Month: February 2018

Enlarge / You'll know it's a Waymo Pacifica Hybrid by the roof bar covered in sensors. (credit: FCA)

On Friday, we discovered that Waymo, the self-driving Google spinoff, has been granted a permit to operate as a Transportation Network Company in the state of Arizona. This means that it can launch an official ride-hailing service and start charging customers for their journeys. It also confirms the findings of a recent report that put Waymo at the front of the autonomous vehicle pack, meaning my colleague Tim Lee was right when he said the launch of a commercial operation by Waymo in Arizona was imminent.

Arizona has become a popular state for autonomous vehicle programs. It has rather permissive testing oversight compared to California, for example. That, plus well-maintained roads and little harsh weather, has encouraged both Uber and Waymo to expand their presence in Phoenix.

In recent months, self-driving cars have become commonplace in the city. Since November 2017, Waymo has been running a pilot program that lets people hail rides in its cars; evidently that hasn't thrown up any red flags to prevent this expansion.

Enlarge / This may become the new default imagery for Spectre and Meltdown around Intel. (credit: Brian Turner / Flickr)

In its annual SEC filing, Intel has revealed that it's facing 32 lawsuits over the Spectre and Meltdown attacks on its processors. While the Spectre problem is a near-universal issue faced by modern processors, the Meltdown attack is specific to processors from Intel and Apple, along with certain ARM designs that are coming to market shortly.

Per Intel's filing, 30 of the cases are customer class-action suits from users claiming to be harmed by the flaws. While Meltdown has effective workarounds, they come with some performance cost. Workarounds for Spectre are more difficult and similarly can harm system performance.

The other two cases are securities class actions that claim that Intel made misleading public statements during the six-month period after the company was notified of the problems but before the attacks were made public.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Steven Puetzer)

Charter Communications cannot use the federal net neutrality repeal to avoid a lawsuit over slow Internet speeds in New York, the state's Supreme Court ruled today.

The lawsuit was filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman against Charter and its Time Warner Cable (TWC) subsidiary in February 2017. Schneiderman alleges that the Internet provider "conduct[ed] a deliberate scheme to defraud and mislead New Yorkers by promising Internet service that they knew they could not deliver."

Charter thought that the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality repeal would help it fight the lawsuit. In November, Charter argued in a court filing that its motion to dismiss the case was bolstered by the repeal because the FCC also preempted state-level regulation.

Enlarge / Here is a comparison of the safe area in landscape mode on the iPhone 8 and on the iPhone X. (credit: Apple)

Today, Apple emailed iOS developers to explore new features in iOS 11 like ARKit. In that email, the company also announced that all new apps submitted from April 2018 onward must be built with the iOS 11 SDK and must support the iPhone X's new display.

This was Apple's complete message to developers on the subject:

iOS 11 has brought innovative features and the redesigned App Store to hundreds of millions of customers around the world. Your apps can deliver more intelligent, unified, and immersive experiences with Core ML, ARKit, new camera APIs, new SiriKit domains, Apple Music integration, drag and drop for iPad, and more.

Starting April 2018, all new iOS apps submitted to the App Store must be built with the iOS 11 SDK, included in Xcode 9 or later. All new apps for iPhone, including universal apps, must support the Super Retina display of the iPhone X.

The email didn't clarify exactly what support for the iPhone X's "Super Retina" screen means—does it just mean the resolution and aspect ratio must be supported, or do developers also have to update their apps to respect the rounded corners, sensor array (which many people call "the notch"), and the home indicator?

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Insurance company Esurance has a new study out on distracted driving, and it makes for interesting reading. Almost everyone agrees distracted driving is bad, yet it's still remarkably prevalent. Even drivers who report rarely driving distracted also report that they engage in distracting behaviors. The study also raises some questions about the growing complexity of modern vehicles, particularly the user interfaces they confront us with.

Almost everyone does it

According to official figures, around 10 percent of all road deaths are due to distracted driving. That percentage has held steady for a while now after peaking at 15 percent a decade ago. In the time since, governments and the auto and tech industries haven't been ignoring the problem. Texting-while-driving bans are ever more common. Smartphones now have do not disturb modes, some of which can turn on automatically. Phones can also cast their displays and certain apps to the car's center stack using Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

And modern vehicles are increasingly packed full of advanced driver aids—what the industry calls ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems)—like adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, blind spot monitoring, collision alerts, and so on.

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On Friday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a 37-page indictment against the Internet Research Agency, a well-known Russian bot and troll factory, and named 13 Russians on charges of “conspiracy to defraud the United States,” wire fraud, and bank fraud, among others.

As he wrote:

Defendant ORGANIZATION had a strategic goal to sow discord in the US political system, including the 2016 US presidential election. Defendants posted derogatory information about a number of candidates, and by early to mid-2016, Defendants' operations included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump (“Trump Campaign”) and disparaging Hillary Clinton. Defendants made various expenditures to carry out those activities, including buying political advertisements on social media in the names of US persons and entities. Defendants also staged political rallies inside the United States, and while posing as US grassroots entities and US persons, and without revealing their Russian identities and ORGANIZATION affiliation, solicited and compensated real U.S persons to promote or disparage candidates. Some Defendants, posing as US persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.

At a press conference in Washington, DC, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave brief remarks and took only a few questions from reporters.

Enlarge / An Antminer S5. (credit: Bitmain)

A New York City resident was ordered to turn off his bitcoin miner after the Federal Communications Commission discovered that it was interfering with T-Mobile's wireless network.

After receiving a complaint from T-Mobile about interference to its 700MHz LTE network in Brooklyn, New York, FCC agents in November 2017 determined that radio emissions in the 700MHz band were coming from the residence of a man named Victor Rosario.

"When the interfering device was turned off the interference ceased," the FCC's enforcement bureau told Rosario in a "Notification of Harmful Interference" yesterday. "You identified the device as an Antminer S5 Bitcoin Miner. The device was generating spurious emissions on frequencies assigned to T-Mobile's broadband network and causing harmful interference."