Month: December 2018

Enlarge

It's once again that special time of year when we give you a chance to do well by doing good. That's right—it's time for the 2018 edition of our annual Charity Drive.

Every year since 2007, we've been actively encouraging readers to give to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity, which provides toys and games to kids being treated in hospitals around the world. In recent years, we've added the Electronic Frontier Foundation to our annual charity push, aiding in their efforts to defend Internet freedom. This year, as always, we're providing some extra incentive for those donations by offering donors a chance to win pieces of our big pile of vendor-provided swag. We can't keep it (ethically), and we don't want it clogging up our offices anyway. It's now yours to win.

This year's swag pile is full of high-value geek goodies. We have nearly 20 prizes amounting to nearly $5,000 in value, including game consoles, computer accessories, collectibles, smartwatches, and more. In 2017, Ars readers raised over $36,000 for charity, contributing to a total haul of more than $280,000 since 2007. We want to raise even more this year, and we can do it if readers really dig deep.

Enlarge

It's once again that special time of year when we give you a chance to do well by doing good. That's right—it's time for the 2018 edition of our annual Charity Drive.

Every year since 2007, we've been actively encouraging readers to give to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity, which provides toys and games to kids being treated in hospitals around the world. In recent years, we've added the Electronic Frontier Foundation to our annual charity push, aiding in their efforts to defend Internet freedom. This year, as always, we're providing some extra incentive for those donations by offering donors a chance to win pieces of our big pile of vendor-provided swag. We can't keep it (ethically), and we don't want it clogging up our offices anyway. It's now yours to win.

This year's swag pile is full of high-value geek goodies. We have nearly 20 prizes amounting to nearly $5,000 in value, including game consoles, computer accessories, collectibles, smartwatches, and more. In 2017, Ars readers raised over $36,000 for charity, contributing to a total haul of more than $280,000 since 2007. We want to raise even more this year, and we can do it if readers really dig deep.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Hiroshi Watanabe)

On Tuesday evening, the New York Times revealed more startling news about Facebook: the company "gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules.”

The news comes days after Facebook disclosed a massive photo bug, weeks after 50 million people were affected by an access-token harvesting attack, and less than a month after it was revealed that Facebook considered selling access to its users’ data. All of those scandals are on top of the Cambridge Analytica debacle. In June 2018, Facebook dodged some lawmakers' questions in written testimony, after two days of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before the US Senate.

The newspaper cited "hundreds of pages" of internal documents, which it did not publish.

HAWTHORNE, CA—On a breezy Tuesday evening across the busy street from SpaceX's headquarters, Elon Musk's Boring Company invited a group of journalists to take a ride through the company's first test tunnel. The test tunnel stretches 1.14 miles from SpaceX's former parking lot, under Crenshaw Boulevard, under the SpaceX campus, and finally terminating behind some nondescript warehouses in Hawthorne, at Prairie St. and 102^th St.

The ride was hardly a finished product; judging the success of The Boring Company's tunnel-digging vision would be impossible at this point. What today's demo did, though, was offer a proof-of-concept.

Entering the tunnel

Across the street from SpaceX, journalists were ushered down a ramp to the original opening of The Boring Company's first tunnel. We got into a modified Model X—modified in that it had bumpers added to the wheels to prevent the vehicle from too much undesirable movement while in the tunnel. Then, a driver (who Boring Company employees told us we were strictly not allowed to speak to) drove us up to the mouth of the tunnel, onto the raised curbs that flanked either side of the tunnel walls.

Enlarge / The iPhone XR. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple released a new version of iOS yesterday, and the public notes this time apply just to iPhones. Labeled iOS 12.1.2, it arrives just two weeks after 12.1.1 hit, and primarily, it fixes a couple of bugs.

Both bugs are related to cellular connectivity and apply only to the three phones just released this year: the iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max. One is an issue with eSIM activation on those devices. (eSIMs are a new feature in these phones that allow a single phone to have multiple numbers or carriers; they're useful if you, for example, have separate personal and work phone numbers or are a frequent international traveler.)

The second bug is related to cellular connectivity specifically in Turkey.

Disney Pixar

While Ars Technica takes a comprehensive approach to film reviews, we usually skip one portion: any pre-film "bumper." For one, these cartoon shorts are usually dissimilar from the film they're attached to. More importantly, most studios don't bother with them.

Pixar has consistently been the exception to that rule, and the studio has shipped so many bumper shorts that it has put out a whopping three compilations of the things. To promote the latest collection, Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 3, the Disney-owned studio has made a bold decision: to give away its latest (and possibly best) short on YouTube. As it turns out, Pixar has never offered such a giveaway until this week.

Disney Pixar

While Ars Technica takes a comprehensive approach to film reviews, we usually skip one portion: any pre-film "bumper." For one, these cartoon shorts are usually dissimilar from the film they're attached to. More importantly, most studios don't bother with them.

Pixar has consistently been the exception to that rule, and the studio has shipped so many bumper shorts that it has put out a whopping three compilations of the things. To promote the latest collection, Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 3, the Disney-owned studio has made a bold decision: to give away its latest (and possibly best) short on YouTube. As it turns out, Pixar has never offered such a giveaway until this week.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

T-Mobile has denied an allegation that it lied to the Federal Communications Commission about the extent of its 4G LTE coverage.

A group that represents small rural carriers says that T-Mobile claimed to have 4G LTE coverage in places where it hadn't yet installed 4G equipment. That would violate FCC rules and potentially prevent small carriers from getting network construction money in unserved areas.

T-Mobile said the allegations made by the Rural Wireless Association (RWA) in an FCC filing on Friday "are patently false."

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

The Windows 10 October 2018 Update, version 1809, continues to limp out of the door. While the data-loss bug that saw its release entirely halted has been fixed, other blocking issues have restricted its rollout. It has so far only been available to those who manually check Windows Update for updates, and even there, Microsoft has restricted the speed at which it's distributed.

This particular speed bump has now been removed, and manual checking for updates is now unthrottled. That means a manual check for updates will kick off the update process so long as your system isn't actively blacklisted (and there are a few outstanding incompatibilities that mean it could be).

Microsoft is saying that this upgrade route is for "advanced" users. Everyone else should wait for the fully automatic deployment, which doesn't seem to have started yet. That'll have its own set of throttles and perhaps even new blacklists if further problems are detected. A number of the remaining compatibility problems are more likely to strike corporate users, as they involve corporate VPN and security software. Companies will need to apply the relevant patches for the third-party applications before they can roll out the Windows 10 update.