Month: January 2018

Enlarge (credit: Spencer Platt | Getty Images)

Tesla is now pressing ahead with lobbying efforts that would allow it to expand its direct dealerships in two more states: Nebraska and Wisconsin.

For now, more than 20 states already allow the California automaker to sell its own vehicles, while others have set up a system that at least partially bans manufacturers from direct sales and effectively protects auto dealers. Those states include Texas, Michigan, West Virginia, and Utah, among others. Last year, court rulings and changes in the law in Arizona, Missouri, Indiana, and other states have paved the way for Tesla to sell directly to the public.

In Nebraska, the new bill under consideration is known as LB 830. It has been met with opposition from existing dealers who are concerned that other manufacturers like GM or Ford will want a similar arrangement.

Enlarge / You can now own one of these and not have it be turned into a useless piece of electronics if the person supporting it goes away. (credit: Garadget)

Last April, Ars reported the curious incident of an Internet-of-Things garage door opener creator who responded to negative reviews and complaints from one customer by shutting down the customer’s account—and in the process, rendering the product unusable. Now, Garadget founder Denis Grisak claims to have reformed his ways, saying he’s opening up the firmware of his company’s eponymous device to allow customers to connect it to the home automation software of their choice, rather than having to rely on Garadget’s own cloud-based service.

Garadget, originally an Indiegogo crowdfunded effort, used an Internet-connected device controller from Particle (the Wi-Fi connected Proton) to provide remote control of garage doors through a smart phone application. The device works with existing garage door openers, essentially functioning as an Internet-connected “button”—allowing owners to remotely open or close their garage doors at a distance via a cloud service. Largely a one-person operation, Garadget has sold about 5,000 devices, Grisak told Ars this week. About 3,000 of those are still active.

But some customers had difficulty getting the mobile application configured, and one took his complaints to Garadget’s community message board and then to Amazon—leaving a scathing one-star review of the product. Grisak (who was handling technical support himself) responded to what he perceived as abuse from the customer by revoking the customer’s key to the cloud service—essentially “bricking” the device by blocking its communications.

The Boring Company

You've got to hand it to Elon Musk. He has built up such a reputation and fan base over the years, that with a mere video and a few tweets, he can sell millions of dollars' worth of novelty toy flamethrowers in a few days. The Boring Company has managed now to sell more than 15,000 flamethrowers with shockingly little detail about what they are or how they work. Boring Company's website gives you a picture and a two-line description and then asks for $500.

With only the barest of descriptions to go by, people's imaginations are running wild. One California politician wants to block the sale of the flamethrower, saying, "We don't allow people to walk in off the street and purchase military grade tanks or armor-piercing ammunition... I cannot even begin to imagine the problems a flamethrower would cause firefighters and police officers alike."

Enlarge / Do the math! (credit: Nintendo)

Earnings reports began appearing for a number of video game companies on Tuesday, and with those came Nintendo's unsurprising confirmation that its Switch hardware is doing quite well. Now we know exactly how well: it needed less than 10 months to surpass its predecessor, the Wii U, in worldwide sales.

Nintendo's latest earning report includes a breakdown of lifetime hardware sales for the Nintendo Switch, Wii U, and Nintendo 3DS family of consoles. Its "as of December 31, 2017" figure places the Nintendo Switch at a current lifetime sales count of 14.86 million units, surpassing the 13.56 million Wii U units sold in a little over five years. The Nintendo 3DS (and its 2DS and "New" variants) have combined to sell 71.99 million pieces of hardware since launching nearly seven years ago.

Originally, Nintendo had told its shareholders to expect first-year Switch sales of 10 million; the company revised that estimate in October, following its last earnings report, to a first-year tally of 14 million worldwide. That has now been exceeded a little earlier than expected. The traditionally slow game-hardware months of January and February will likely pad the Switch's first true 12 months of sales data, if only a bit, due to a lack of major or exclusive Nintendo software during that span of time. Nintendo fans will have to wait until March for a new Kirby game and April for the weird, build-your-own-cardboard experiment of Nintendo Labo.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft announced a number of updates to its suite of Office apps for iOS today, better integrating them into Apple's ecosystem. Arguably the most anticipated update is OneDrive's new integration with the iOS Files app and support for drag-and-drop gestures on iPhones and iPads.

OneDrive now natively supports the Files app on iOS, letting users upload, share, and save content to OneDrive or SharePoint from apps that support the Files app, which Apple debuted with iOS 11. Users can tag OneDrive or SharePoint documents in the Files app to make them easier to find as well. Microsoft also redesigned the OneDrive app with a new list view and support for more than 130 file types for previews, letting users open, edit, and share Photoshop and other file types from directly within the app.

Drag-and-drop is a popular new feature of iOS 11 and makes working with documents—particularly on iPad—much easier, and now the OneDrive and Office apps for iOS support drag-and-drop. Users can move files into various apps more easily by dragging and dropping them into the desired program, which will be especially useful while in Split View on iPad. The new support lets customers move files in between OneDrive and Office apps as well as Microsoft's apps and other sources, such as Messages.

(credit: Mike Mozart)

Comcast customers in Washington state should check their bills for unwanted charges, State Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a consumer alert issued this week.

Ferguson filed a $100 million lawsuit against Comcast in August 2016, accusing the nation's largest ISP of misleading customers in order to tack $5 onto their monthly bills for an unnecessary Service Protection Plan (SPP). (Comcast has since raised the fee to $6 a month.)

With that lawsuit still pending, Ferguson says his office has received new complaints.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Matt Morton)

Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald has resigned as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention following a report by Politico that she bought shares in a tobacco company just months into the job. The report also noted that she invested in drug, health insurance, and food companies.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar accepted her resignation this morning, according to a statement by a spokesperson for the department.

“Dr. Fitzgerald owns certain complex financial interests that have imposed a broad recusal limiting her ability to complete all of her duties as the CDC Director,” the statement read. “Due to the nature of these financial interests, Dr. Fitzgerald could not divest from them in a definitive time period. After advising Secretary Azar of both the status of the financial interests and the scope of her recusal, Dr. Fitzgerald tendered, and the Secretary accepted, her resignation.”