Month: April 2018

Enlarge / How often do you see a frying pan meme in a lawsuit? (credit: PUBG Corp)

As expected, the massively popular online shooter Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) has been followed by a wave of imitators, particularly on smartphones. But it has been unclear if or when the game's creators would ever consider legal action against any of these copycats. In particular, a brief chest-puffing incident involving the similar, and hugely popular, Fortnite Battle Royale came and went last year without incident.

That changed on Monday with a suit filed against NetEase, a Chinese game publisher with two very PUBG-like games on smartphones. The suit, filed in Northern California's US District Court by PUBG Corp (a wholly owned subsidiary of Korean game publisher Bluehole), alleges both copyright and trademark violations by NetEase's mobile-only games Rules of Survival and Knives Out.

Much like PUBG, NetEase's games offer 100-person online battles on an island that players parachute onto. The battles revolve around a constantly shrinking "safe zone," a specific set of military-grade weapons and armor, and a variety of island-crossing vehicles. What's more, NetEase's games beat PUBG to iOS, which invited a substantial number of "PUBG on phone" comparisons before the official version finally hit mobile devices.

Enlarge / While we've done a lot to control the flow of the Mississippi, it's not always effective. (credit: USGS)

It's hard to get a sense of the Mississippi River's scale without having seen it. It drains water from 31 of the 48 contiguous states, along with parts of Canada, and its outflow can average up to 20,000 cubic meters of water every second. When something that big floods, it can be a staggeringly destructive event, one that can impact multiple states as the surge of water makes its way downstream to the ocean.

Accordingly, humans have been attempting to limit the impact of flooding by building structures that contain the river and direct its overflows. But as floods have continued to plague the river basin, including a massive 2011 flood, people have started to question whether the structures we've built have only made matters worse. A new study reaches back 500 years to gather data on past floods and answers that question with a yes.

Creating a history

For a river like the Mississippi, floods are erratic events, which means that picking out trends requires many years of data. A decade-long lull in flooding, for example, won't tell you if you're safer or lucky. And here, the relatively recent settling of the North American interior works against us; the first hardware to measure the flow of the river wasn't installed until nearly 1900. So how do you analyze a history that doesn't exist?

Enlarge / Xbox One X Console Controller. (credit: Microsoft)

A video game industry lobby group is joining the lawsuit that seeks to reinstate net neutrality rules in the US, saying that the net neutrality repeal could harm multiplayer online games that require robust Internet connections.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) yesterday filed a motion for leave to intervene so that it can support the case against the Federal Communications Commission. The lawsuit, filed by a mix of Democratic state attorneys general, tech companies such as Mozilla, and consumer advocacy groups, seeks to reverse the FCC's December 2017 vote to eliminate net neutrality rules.

The ESA said its members will be harmed by the repeal "because the FCC's Order permits ISPs to take actions that could jeopardize the fast, reliable, and low-latency connections that are critical to the video game industry."

HP

Intel's expanded range of 8th-generation Core processors announced earlier this week included a couple of mobile Xeon models, boasting all the same specs as the non-Xeon parts—6 cores/12 threads, running at up to 4.8GHz, with 12MB cache—but with the addition of a feature that's still something of a rarity: ECC memory.

The ZBook Studio and closely related ZBook Studio x360 both have weights starting at under 5lb, with processor options up to the top-spec Xeon, 32GB memory, 4TB PCIe SSD storage, and a discrete Nvidia Quadro P1000 with 4GB of dedicated GDDR5. A range of screen options is available, with both offering a 3840×2160 15.6-inch 600-nit screen at the high end. The x360, as the name suggests, gives that screen a 360 degree hinge, so it can be used in tent or tablet mode; the regular version has a regular hinge. Whatever screen configuration you pick, they both include Windows Hello facial recognition cameras. Both have Thunderbolt 3, 802.11ac, and Bluetooth 5; the x360 has optional 4G LTE.

Enlarge / Which of these gun-toting badasses is actually a toxic player?

Ubisoft is taking extra effort to rein in "toxic" behavior among the more than 25 million registered players of Rainbow Six: Siege. In a blog post last night, the company laid out new policies and procedures for limiting hate speech and antisocial in-game behavior in the game, though many of those changes won't go into effect until later this year.

The core of the changes centers around players using "racial or homophobic slurs, or hate speech," defined by the game's Code of Conduct as language that's "illegal, dangerous, threatening, abusive, obscene, vulgar, defamatory, hateful, racist, sexist, ethically offensive, or constituting harassment."

Following on a Reddit post from last month, Ubisoft says it is now actively tracking how often individual players violate this policy and will be issuing bans ranging from two days to permanent. Rather than always starting with a slap on the wrist for first offenses, though, Ubisoft warns that "particularly egregious offenders can be permanently banned without a warning."

Enlarge / A tourist walks in the Redwood forest amongst tall trees in Rotorua, New Zealand. (credit: Matteo Colombo / Getty Images)

ROTORUA, New Zealand—My pitches to Ars' editors are, in contrast to my articles, short and to the point. "I'm going to New Zealand soon. They have a big forestry industry and there is a local research institute trying to turn waste wood into biofuels. I think that would make an excellent story."

In my mind, its acceptance was equally brief: "Sweet as. Enjoy your trip to biochemistry land."

Today, biofuels may conjure images of ears of corn or Priuses for US readers, but the domestic industry has been as much about politics lately as it has been about scientific innovation. While researchers and scientific organizations have looked into finding green energy sources in everything from human waste to humble algae, state and federal governments continue to tangle over how much of a priority this area should be.

Enlarge / Thanks in part to a functional safety barrier, the damage from the September crash in Hayward was much less severe than last month's crash in Mountain View. (credit: KGO-TV)

Last week, we reported on the death of Walter Huang, a Tesla customer whose Model X vehicle slammed into a concrete lane divider in Mountain View, California. Tesla has acknowledged that Autopilot was active at the time of the crash.

Now KGO-TV, the local ABC television station in the San Francisco area, has uncovered details of another crash involving a Tesla vehicle slamming into a highway divider with Autopilot engaged. This incident occurred in Hayward, across the San Francisco Bay from Silicon Valley.

Thankfully, this crash was different in one important respect: there was a working highway safety barrier in front of the concrete divider. As a result, the crash was much less severe and the driver was able to walk away.