest phones.

But Reddit users, and Geekbench developer John Poole, have a compelling new theory, backed up by benchmarks: the iPhone may throttle performance to preserve battery life or avoid unexpected shutdowns as the battery degrades.

Enlarge / US Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) delivers a speech at the Republican National Convention on July 21, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong)

A Republican lawmaker is proposing a net neutrality law that would ban blocking and throttling, but the bill would allow ISPs to create paid fast lanes and prohibit state governments from enacting their own net neutrality laws. The bill would also prohibit the FCC from imposing any type of common carrier regulations on broadband providers.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) announced the "Open Internet Preservation Act" in a video posted to Twitter.

"We can do this now that [FCC] Chairman [Ajit] Pai has successfully done his job of getting the net neutrality rules off the books," said Blackburn, who is chairperson of a congressional telecommunications subcommittee.