Month: June 2018

Enlarge / Democrats vs. Republicans. (credit: Getty Images | Linda Braucht)

Congressional Democrats seeking to reinstate net neutrality rules are still 46 votes short of getting the measure through the House of Representatives.

The US Senate voted last month to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules, with all members of the Democratic caucus and three Republicans voting in favor of net neutrality.

A discharge petition needs 218 signatures to force a House vote on the same net neutrality bill, and 218 votes would also be enough to pass the measure. So far, the petition has signatures from 172 representatives, all Democrats. That number hasn't changed in two weeks.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Sony executives welcoming the Switch version of Fortnite into working with their network in the future, perhaps?

Sony Interactive Entertainment America President and CEO Shawn Layden offered some vague hope to PS4 players who want to play with those on other consoles this week. In response to a question from Eurogamer at Spain's Gamelab conference, Layden said he is "confident" the company will come up with some sort of cross-console play solution in the future.

"We're hearing it," Layden said of player complaints surrounding the inability for PS4 games to play well with other consoles. "We're looking at a lot of the possibilities. You can imagine that the circumstances around that affect a lot more than just one game. I'm confident we'll get to a solution which will be understood and accepted by our gaming community, while at the same time supporting our business."

While Microsoft and Nintendo have opened up their online networks in recent years, Sony has consistently blocked developer efforts to let games on the PlayStation Network interact with versions of those same games on other consoles (though many PS4 games do allow cross-platform play with PC and mobile phone versions). The issue has gained increased visibility in recent weeks as Fortnite players on Nintendo Switch have discovered that playing the game on PS4 permanently locks their existing game accounts from compatibility with other consoles.

Enlarge (credit: Robomart)

Last month, we wrote about a wave of startups like Nuro, Starship, and Marble that are building autonomous delivery vehicles. It's a promising concept. Designers of these vehicles don't need to worry about passenger comfort or safety (since there are no passengers). And vehicles can be slow—about 25 mph (40 kph) for Nuro, even slower for Starship and Marble—without irritating anyone inside the vehicle, which greatly simplifies the technical challenges of building a fully autonomous vehicle.

In our survey of this emerging market, we didn't mention another fascinating startup with a different twist on the same basic concept.

"It's not a delivery vehicle, it's an autonomous store on wheels," said Ali Ahmed, the CEO of Robomart, in a Tuesday interview with Ars.

A Facebook rendering of the Aquila solar-powered drone. (credit: Facebook)

It was supposed to be the future of digital communications, helping to connect the "next five billion people" to the Internet. But Facebook has now shut down its internal effort to build high-altitude solar-powered drones to provide a backbone for Internet connectivity in areas lacking wired infrastructure. In a blog post yesterday, Facebook's Yael Maguire announced that the company is shuttering its Aquila drone program.

The goal of the Aquila program was to create a drone that could stay aloft for months at a time, orbiting over a geographic area at high altitude to provide a persistent radio link. Facebook based Aquila on the work of the UK-based drone research company Ascenta, which Facebook acquired in 2014—incorporating the operation into the company's Connectivity Lab and Internet.org project. The original plan was to use laser communications links between Aquila drones to provide a backbone network to provide Internet connectivity to ground stations.

At the time, Facebook and Google were both aggressively looking for ways to further expand their reach; Google had launched its Project Loon the year before and made its own solar-powered drone acquisition in April of 2014, buying Titan Aerospace. But like many things that both Facebook and Google took on four years ago, both drone efforts struggled. Facebook only managed two test flights of the Aquila design; the first ended in a hard landing caused by a structural failure, and the second was more successful but still far from meeting Facebook's goals. Titan suffered a similar fate after being incorporated into Google's X spin-off company; Titan was shut down last January, as Google parent Alphabet chose to focus on Project Loon and delivery drones.