Month: April 2018

Enlarge / Bird and Lime scooters sit parked in front of a building on April 17, 2018 in San Francisco. (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

The City Attorney of San Francisco has now sent three cease-and-desist letters to three electric-scooter venture-backed startups that are operating in the famed city-by-the-bay.

In recent weeks, San Francisco and other Bay Area cities have been inundated by a plethora of the dockless, short-term rental scooters. The scooters are accessed via smartphone app, typically for $1 to unlock and then $0.15 per minute afterwards. (Some have already ended up in Oakland’s Lake Merritt, seemingly in protest.)

Vice dubbed the new scooterscape a "bizarre scooter war," while Vanity Fair has called the phenomenon "Wheelmageddon." (One venture capitalist has even questioned how this is even a profitable business model.)

Microsoft's plan to launch a new "avatar" system for Windows 10 and Xbox users received its most revealing leak yet this week, thanks to an eagle-eyed forum user combing through an ex-Microsoft contractor's resume.

After receiving a splashy reveal at E3 2017, Microsoft's "Xbox Avatars"—a series of cartoony characters that players can customize and possibly bring into future games—were quietly delayed beyond their original "fall 2017" launch window. The company has remained mum on them ever since, beyond formally announcing a vague "2018" window. But ResetERA forum user Gowans turned up Xbox Avatar's upcoming Windows 10 app by way of one of its "design integration developers," Mark Dunbar, posting footage of the app on his portfolio site.

Enlarge / "Free" as in "censored." (credit: Carl Court / Getty Images)

Early today, Roskomnadzor—Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media—moved to enforce a new Russian federal law blocking the use of Telegram, the encrypted chat and social networking application that has become the favored tool of Russia's political opposition and journalists. The censorship began with Roskomnadzor instructing Internet service providers to block requests to Internet Protocol addresses of Telegram's servers.

But as users flocked to virtual private networks and proxy services to reach Telegram from their mobile devices and computers—or resorted to building their own—government censors added large swaths of IP addresses to the block list. And according to multiple sources within Russia, ISPs there are now blocking large chunks of IP addresses associated with cloud services from Amazon and Google.

Alexander Zharov, the chief of Roskomnadzor, confirmed that Amazon's addresses were being blocked "due to the fact that the Telegram messenger started using them to bypass the lock in Russia," RT reported.

Enlarge / The glaciers are in on the conspiracy! (credit: NOAA)

The vast majority of scientists—by most measures, well over 90 percent—accept the evidence that humans are driving our current climate change. Among the public, however, that figure is much lower. One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that the public doesn't understand just how strong the scientific consensus is. If people think scientists are divided on this issue, they could be more likely to feel that their own opinion is justified, even if it goes against the conclusions of the people with the most relevant expertise.

Researchers have now looked at how people in the US respond to being told about the scientific community's near unanimity on the topic. They found that the results vary geographically, with a stronger response in states that are more politically conservative. This roughly balances the lower acceptance in the states initially, meaning that all states more or less end up looking about the same.

Consensus messaging

The issue here is typically called "consensus messaging." The idea is that many members of the public don't fully realize just how unified scientific opinion—the consensus—currently is. If they did, members of the public might be more likely to accept scientists' conclusions and perhaps demand policies that address climate change. And there's room for a lot of improvement here, as only about 10 percent of the US public correctly recognizes that the scientific consensus on climate change is over 90 percent.

Enlarge / A photomicrograph of Salmonella typhi bacteria using a Gram-stain technique. (credit: CDC)

A tenacious epidemic of extensively drug-resistant (XDR) typhoid in Pakistan is just one small genetic step away from becoming untreatable—and health experts expect it to spread worldwide.

“It’s a global concern at this point,” Dr. Eric Mintz, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told The New York Times. “Everything suggests this strain will survive well and spread easily—and acquiring resistance to azithromycin is only a matter of time.” Azithromycin is currently the only antibiotic remaining that treats the infection.

Typhoid fever, caused by Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi bacteria, is endemic to Pakistan, parts of which suffer from poor infrastructure, crowded urban areas, and insufficient access to healthcare. The epidemic caused by the XDR strain—the first of its kind—has been unfolding there since November 2016. It has now affected at least 850 people in 14 districts, according to the latest figures from the National Institute of Health in Islamabad and first reported by the Times. Prior to this epidemic, there were only four known, unrelated cases of such heavily drug-resistant typhoid, occurring in Iraq, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

Enlarge / FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn addresses protesters outside the Federal Communication Commission building to rally against the end of net neutrality rules on December 14, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )

Democrat Mignon Clyburn is leaving the Federal Communications Commission after nine years of service. As part of the FCC's Democratic majority from 2009 through 2016, Clyburn repeatedly voted for consumer-protection regulations over the objections of Internet service providers. More recently, Clyburn has been on the losing end of many votes as the FCC's new Republican majority deregulates the broadband and telecom industries.

Clyburn's term expired in June 2017, but commission rules allowed her to stay until the end of 2018 if she had chosen to do so. Rather than seek a new five-year term, she announced that today's FCC meeting would be her last.

Being an FCC commissioner has been "the most incredible opportunity for me," Clyburn said at the meeting. "In my wildest dreams, if I could have crafted my destiny, I never would have dreamed of this."

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is led by a hefty discount on the Essential Phone, a smartphone from the father of Android himself—the Droidmaster, if you will—Andy Rubin. It's currently down to $400 on Amazon: that's $100 off its usual going rate these days and well off its original price of $700.

Now, the phone has its issues. We weren't exactly enthralled by Essential's first device when it launched last August. There's no headphone jack, no waterproofing, and no microSD slot, and its performance on T-Mobile is known to be shoddy. A price cut doesn't change that.

But as we noted when Essential first cut the Phone's price to $500, being cheaper goes a long way toward making up for those flaws. At $700, it can't compete. At $500, it was at least in the conversation with the OnePlus 5T. At $400, with the 5T out of stock and the OnePlus 6 expected to be pricier than usual, the Phone looks something like the best value on the Android market. It's fast, it feels like a $700 device, and it has the cleanest take on Android this side of a Pixel.

Enlarge (credit: Rev Stan / Flickr)

It looked like Windows 10 build 17133 was going to be blessed as the 1803 update, but that plan has been derailed. Though the build was pushed out to Windows Insiders on the release preview ring—an action that, in the past, has indicated that a build is production ready—it turns out that it had a bug causing blue screens of death.

Microsoft could likely have addressed the situation with an incremental update, but for whatever reason, it didn't. Instead, we have a new build, 17134. This build is identical to 17133 except that it fixes the particular crashing issue. Fast ring Insiders have the build now, and it should trickle out to Slow ring and Release Preview ring shortly. If all goes well, the build will then make its way out to regular Windows users on the stable release channel.

When will that happen? That's less clear. The expectation was that 17133 would be pushed out on this month's Patch Tuesday; with the delay, May's Patch Tuesday would be the logical opportunity, though if Microsoft is happy that the build works, there's no particular need to wait.