Month: April 2018

Enlarge (credit: Anthony Quintano / Flickr)

In advance of his upcoming testimony before the UK Parliament, Aleksandr Kogan wants the public to know two things: he's sorry, and he's not a Russian agent. (Kogan, who was born in Moldova, moved to the Soviet Union as a child before eventually emigrating to the United States, where he became a citizen.)

Kogan, who authored the initial Facebook app created at the behest of Cambridge Analytica, has now come forward. He recently granted interviews to The New York Times, BuzzFeed News, and CBS' 60 Minutes. (Kogan did not respond to Ars' request for comment.)

It was Kogan's 2014 app, "This is Your Digital Life," which invited users to log in with their Facebook credentials and answer a slew of survey questions in exchange for $4. Those respondents also allowed Kogan and his team access to their friends' public profile data. In the end, this system captured data on 87 million Facebook users. This data trove ultimately wound up in the hands of Donald Trump's presidential campaign when it hired the London-based firm.

Enlarge / The "Surface Phone" is speculated to be some kind of dual-screen device. (credit: Microsoft)

The rumors that Microsoft is developing some kind of phone-like device (perhaps a "Surface Phone" or "Andromeda") have been floating around for years, with little concrete evidence that such a thing exists. But the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview has given new fuel for the speculative fire: it has a set of new APIs for cellular phones.

Windows has had integrated support for cell modems since Windows 8, but this has been restricted to supporting data connections. Telephony—dialing numbers, placing calls—has always required either Windows Phone or Windows 10 Mobile. This has made the full Windows 10 unsuitable for a phone.

That may be changing. Windows 10 build 17650—a preview of Redstone 5, the next Windows update after the delayed April update—includes some telephony APIs. The new APIs cover support for a range of typical phone features: dialing numbers and contacts, blocking withheld numbers, support for Bluetooth headsets and spearphone mode, and so on and so forth. There also looks to be some kind of video-calling support, suggesting support for 3G or LTE video calling.

Enlarge / I thought this screen from Detroit could be used as a metaphor for the current legal wrangling, but I'm not 100% sure of how. (credit: Quantic Dream)

Quantic Dream, the developer behind upcoming PS4 game Detroit: Beyond Human, has brought lawsuits against two French media outlets following articles accusing the developer of fostering a "toxic corporate culture."

Kotaku reports on the lawsuits against Le Monde and website Mediapart, two of the three outlets that published a joint investigation of Quantic Dream in January. The third, Canard PC, told the site it has received "threatening letters" surrounding the articles but is not the subject of any lawsuits at this time.

"We're suing their journalists," Quantic Dream founder David Cage confirmed to Kotaku at a recent preview event.

Enlarge / Doctors performing surgery. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

A young military veteran severely maimed by an improvised explosive device (IED) received a transplant of a large section of tissue, including the penis, scrotum, and a portion of the abdominal wall, from a deceased organ donor, according to The New York Times.

The 14-hour operation took place at Johns Hopkins Hospital last month. It marks the third successful penis transplant and the first complex penis transplant, which is to say it involved the scrotum and surrounding tissue as well as the penis. For ethical reasons, surgeons removed the testicles prior to the transplantation to prevent the possibility that the recipient could father children genetically belonging to the donor.

Though doctors expect his recovery and nerve regrowth to take some time, they’re hopeful that the patient will eventually recover the ability to urinate and have spontaneous erections and orgasms. In fact, they expect urination to be possible within a few months.

Enlarge / Set TV's website. (credit: Set TV)

Netflix, Amazon, and the major film studios have once again joined forces to sue the maker of a TV service and hardware device, alleging that the products are designed to illegally stream copyrighted videos.

The lawsuit was filed against the company behind Set TV, which sells a $20-per-month TV service with more than 500 channels.

"Defendants market and sell subscriptions to 'Setvnow,' a software application that Defendants urge their customers to use as a tool for the mass infringement of Plaintiffs' copyrighted motion pictures and television shows," the complaint says. Besides Netflix and Amazon, the plaintiffs are Columbia Pictures, Disney, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros.

Volkswagen

They say there's none so zealous as a fresh convert. The fallout from dieselgate saw Volkswagen find religion in electrification, and the automaker sure is embracing it. Last year, now-departed VW Group Chairman Matthias Müller revealed Roadmap E, which commits the company to electrifying its entire lineup by 2030. It is building networks of 350kW DC chargers. In Europe that's happening with other OEMs; here in the US it's doing it alone (revealing on Monday that Target and Sheetz, among others, will join 100 Walmarts in the network). It has locked in $25 billion of batteries for European- and Chinese-market battery electric vehicles (BEVs), and barely an auto show goes by without the reveal of yet another BEV under the I.D. sub-brand. The first of these will go on sale in 2020, with the microbus that everyone drools over coming in 2022.

But one I.D. electric car will hit the street a little sooner. Well, one particular street—the strip of road that runs up to the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado. Volkswagen will use this year's Pikes Peak International Hill Climb both to stress test its new BEV platform and—if driver Romain Dumas sets a new EV record—to make some headlines. In March we saw a couple of renders of the I.D. R Pikes Peak, but on Sunday at Alès in France, it finally gave us our first look at the real thing.

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson)

If you’ve ever wished that a new study came packaged with some science fiction exploring the implications, this is your lucky day. Of course, not every research paper lends itself to a short story, but a manuscript by NASA’s Gavin Schmidt and the University of Rochester’s Adam Frank asks a fun question: are we sure that humans built the first industrial civilization in Earth’s history?

In recent years, scientists have debated defining a new geologic epoch—the “Anthropocene”—based on the idea that humans have done enough to leave a recognizable mark in Earth’s geologic archives. Theoretically, if another world harbored life that produced an industrial civilization, we could find the proof written in that world’s rocks, too.

To examine that idea, Schmidt and Frank pawed through the pages of Earth’s history—after all, it’s not impossible that some earlier species built a civilization that was subsequently wiped out, right? By looking for funky signals in the rock record, you can think about how clear the signs might be on another world.