Month: March 2018

Enlarge (credit: Uber)

The chief of the Tempe Police has told the San Francisco Chronicle that Uber is likely not responsible for the Sunday evening crash that killed 49-year-old pedestrian Elaine Herzberg.

“I suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident," said chief Sylvia Moir.

Herzberg was "pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags," according to the Chronicle's Carolyn Said, when she "abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic."

Enlarge / Facebook CSO Alex Stamos speaking at the Web Summit in Dublin in 2015. (credit: Web Summit via Creative Commons)

Update: Facebook CSO Alex Stamos tweeted the following on Monday evening in the wake of The New York Times report:

Despite the rumors, I'm still fully engaged with my work at Facebook. It's true that my role did change. I'm currently spending more time exploring emerging security risks and working on election security.

We have updated the story accordingly.

Original story:

Enlarge (credit: William Warby / Flickr)

One of the less appealing aspects of the twice-yearly Windows 10 feature updates is that they're slow to install and, for most of the installation process, your PC is out of commission, doing nothing more than displaying a progress indicator.

Thanks to a new upgrade process, the next update—expected to be released in April—should result in substantially less downtime. The install process is split into two portions: the "online" portion, during which your PC is still usable, and the "offline" portion after the reboot, during which your PC is a spinning percentage counter.

Microsoft estimates that the Creators Update, released almost a year ago, would take about 82 minutes on average during the offline phase. Improvements made in the Fall Creators Update cut that to about 51 minutes, and the next update (which still hasn't actually been blessed with an official name) will cut this further still, to just 30 minutes.

The competition for the world's biggest "battle royale" video game got even hotter on Monday with a not-too-surprising announcement: Playerunknown's Battlegrounds now has a free mobile version available across the world. Downloads are now live for all iOS 9.0 and later devices and most Android 5.1.1-and-above devices with at least 2GB RAM.

Based on our preliminary tests of the live American version, this famously unoptimized game is way more playable—even on older, legacy devices—than it has any right to be.

Tesla Powerpacks in South Australia. (credit: Tesla)

The new premier of South Australia, Steven Marshall, is unconvinced about a virtual power plant project that had been proposed by Tesla and accepted by Jay Weatherill, the Australian state's previous premier, in February.

The project aims to put thousands of solar panels and batteries on South Australian homes, starting with public Housing Trust properties, to create a 250MW distributed "power plant," which can respond to grid signals and isolate itself (or "island") during outages. The project would have received a AU$2 million (US$1.54 million) grant from the state, as well as AU$30 million (US$23.16 million) in state-backed loans.

Marshall's objection to the project seems to be rooted in its structure rather than in a blanket opposition to energy storage. On Monday, when a reporter asked Marshall about the plan to outfit Housing Trust homes with solar panels and batteries, he replied, "That's not part of our agenda. Our agenda is 40,000 homes." The 40,000 homes is a reference to Marshall's plan to put up $100 million in subsidies to offer a $2,500 grant on each battery storage unit installed at 40,000 homes.