Month: February 2019

To all our fellow #Travelers... ❤️ ⁦@MacKenziePMusic⁩ ⁦@NestaCooper⁩ ⁦@JaredAbrahamson⁩ ⁦@PatrickGilmore⁩ ⁦@LeahCairns⁩ ⁦@SpenceJen⁩ ⁦@jalexbrinson⁩ ⁦@bradtravelers⁩ ⁦@Carrie_Mudd⁩ pic.twitter.com/76Y3wYmnSQ

— Eric McCormack (@EricMcCormack) February 1, 2019

Time-travel drama Travelers has been one of my favorite streaming shows of recent years. It followed a group of time travelers sent from hundreds of years in the future to try to avert multiple catastrophes that left the world ravaged by war and environmental disaster, with humanity eking out its survival in a handful of biodomes. The first two seasons were produced by Showcase in Canada and streamed by Netflix. The third, released last December, was a Netflix exclusive.

Alas, that's where Netflix's involvement ends, with lead Eric McCormack (of Will & Grace fame) announcing that the show has not been renewed for a fourth season.

Unlike viewers of other cancelled shows, we are at least spared the misery of an unresolved cliffhanger. The third season felt perhaps a little rushed—it could have made its way to the same endpoint over many more seasons—but it ended in a way that wrapped up the story and even gave some of the characters a happy ending. But even with the story wrapped up, it left plenty of room for exploring the same universe. Moreover, it strongly implied that the future crisis had not been averted and that there was still work for the time travelers to do if a brighter future for humanity was to be created.

Enlarge (credit: Chatsimo / Getty Images)

A 20-year-old Massachusetts man who recently accepted a plea deal with prosecutors in Santa Clara County, California is believed to be the first person in the US to be convicted of SIM swapping.

The SIM swapping technique allows a person to fool a mobile carrier into transferring someone else’s number to them—thus enabling possible account hijacking or other password resets that rely on the phone number itself as an authentication device. According to Vice Motherboard, which first reported the case, accused SIM swapper Joel Ortiz recently accepted a plea deal of 10 years—but it is not immediately clear which counts he pled to.

Last year, Ortiz faced a 28-count indictment outlining alleged violations involving a slew of computer crimes and violations of personal identifying information law. In a police report provided to Ars, Ortiz victimized at least 22 people nationwide, including one man named Seth Shapiro, who lost $1.7 million in cryptocurrency. Ortiz is believed to have stolen a total of around $5 million in total using this technique.

Enlarge / An Electrify America charging station. (credit: Electrify America)

On Monday, Volkswagen subsidiary Electrify America announced a partnership with Tesla to deploy Powerpack batteries (the utility-grade version of the stationary storage, Tesla Powerwall) at 100 charging stations throughout the US.

The plan is to use the 210 kilowatt (kW), 350 kilowatt-hour (kWh) batteries as local reserves during periods of high demand, when utilities might charge a company like Electrify America higher rates to provide electricity. On particularly hot days as utilities struggle to meet the needs of air conditioning, for example, higher electricity rates can kick in. That's where reserves of power can help a company like Electrify America shave down the amount of power it's demanding.

The Powerpacks are modular, and a press release from Electrify America says that the company may add more Powerpacks to certain locations over time. Giovanni Palazzo, CEO of Electrify America, said in the same press release: “With our chargers offering high power levels, it makes sense for us to use batteries at our most high demand stations for peak shaving to operate more efficiently. Tesla’s Powerpack system is a natural fit given their global expertise in both battery storage development and EV charging."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Nintendo / Microsoft)

Xbox Live users will soon be able to take their "gaming achievement history, their friends list, their clubs, and more" to games on the Nintendo Switch and mobile platforms. That's according to a Game Developers Conference session description recently posted ahead of the March conference (and first noticed by Windows Central).

The conference session is titled "Xbox Live: Growing & Engaging Your Gaming Community Across iOS, Android, Switch, Xbox, and PC" and is led by members of the Xbox team. It promises a first look at a new "cross-platform XDK" that will "enable game developers to connect players between iOS, Android, and Switch in addition to Xbox and any game in the Microsoft Store on Windows PCs." That will expand the potential audience for Xbox Live from 400 million gaming devices to over 2 billion, by Microsoft's count—the service currently has 68 million active players, Microsoft says.

The next step

Microsoft has been slowly opening up the Xbox platform's walled garden for years now. Back in 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft maker Mojang but continued to support the game on many non-Microsoft platforms. In 2016, the company officially opened up the Xbox One to allow for gameplay with players on other platforms, eventually pressuring Sony to reluctantly do the same.

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  This is the 2019 Lexus ES350 F Sport. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

Last year, I may have been a little unkind when I reviewed the Toyota Camry. I still wonder if that was because the car we drove was a fully loaded version; the Camry is a utilitarian car, and something about one with a bright red leather interior just didn't sit right. After all, if you want a fancy Toyota, there's an entire brand called Lexus who's raison d'être is just that. Which brings us to today's car, the $43,135 2019 Lexus ES350 F Sport. It is, in essence, a fancy Camry. And while it doesn't quite live up to the "F Sport" moniker, the end result is really quite good.

All-new architecture, you say?

The new ES is in fact the seventh generation of vehicle to wear the nameplate—that's not bad going, considering the first ES only turned a wheel in 1989. Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising given that the related Camry is now in its eighth iteration, though. And related they are; the Camry and ES both share the same modular Toyota New Global Architecture-K (or GA-K) as starting point, which also provides the building blocks for the Toyota Avalon and RAV4. The layout sticks to the tried-and-tested approach of a transverse engine and front- or all-wheel drive.

It's a bigger car than the one it replaces, being both 2.6 inches (66mm) longer and 1.8 inches (46mm) wider now (L: 195.5 inches/4,966mm, W: 73.4 inches/1,864mm, H: 56.9 inches/1,445mm), and with the wheels closer to the corners, that translates into a roomier interior. (The wheelbase is 2 inches/51mm longer at 113 inches/2,870mm.) According to the designer, Yasuo Kajino, the ES' look is "provocative elegance." Insert my usual disclaimer about the subjectivity of car design here, but to my eyes it wears its shape well—better than the Camry, which still evokes a late 1950s, Flash Gordon and fins thing to me. Lexus' current hourglass/cheese grater front grille will still challenge some, though. (If you pick the regular ES (starting at $39,600), or the hybrid (from $41,410), the interlocking Ls are replaced with plain old vertical bars, but neither was available on the press fleet yet, so we were sent this one.)