Month: October 2018

Valentina Palladino

NEW YORK—Apple led today's event by talking about two of its most-loved devices: the MacBook Air and the Mac mini. While Apple customers may have loved these devices since their debuts, Apple hasn't shown them much love over the past couple of years.

That changed today with the introduction of the new MacBook Air (which includes updates like a Retina display, Touch ID, and Apple's butterfly keyboard) and a new Mac mini (which got a big spec bump with quad- and hexa-core processors). Today's event brought the biggest hardware changes that both devices have seen in a long time, and yet they still have a lot in common with their predecessors—and that's a good thing.

Enlarge / The front of Tesla owner Shawn Hudson's car was totally destroyed. Hudson survived the crash. (credit: Shawn Hudson)

Earlier this month, Shawn Hudson's Tesla Model S crashed into a stalled car while moving at about 80 miles per hour on a Florida freeway. Tesla's Autopilot technology was engaged at the time, and Hudson has now filed a lawsuit against Tesla in state courts.

"Through a pervasive national marketing campaign and a purposefully manipulative sales pitch, Tesla has duped consumers" into believing that Autpilot can "transport passengers at highway speeds with minimal input and oversight," the lawsuit says.

Hudson had a two-hour commute to his job at an auto dealership. He says that he heard about Tesla's Autopilot technology last year and went to a Tesla dealership to learn more.

Enlarge / NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has run out of fuel. (credit: NASA)

After more than nine years in operation, the Kepler Space Telescope has run out of hydrazine fuel. Mission managers will now send a command to the spacecraft, which is presently trailing Earth in a heliocentric orbit about 150 million kilometers away, to turn off the spacecraft's transmitters. It will be cast adrift into the silent blackness of space.

But though the spacecraft's effective mission will end, it will live on in troves of data that scientists have yet to process. Already, during its lifetime, the spacecraft has found 2,681 confirmed planets and an additional 2,899 candidate planets that require follow-up confirmation from ground-based telescopes. Those numbers were current as of Monday evening.

Kepler can safely be counted as one of the most transformative missions that NASA has ever sent into space. Prior to its launch, astronomers knew planets existed around other stars, but their knowledge beyond that was fuzzy. Now, astronomers have a wealth of information. "Because of Kepler, what we think about our place in the universe has changed," Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters, said Tuesday during a conference call with reporters.

Getty Images

Russia's one and only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, is in the middle of a long-forestalled refit in Murmansk. But its repairs may take a bit longer now that the floating dry dock that was carrying it at Murmansk's Shipyard 82 suddenly sank—causing a giant crane to crash onto the Kuznetsov and gash a 16-foot hole in its hull. One shipyard worker is missing, and four others were hospitalized—two of them in critical condition.

The floating dry dock, the PD-50—one of the largest in the world—apparently sank as the result of a power outage following a power surge at the shipyard, possibly related to damage to power lines caused by ice.

Enlarge / Who doesn't love some new Windows? (credit: Peter Bright / Flickr)

Microsoft is making yet more fixes to Windows 10 build 17763, the build that has been blessed as the Windows 10 October 2018 Update.

The update was initially published on the second Tuesday of the month, but within a few days Microsoft had to pull the update due to a bug that could cause data loss. It turned out that the bug had been reported numerous times during the preview period, but for whatever reason Microsoft had overlooked or ignored the feedback items describing the problem.

Microsoft fixed that particular bug and sent the fixed build to Windows Insiders to test. The fixes published today include a fix for another widely reported (but apparently ignored) bug when dragging files from .ZIP archives in Explorer. If a file within the archive has the same name as a file in the destination directory, Explorer is supposed to show a prompt to ask whether to overwrite the existing file or rename the new one. For some reason, Windows build 17763 was not asking the question. Instead, it was skipping the extraction of the file with the conflicting name.

Enlarge / FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly speaks during an FCC meeting in Washington, DC on November 16, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

A Republican on the Federal Communications Commission claimed that municipal broadband networks pose a unique threat to First Amendment free speech rights—but provided no compelling evidence to back his claim.

FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly made his claim in a speech last week at the Media Institute's "Free Speech America" event. (Motherboard wrote about O'Rielly's speech yesterday, and the FCC posted a transcript.)

O'Rielly said that broadband providers run by local governments "have engaged in significant First Amendment mischief." But O'Rielly's only evidence to support his claim was the networks' Acceptable Use Policies, which contain boilerplate language similar to the policies used by private ISPs such as Comcast and AT&T.