Month: February 2019

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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has egg on its face after a small research and consulting firm called Quality Control Systems produced a devastating critique of a 2017 agency report finding that Tesla's Autopilot reduced crashes by 40 percent. The new analysis is coming out now—almost two years after the original report—because QCS had to sue NHTSA under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the data underlying the agency's findings. In its report, QCS highlights flaws in NHTSA's methodology that are serious enough to completely discredit the 40 percent figure, which Tesla has cited multiple times over the last two years.

NHTSA undertook its study of Autopilot safety in the wake of the fatal crash of Tesla owner Josh Brown in 2016. Autopilot—more specifically Tesla's lane-keeping function called Autosteer—was active at the time of the crash, and Brown ignored multiple warnings to put his hands back on the wheel. Critics questioned whether Autopilot actually made Tesla owners less safe by encouraging them to pay less attention to the road.

NHTSA's 2017 finding that Autosteer reduced crash rates by 40 percent seemed to put that concern to rest. When another Tesla customer, Walter Huang, died in an Autosteer-related crash last March, Tesla cited NHTSA's 40 percent figure in a blog post defending the technology. A few weeks later, Tesla CEO Elon Musk berated reporters for focusing on stories about crashes instead of touting the safety benefits of Autopilot.

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If you're trying to extort money from people, there are probably better choices for a victim than William H. Webster. Back in 2014, Webster was called by a Jamaican man, 29-year-old Keniel Aeon Thomas, who was attempting to perpetrate the all too common advance-fee fraud scam (often known as the 419 scam, after the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code that addresses fraud). According to Thomas, Webster and his wife had won $15.5 million and a Mercedes-Benz in the Mega Millions lottery, and the caller would be all too happy to release those funds, just as long as Websters first paid $50,000 to cover taxes.

Over a number of weeks, Thomas, calling himself David Morgan, made a series of calls to the Websters, and they soon turned threatening: he described their house, and he said that if they didn't hand over $6,000, he'd shoot them in the head or burn their house down, boasting that the FBI and CIA would never find him.

But unknown to Thomas, William H. Webster is a man with a considerable past. He was director of the FBI under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (1978-1987), and then director of the CIA under Reagan and George H.W. Bush (1987-1991), making him the only person to have led both intelligence agencies. Now aged 94, he still works in government and has been chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council since 2005. As such, he's a little better connected than most victims of these phone scams, and both he and his wife Lynda swiftly took advantage of these connections. They reached out to contacts at the FBI, calling an agent while talking to Thomas so that the agent could listen in.

We awoke this morning to the first teaser trailer for Frozen 2, the sequel to Frozen, Disney's inventive 2013 re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Snow Queen." The original was such a blockbuster that it will be hard for any sequel to recreate the magic, but the new teaser certainly looks promising.

(Spoilers for original Frozen below.)

The first film told the story of two princesses of Arendelle. The elder, Elsa (Idina Menzel), has the power to control and create ice and snow, but she struggles to control it. When she accidentally injures her young sister Anna (Kristen Bell), local trolls heal Anna but caution that Elsa must learn to control her magic. In response, their parents lock them both away. When Elsa turns 21, she's crowned queen but a spat with Anna after the coronation reveals her magic. She's exiled from the kingdom, flees to the mountains, and builds a gorgeous castle of ice and snow in which to live out her days in isolation. But she doesn't realize Arendelle has also frozen over, endangering the people.

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Blizzard fans are going to have to wait a little bit longer for any major new titles from the company. In a conference call accompanying yesterday's quarterly earnings announcement (where the company announced record results and significant layoffs), Activision Blizzard CFO Dennis Durkin said the company is "not planning a major frontline release for Blizzard in 2019," and it expects "materially lower financial performance" for the developer in the coming year.

That doesn't mean Blizzard will be taking the year off, of course. The company will be diving into its past catalog for previously announced releases like World of Warcraft Classic and Warcraft 3: Reforged, both coming later this year. Continuing games like Overwatch and Hearthstone will also see their usual slate of regular content updates.

But Durkin's statement makes it clear we'll have to wait until 2020 for any truly new titles from Blizzard. That includes the recently announced mobile Diablo Immortal and any other PC or console-based Diablo titles. It also means no new World of Warcraft expansion is expected for the year—Durkin specifically used 2018's Battle for Azeroth expansion as a contrast with the 2019 slate.