Month: August 2018

Enlarge / Meet the Stratolaunch fleet. (credit: Stratolaunch)

For the last year or so, Stratolaunch has conducted a number of ground-based tests on the world's largest aircraft, both inside its gargantuan hangar and on a runway in Mojave, California. If all goes well, the company plans for the aircraft with a 117-meter wingspan to make its maiden flight by the end of this year.

But the aircraft is only a means to an end—sustainably launching rockets into space. Although Stratolaunch appears to have built a fine airplane, questions have lingered for years regarding exactly which rockets will be flown to a cruising altitude, and then released by the airplane. And when you've built an aircraft the likes of which have never been seen before, such curiosity is understandable.

On Monday, the company finally provided some additional clarity. Previously, Stratolaunch announced an agreement to launch small Pegasus rockets from the aircraft, but these boosters can only deliver up to 370kg into low-Earth orbit. (And they are so small, their use could not possibly justify the scale of the Stratolaunch plane, with a wingspan 20 meters greater than even the Spruce Goose).

Enlarge (credit: Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Google is facing new scrutiny in the wake of revelations that it stores users’ location data even when "Location History" is turned off.

Last Friday, Google quietly edited its description of the practice on its own website—while continuing said practice—to clarify that "some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other services, like Search and Maps."

As a result of the previously unknown practice, which was first exposed by the Associated Press last week, Google has now been sued by a man in San Diego. Simultaneously, activists in Washington, DC are urging the Federal Trade Commission to examine whether the company is in breach of its 2011 consent decree with the agency.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

AT&T-owned DirecTV has defeated the bulk of a $4 billion lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, which wasn't able to convince a judge that DirecTV ads deceived customers about the price of service.

The FTC sued DirecTV in March 2015, alleging that the nation's largest satellite TV provider used deceptive advertising to get consumers to agree to price increases of up to $45 per month and early cancellation fees of up to $480. The FTC was seeking refunds for affected consumers.

But a judge's ruling on Thursday gutted the FTC's case against DirecTV, which has been an AT&T subsidiary since July 2015. "The FTC's ambition in attempting to show that over 40,000 advertisements were likely to deceive substantially exceeded the strength of its evidence," wrote Judge Haywood Gilliam, Jr. of US District Court for the Northern District of California. "This case did not involve the type of strong proof the Court would expect to see in a case seeking nearly $4 billion in restitution, based on a claim that all of DirecTV's 33 million customers between 2007 and 2015 were necessarily deceived."

Enlarge / Say hello to yet another Geforce graphics card. (credit: Nvidia)

Ahead of Nvidia's pre-Gamescom keynote on Monday, Internet retailers spilled the beans on the existence of the company's next consumer-grade graphics cards: the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti.

Nearly an hour later, Nvidia unveiled its own product listings for "Founders" editions of the "20-series" video cards, confirming a September 20 launch for those two models and a "coming later" notice for an additional RTX 2070. The prices are as follows: $599 for the RTX 2070; $799 for the RTX 2080, and $1,199 for the RTX 2080 Ti.

That much money for the 2080 Ti Founders Edition will net you 11GB of GDDR6 RAM and a card running at a base clock of 1350 MHz and a "boost" clock of 1635 MHz. It will include 4352 CUDA cores and 352-bit memory bandwidth running at 616 GB/sec. The more affordable 2080 Founders Edition actually clocks faster, at a "boost" clock of 1,800 MHz, but with 8GB of GDDR6 RAM. That memory comes at a 256-bit bandwidth running at 448 GB/sec, and the card includes 2944 CUDA cores.