Month: March 2019

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Spencer Platt)

In a motion to dismiss an explosive lawsuit brought by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma argues that it is not responsible for the current epidemic of opioid overdoses as the Commonwealth alleges—even if the people now overdosing were initially patients who became addicted to opioids while using its highly addictive painkiller.

Purdue, which forcefully marketed OxyContin after its 1995 FDA approval, notes that opioid overdose deaths are currently driven by use of illicit opioids, namely heroin and fentanyl. Those overdoses, regardless of whether they stem from an addiction formed using OxyContin, are “far removed from a physician prescribing a Purdue medication,” the company argues. The motion goes on:

Those alleged harms happen because of numerous additional intervening acts, including criminal acts by third parties such as drug dealers who sold deadly heroin and fentanyl in the Commonwealth. These are not Purdue’s acts and any connection between Purdue and these illegal acts is too remote to be actionable.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deaths from opioid pain killers rose in parallel with the amount (in kilograms) of opioids sold in the US—both quadrupling within the time frame of 1999 and 2010. While opioid prescriptions leveled off and began declining in 2012, deaths from the extremely potent opioid fentanyl began spiking nationwide in 2013. Likewise, deaths from heroin also didn’t begin significant upticks until around 2011.

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 16: Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) looking on, speaks at a press conference at the Capitol Building on May 16, 2018 in Washington, DC. The Senate voted and passed a Resolution of Disapproval to undo President Trump and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality rules. (credit: Mark Wilson | Getty Images)

Democrats in Congress today introduced a net neutrality bill that would fully restore the Obama-era rules that were repealed by the FCC's current Republican majority.

The "Save the Internet Act" is just three pages long. Instead of writing a new set of net neutrality rules, the bill would nullify FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's December 2017 repeal of the FCC order passed in February 2015 and forbid the FCC from repealing the rules in the future.

"A full 86 percent of Americans opposed the Trump assault on net neutrality, including 82 percent of Republicans. That's hopeful," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at a press conference announcing the bill today. "With the Save the Internet Act, the Democrats are honoring the will of the people."

Enlarge / Coinbase, the California cryptocurrency exchange startup valued at $ 8 billion, bought an analytics firm started by former members of HackingTeam. You won't believe what happened next.

After a wave of protest from the cryptocurrency community, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced in a blog post on Monday that some of the leadership of a recently acquired blockchain analytics firm would "transition out of Coinbase." The reason for the outcry: those executives were former employees of HackingTeam, the Italian company that provides offensive hacking tools to law enforcement and intelligence organizations—including those of Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and other countries with poor human rights records. One piece of HackingTeam's malware kit, called Pegasus by mobile security researchers, was tied to surveillance targeting United Arab Emirates dissident Ahmed Mansoor—an Emirati blogger who has been arrested multiple times in the UAE and is still imprisoned.

Coinbase acquired the company in question—Neutrino—on February 19. Neutrino's technology maps blockchain networks, allowing the tracking of transactions, an important capability for both potential financial company customers and law enforcement agencies, and one that would allow Coinbase's cryptocurrency exchange to integrate with more traditional finance.

"Our mission as a company is to create an open financial system for the world," Armstrong said in his blog post. "To do this, the first step is to empower as many people as possible to get access to cryptocurrency. Since most of the money in the world is tied up in the traditional financial system, this means we need to connect to that system and be compliant with all laws and regulations as a financial service business."

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

A little later than planned, two new Azure data centers have gone live in South Africa. With these, Microsoft has become the first major cloud provider to have any infrastructure on the African continent.

First announced in 2017, the company originally intended to open its facilities—South Africa West in Cape Town and South Africa North in Johannesburg—in 2018. Even with the delays, Microsoft has still beaten Amazon to the punch; an AWS datacenter is to open in Cape Town in 2020. As well as offering Azure services, Microsoft is going to use the facilities for hosting Office 365 from the third quarter of the year and Dynamics 365 from the fourth quarter.

Microsoft is also investing in connectivity in Africa, with a fibre network reaching Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and soon Angola. The customer profile in Africa is perhaps a little more varied than in the other regions Microsoft serves. Early customers include not just a bank and a municipal water utility, but also the Peace Parks Foundation, which is working to monitor and prevent poaching. The foundation processes tens of thousands of cameras used to monitor areas at risk of poacher activity and also intends to use expanded network infrastructure to relay radio communications to improve its ability to reach remote areas.

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk in December 2018. (credit: Robyn Beck/Pool via Bloomberg)

When Earl Banning bought his Model 3 last May, he paid $5,000 for the "Enhanced Autopilot" package, which offers lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control. Then in early October, he decided to pay an additional $4,000 for the "Full Self-Driving" package. The option would have cost $3,000 if he bought it with the car, but it cost an extra $1,000 if purchased later.

"There's this idea in the media of Tesla scamming people out of money," Banning said in a late October interview with Ars. "I feel like it was the opposite experience."

A Tesla salesperson warned Banning that the full self-driving option didn't do anything yet, Banning says, but he chose to buy it anyway. "I kept saying, here, I'm dumb, take my money," he said.

Enlarge / GTA, Call of Duty, and FIFA dominate PlayStation's most popular games, according to new trophy-based public estimates from Gamstat. (credit: Gamstat)

Back in December, a holiday promotion for Sony's PlayStation Network inadvertently leaked total player counts for hundreds of PlayStation titles. Now, one site is building off that work to create an ongoing database of player count estimates for every game on PSN.

Gamstat launched in December as a clearinghouse for information gleaned from that "MyPS4Life" data leak. But in recent weeks it's unveiled a new algorithm—as outlined on the about page and in more detailed discussions with Ars Technica—that takes inspiration from previous efforts like Steam Gauge and Steam Spy (before Valve shut off the data spigot, in any case).

Time travelling with trophies

First, the Gamstat algorithm takes a semi-random sample of the entire universe of PlayStation Network users. Gamstat's administrator, who goes by Dennis, outlined this sampling procedure to Ars but asked that it not be shared to prevent potential meddling by Sony.