Month: April 2018

Enlarge / A patent image depicting how Clear would work. (credit: Ray Ozzie)

Ray Ozzie's proposal to end the long-simmering crypto war between law enforcement and much of the tech world is getting a chilly reception from privacy advocates and security experts. They argue his plan is largely the same key-escrow program proposed 20 years ago and suffers from the same fatal shortcomings.

Dubbed "Clear," Ozzie's idea was first detailed Wednesday in an article published in Wired and described in general terms last month. The former chief technical officer and chief software architect of Microsoft and the creator of Lotus Notes, Ozzie portrays Clear as a potential breakthrough in bridging the widening gulf between those who say the US government has a legitimate need to bypass encryption in extreme cases, such as those involving terrorism and child abuse, and technologists and civil libertarians who warn such bypasses threaten the security of billions of people.

In a nutshell, here's how Clear works:

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today, the Dealmaster has scrounged up another good-looking deal for those in need of a cheap laptop, as Acer's Aspire 5 notebook is down to $459 at Walmart.

This configuration comes with a 7th-gen Core i7-7500 processor, a 15.6-inch 1080p display, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. The familiar caveats with budget laptops still apply: it's meant for casual use more than gaming or graphics-intensive work, the build quality and display won't blow you away, and the keyboard isn't backlit. But last year's Core i7 isn't exactly a slouch for $459, and neither is a fully 1080p display. If you just can't pay for something better, you could do worse.

If your laptop situation is all set, there's also a smorgasbord of PC accessory deals going on at Amazon today, including the lowest price we've seen on the high-end AMD Threadripper 1950X CPU we praised last year. There are deals on wireless headphones, iPads, and Amazon's Fire HD 10 tablet beyond that. Check it all out for yourself below.

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We're still waiting for the next Windows 10 update, probably to be named the April 2018 Update, even though April is rapidly nearing its end. This means that the Fall Creators Update, Windows 10 version 1709, is still the latest update, and hence, it's still creeping upward in usage.

This month, according to the numbers collected by AdDuplex, the Fall Creators Update was found on 92.8 percent of Windows 10 installations, adding another two percent over last month. That makes it the most widely used update yet: the Anniversary Update (version 1607) peaked at 92.1 percent after eight months of availability.

The numbers also suggest that Windows Insiders may be a little more diverse than expected. Most months, the number of people on the next version of Windows is about 0.4 percent. But in the months immediately prior to a new update—during which the putative release is pushed out not just to the usual Fast and Slow distribution channels but also the Release Preview channel—that number hits about 0.8 or 0.9 percent. This doubling of the apparent size of the Insider program suggests that there's a surprisingly large number of Insiders that are using Release Preview builds, not just wanting to use the previews unless they're close to production ready.

Enlarge / Net neutrality supporter protests the FCC's repeal outside a federal building in Los Angeles, California on November 28, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Ronen Tivony | NurPhoto)

A California bill that would impose the nation's strictest net neutrality law has been approved by another state Senate committee, bringing it closer to passage.

The California Senate Judiciary committee approved the bill Tuesday in a 5-2 vote, with Democrats supporting the net neutrality rules and Republicans opposing them.

“California can—and must—step up to re-establish the Obama-era net neutrality rules to protect consumers and our democracy," bill sponsor Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said in an announcement.

Enlarge (credit: Spencer Platt | Getty Images)

It is no secret that Tesla's Autopilot project is struggling. Last summer, we covered a report that Tesla was bleeding talent from its Autopilot division. Tesla Autopilot head Sterling Anderson quit Tesla at the end of 2016. His replacement was Chris Lattner, who had previously created the Swift programming language at Apple. But Lattner only lasted six months before departing last June.

Now Lattner's replacement, Jim Keller, is leaving Tesla as well.

Keller was a well-known chip designer at AMD before he was recruited to lead Tesla's hardware engineering efforts for Autopilot in 2016. Keller has been working to develop custom silicon for Autopilot, potentially replacing the Nvidia chips being used in today's Tesla vehicles. When Lattner left Tesla last June, Keller was given broader authority over the Autopilot program as a whole.

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Nintendo is celebrating the end of a pretty good first year for the Nintendo Switch, with just over 15 million unit sales in the 12 months ending in March (on top of almost 3 million sales in the console's launch month of March 2017). But Nintendo seems pretty sure that the system can perform even better in the coming fiscal year, and the company is projecting 20 million sales in the coming 12 months in a new annual report.

That target is actually a little below reports from last November, which suggested Nintendo would target annual sales of 25 million to 30 million Switch systems. Selling 20 million units in the coming year would put the Switch in the same sales range as the PS4 (which sold 17.7 million units in its second full year) but behind the sales mania of the Nintendo Wii, which sold 25.94 million units in its second full year.

The October launch of Super Mario Odyssey seems to be driving at least some of Nintendo's hardware optimism. The game has already sold over 10.4 million units, outpacing Mario Kart 8 (9.22 million) and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (8.48 million) despite being on the market for a much shorter time. The fact that Mario Odyssey was included in a special holiday bundle with the Switch probably didn't hurt that performance, either.