Month: November 2018

Enlarge / Plaintiff Tanya Gersh of Whitefish, Montana. (credit: Dan Chung / Associated Press)

When Andrew Anglin isn't editing his neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, he organizes harassment campaigns against perceived enemies. One target of an Anglin harassment campaign, Tanya Gersh, sued Anglin last year. On Wednesday, a Montana federal judge dealt Anglin a significant setback, holding that the First Amendment does not protect Anglin's right to publish Gersh's personal information and encourage his legion of anti-Semitic followers to harass her.

But this legal battle isn't over yet. The judge's ruling allows the lawsuit to go forward, but Gersh's lawyers will still have to prove Anglin liable for invasion of privacy and other harms.

Still, the ruling could prove significant for other victims of online harassment. Anglin argued that he was just publishing information—like Gersh's home phone number—and couldn't be held responsible for what his readers did with that information. But the judge pointed to clear evidence Anglin knew exactly what readers would do with the information and egged them on at every step.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple has lined up another partnership to boost its video-content offerings. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Apple signed a deal with A24 studio, a New York-based production company responsible for movies, including the 2017 Oscar winner for Best Picture, Moonlight.

Details of forthcoming projects haven't been disclosed, but Apple reportedly signed a "multi-year partnership" to make "independent, feature-length films" with A24. Apple has numerous production partnerships and deals in the works already, but most are for serialized shows and other video content.

For the past year, Apple has focused on gleaning talent for its original content offerings. It began with the Carpool Karaoke and Planet of the Apps series, both of which are exclusively available on Apple Music.

Enlarge / All hail Hypnotoad!

The first few hours in Fallout 76 are strange. It's both familiar and foreign. The well-trod path of creating a character and exiting the safety of an underground vault is sharply juxtaposed with a distinct lack of scripted NPCs. Instead, in a departure from Fallout's decades-long history of single-player titles, you share your slice of post-apocalyptic West Virginia (referred to as Appalachia) with real, live people. Since Bethesda didn't provide pre-launch review code, we've only been able to spend our single day playing in this strange new land alongside the rest of the audience. So far, it's unclear whether this experiment will be a successful one.

What is clear immediately is that Fallout 76 is the best-looking Fallout ever. Running on an Xbox One X and displayed on a 4K TV, the visuals are vibrant and clear, a far cry from the muddy textures of Fallout 4. So far, the game has run much more smoothly as well, without the long loads and jerky pauses of the previous Fallout titles. These days, that's an impressive feat for a multiplayer game on launch day.

Fallout 76 starts similarly to other games in the series: after decades in an underground vault, protected from the nuclear war and ensuing fallout that devastated the United States, it's time to go outside. While Vault-Tec subjected many of its vault inhabitants to convoluted social experiments, Vault 76 residents have a simple mission: on Reclamation Day, 25 years after the bombs fell, it's time to leave and take the country back.

You'll create a character from scratch, determining details like face and body shape, skin color, hairstyle, and gender (male or female only; there's no non-binary option). Fallout 76 adds a fun photo mode that lets you snap your character using a variety of filters and frames, like an in-game Instagram. After taking that first photo and naming your character, you're on your way.

Enlarge / E3 loses one of its big three in 2019. (credit: Aurich / PlayStation)

Shortly after E3 2019's dates were announced on Thursday, one major player in the gaming industry, Sony, confirmed that it will not be participating in the annual event. This is the first time Sony has skipped E3 since its 1995 inception.

In a statement given to Ars Technica, Sony Interactive Entertainment hinted to a 2019 PR strategy that depends less on physical conferences and more on direct outreach by the company to fans.

"As the industry evolves, Sony Interactive Entertainment continues to look for inventive opportunities to engage the community," the statement reads. "PlayStation fans mean the world to us, and we always want to innovate, think differently, and experiment with new ways to delight gamers. As a result, we have decided not to participate in E3 in 2019.

Enlarge / Michael Griffin, under secretary of defense for research and engineering, testifies during a House Armed Services Committee in April. (credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

In recent weeks, NASA officials have been running a charm offensive on their proposed "Gateway" in lunar space, which would serve as a space station in a distant orbit around the Moon. The agency has proposed this interim step in lieu of returning directly to the lunar surface with humans. The agency has even started talking about the Gateway as a "spaceship," presumably because this sounds more exciting than a "station."

Public criticism of the proposal has been limited to date, in part because so much of the aerospace community has the potential to earn contracts by either helping to build the lunar space station or supply it with consumables once it is up and running in the mid-2020s. (We spoke to a few of the public critics for a feature published in September.)

However, during a meeting of the National Space Council Users' Advisory Group on Thursday, some of the criticism we've heard privately spilled into public view. One of the committee's members, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, declared that, "I'm quite opposed to the Gateway."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Olena_T)

SpaceX today received US approval to deploy 7,518 broadband satellites, in addition to the 4,425 satellites that were approved eight months ago.

The Federal Communications Commission voted to let SpaceX launch 4,425 low-Earth orbit satellites in March of this year. SpaceX separately sought approval for 7,518 satellites operating even closer to the ground, saying that these will boost capacity and reduce latency in heavily populated areas. That amounts to 11,943 satellites in total for SpaceX's Starlink broadband service.

SpaceX "proposes to add a very-low Earth orbit (VLEO) NGSO [non-geostationary satellite orbit] constellation, consisting of 7,518 satellites operating at altitudes from 335km to 346km," the FCC said in the draft of the order that it approved unanimously today. The newly approved satellites would use frequencies between 37.5 and 42GHz for space-to-Earth transmissions and frequencies between 47.2 and 51.4GHz for Earth-to-space transmissions, the FCC said.

Enlarge / It's still best to avoid needing antibiotics. (credit: Wyoming Dept. of Health)

In the battle against gonorrhea, antibiotics have been forced into a rapid and devastating retreat. In the early 1990s, three different antibiotics were available as treatments recommended by the CDC. Resistance to one of these options was detected in the late ‘90s; since then, one after another, treatment options bit the dust. Now, resistance to all available treatment is growing.

“We are facing the real danger of multidrug-resistant, nearly untreatable gonorrhea,” wrote Susan Blank and Demetre C. Daskalakis in the New England Journal of Medicine last week. On its own, this is a very serious public health concern; taken together with the sharp uptick in the number of reported cases of gonorrhea in the US, it’s alarming.

A second paper published last week offers some hope: in a small trial, a new antibiotic did well against gonorrhea. The drug, called zoliflodacin, has a different way of attacking bacteria, making it a useful new option against antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. A much larger clinical trial is now in the cards.