Month: August 2018

Infiniti

It's almost the end of August, and that means it's time for Monterey Car Week. Ars won't be there on the ground this year—why yes, I do have a bad case of FOMO—but that won't stop us from bringing you some of the cooler news as it happens. Multimillion-dollar classics, obscure-but-not-forgotten supercars, and legendary race cars make their way to the peninsula to bask in each other's reflected glory. But it's not all old stuff. The car companies and design houses also use Car Week—which is like a cross between Comic Con and the Oscars, but with wheels—to show off their concepts, and this year is no exception.

First out of the gates is Infiniti. Last year, it gave us Prototype 9, which imagined a 1940s-style barn find, but electric. This year, Infiniti has brought us Prototype 10. This concept also takes cues from the past, this time the sleek little speedsters of the 1950s.

Enlarge / Reality Winner exits the Augusta Courthouse June 8, 2017 in Augusta, Georgia. (credit: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

Reality Winner, the intelligence contractor who leaked to The Intercept and was quickly caught in June 2017 thanks to microdot printing, was sentenced to 63 months in prison on Thursday.

She had pleaded guilty on June 21 to a single count of unlawful retention and transmission of national defense information.

The information that Winner provided to The Intercept resulted in this June 5, 2017 news story: "Top-Secret NSA Report details Russian hacking effort days before 2016 election."

Enlarge / It doesn't look like it, but this west-side Los Angeles neighborhood of Culver City is home to numerous TV, film, video game, VR, and AR studios. (credit: Samuel Axon)

In April, we reported that Apple was working on developing a TV series based on Isaac Asimov's highly influential Foundation series of science fiction novels. Today, Ars has confirmed not only that Foundation was in development, but it has now been given a full series order—meaning we're definitely going to see it.

As previously reported, David Goyer (screenwriter for The Dark Knight and Batman Begins) and Josh Friedman (creator of the TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and screenwriter for Steven Spielberg's 2005 War of the Worlds film) will be the showrunners and executive producers. The series is being produced by Skydance Television, and Skydance CEO David Ellison will be an executive producer for the series (he is the son of famed Oracle executive Larry Ellison). Isaac Asimov's daughter, Robyn Asimov, will also executive produce, along with Dana Goldberg and Marcy Ross.

Foundation takes place over more than a thousand years, and the story tracks a group of exiles who are fighting against the Galactic Empire in order to save it. It is a highly influential work of science fiction; its impact can be felt in Star Wars, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and many other sci-fi films, books, and video games. Several previous attempts have been made to bring Foundation to the screen before to no avail—including ones by Independence Day director Roland Emmerich and Westworld's Jonathan Nolan.

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[Update: Aug 27: Microsoft confirmed basically all of the details of last week's reports this morning, launching the Xbox All Access subscription plan as a way to get "Xbox One and 100 games [via Xbox Games Pass]" with "no upfront cost and one low monthly price."

As previously reported, subscribers commit to spending $22 a month for an Xbox One S or $35 for a 1TB Xbox One X console over two years. That subscription provides immediate access to the hardware, which subscribers can keep after the subscription ends, as well as Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Games Pass, which normally cost about $15/month combined on their own.

Subscribers will have to sign up for a Dell Preferred Account at a physical Microsoft Store location to take advantage of the offer, which is listed as "for a limited time only."  Subscribers who cancel before the two year period is up will have to pay the remainder of their balance.