Month: August 2018

Google is dropping a major surprise on us today and releasing the final consumer-ready version of Android P. It has a final name: the version number is "9" (not "9.0"), and we know what the "P" stands for: "Pie."

"Android 9 Pie" is now finished and will start rolling out to Google's Pixel phones.

Enlarge / Alex Jones in Cleveland in 2016. (credit: Brooks Kraft/ Getty Images)

Conspiracy theorist and online troll Alex Jones got more bad news on Monday as YouTube banned Jones' channel on YouTube.

"This account has been terminated for violating YouTube's Community Guidelines," a notice on Jones's YouTube channel states.

The decision comes hours after Apple and Facebook made similar moves. Early on Monday, Apple removed five of the six podcasts from Infowars, Alex Jones's site, from its popular podcast directory. Facebook followed suit, taking down four of Jones's most popular pages and effectively banning him from the site.

Enlarge / Space is pretty.

Nearly two years after its rocky initial launch, No Man’s Sky still has a long way to go. But after three major updates and the recent pseudo-relaunch in the form of No Man’s Sky NEXT, it finally feels like a game that deserves to go that extra distance. That’s assuming you can put up a with a lot of turbulent interstellar travel in the meantime, anyway.

Like a lot of folks, I whipped up a fresh save to coincide with the new NEXT update after barely touching the game’s reportedly great additions (base building, freighters, and a whole new story campaign) over the past two years. The restart immediately felt both familiar and bizarrely off, somehow. My silent avatar still started on one of 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets with nothing but a mining laser and a damaged ship.

But there was a new, subdued urgency to those opening seconds. The game casually drew my attention to a half-full energy meter on my user interface. I only had seconds to find sodium and refuel it, or I’d start taking damage from the superheated planet’s surface. Finding sodium, however, meant I needed to repair my multi-tool’s malfunctioning scanner. That required a material that was new to me, Ferrite Dust, and much futzing with reams of menus and inventories.

Enlarge / Demonstrators rally outside the Federal Communication Commission building in Washington, DC, to protest the end of net neutrality rules on December 14, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla)

The Trump administration has asked the US Supreme Court to vacate the 2016 court ruling that upheld the Obama-era net neutrality rules in a strategy that could help uphold the Federal Communications Commission's recent repeal of those rules.

The rules themselves are no longer on the books, having been repealed by the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai, Trump's pick to lead the commission. But broadband industry lobby groups appealed to the US Supreme Court in September 2017 anyway, asking the nation's highest court to rule that the Obama-era FCC exceeded its authority when it reclassified Internet providers in order to impose stricter regulations.

Lawyers for the FCC and Department of Justice filed a brief with the Supreme Court Friday, supporting the broadband industry's case. The DOJ and FCC noted that the case "appears to be moot" because of Pai's repeal of the net neutrality rules and that the future of net neutrality will be decided in a new case in which dozens of litigants sued Pai's FCC to reverse the repeal.

Enlarge / In January, 2018, Rocket Lab reached orbit for the first time with the second launch of its Electron vehicle. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Rocket Lab has announced another delay to the launch of its "It's Business Time" mission, this time until November. But the rocket company seems confident enough that it has addressed an issue with the rocket motor controller that it has scheduled another launch to take place within weeks of the "It's Business Time" flight.

Originally, the third flight of Rocket Lab's Electron launcher was due to occur in April 2018, and this was eventually delayed until June. After engineers discovered an issue with the rocket's motor controller, the company stood down its launch attempt this summer (winter in the southern hemisphere, where Rocket Lab launches from New Zealand). According to a news release from the company, this additional time allowed for more analysis, and the motor controllers have been modified and undergone new qualification testing ahead of the next launch.

The company appears to have softened the blow of this additional launch delay until November by promising that the fourth flight of the Electron vehicle will occur "within weeks" of the third flight. That mission is tentatively scheduled for December.