Month: May 2018

Enlarge / The Nikola One in December 2016. (credit: NMC)

On Tuesday, zero-emissions truck startup Nikola Motor Company sued Tesla for allegedly infringing on its design patents. Nikola says that Tesla's Semi, which was revealed in November 2017, too closely resembles its Nikola One, a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle that was revealed in December 2016. (Somewhere, the ghost of Nikola Tesla is feeling very conflicted.)

Nikola is currently based in Salt Lake City, Utah, but it's planning to move its headquarters to Phoenix, Arizona, in July. The patent lawsuit (PDF) was filed in US District Court for the Federal District of Arizona. Nikola is asking for $2 billion in damages.

The hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle startup filed design patents on its Class 8 truck in December 2015 and showed off a real-world prototype in December 2016 (you can read Ars' coverage of that announcement here). Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced in July 2016 that his company was just beginning to build a semi truck.

Enlarge / Some might object to using a slot machine to illustrate a piece on loot boxes, but Juniper directly calls them "a form of in-game gambling" so... (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

With all the controversy, scrutiny, and international regulation randomized video game loot boxes are facing these days, you might think the practice of charging players for a chance at unknown in-game items might be set for a precipitous decline. On the contrary, though, one analyst sees spending on loot boxes increasing by over 62 percent in the next four years to become a $47 billion piece of the industry. By then, loot boxes will represent over 29 percent of all spending on digital games, the analyst said, up from just under 25 percent currently.

In a newly published forecast of the global game market, Juniper Research concedes that developers are "effectively encouraging a form of in-game gambling" with loot boxes and using that addictive potential to "extend both the lifecycle and engagement of games titles to their audience." These kinds of non-traditional money-making techniques are a practical necessity for developers squeezed by increasing costs and stagnant or declining up-front game prices, Juniper says.

"As new technologies and standards come into play, costs are ever-growing, yet game prices, in the console industry particularly, are relatively flat, leading to developers seeking new means to monetize their products," Juniper analyst Lauren Foye told Ars. "Thus it is logical that loot box mechanics, which have proven so successful for titles such as CS:GO and PUBG, would see integration onto new, upcoming titles."

Enlarge / Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Signal. (credit: Knight Foundation)

Last week, Amazon announced a change to an Amazon Web Service designed specifically to end the use of domain fronting—the exploitation of a content delivery network’s architecture to conceal the actual destination of encrypted Internet traffic.

At the same time, Amazon issued a warning to the developers of the Signal encrypted phone and messaging application that it would cancel Signal's CloudFront account if the service continued to attempt to evade censorship using Amazon's sites as cover.

Signal uses CloudFront to handle load balancing of its servers, none of which has a permanent IP address.

Enlarge / Signs for Cambridge Analytica in the lobby of the building in which the firm is based on March 21, 2018 in London. (credit: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

Cambridge Analytica, the embattled London-based data analytics firm that famously did work for the Donald Trump presidential campaign, has shut down.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the company's closure is effective today.

It was revealed last month that a 2014 survey app that required Facebook login credentials allowed the survey creator and his team access to their friends' public profile data. In the end, this system captured data from 87 million Facebook users. This data trove wound up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, a British data analytics firm, which worked for the Donald Trump presidential campaign.

Female Aedes aegypti mosquito as she was in the process of obtaining a "blood meal." (credit: US Department of Health and Human Services)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an alarming report yesterday, declaring that cases of diseases spread by ticks, mosquitos, and fleas more than tripled in the US between 2004 and 2016. Unnerving headlines followed, emphasizing the tripling (e.g. The Washington Post) or some making claims that tick and mosquito infections are “spreading rapidly” (e.g. The New York Times).

But a look at the data tells a more nuanced, less alarming story.

The CDC’s data, published in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, clumps together cases of 16 different types of diseases spread by insects (called "vector-borne diseases"), which are each reported to the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS). This system covers all US states as well as US territories. The agency noted in its press materials that this is the first time they’ve ever aggregated disease counts together like this for one analysis. (Why they chose to start this year is anyone’s guess. Perhaps because it allowed them to say things like “diseases tripled.” Who knows?)