Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Turkey's planned purchase of F-35A Joint Strike Fighters has been vetoed in the wake of the Turkish purchase of Russian anti-air defenses. (credit: US Air Force)

Today, the White House officially announced that Turkey would not be allowed to purchase the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The US government had warned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that his government's purchase of S-400 surface-to-air missile systems from Russia would be incompatible with NATO systems and would trigger an exclusion of Turkey from the F-35 program. Turkey was a financial contributor to the F-35 development program and already had pilots in the US in training to fly the aircraft; those pilots were kicked off US training bases in June.

US and NATO partners are concerned that the S-400 systems, supported by Russian technicians, will essentially amount to an intelligence collection system for Russia on NATO aircraft and military operations. But Erdoğan has been steadily marching away from NATO since the July 2016 coup attempt against his government. That coup led to the arrest of many military officers who were the backbone of the Turkish military and had long relationships with NATO partners. Former head of the Turkish air force Akin Ozturk was one of over 2,000 former members of the military given life sentences.

In a speech on July 15 (the third anniversary of the coup attempt), Erdoğan welcomed the first components of S-400 systems to Turkey, saying that "the S-400s are the strongest defense system against those who want to attack our country... God willing, we are doing this as a joint investment with Russia and will continue to do so.” He added that "with God’s permission," the missile systems would be fully deployed by April 2020.

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  The Xiaomi Mi A3. [credit: Xiaomi ]

Today Xiaomi announced the Xiaomi Mi A3, the latest phone in its "A" line. In the past, Xiaomi's A line has been a good bet if you're looking for a midrange smartphone. This latest model comes in at €249 (~$280) and is launching in Europe on July 24. Decent phones in the sub-$300 price range are tough to come by, so any serious device priced this low is worth paying attention to. Just looking at the spec sheet, though, we do have some concerns.

As you'd guess, the A3 is a third-generation Xiaomi A phone, and in many ways, these represent the least "Xiaomi" phones Xiaomi makes. Instead of Xiaomi's iOS-inspired "MIUI" Android skin, these phones are in Google's "Android One" program, which means they come with stock Android and get two years of OS updates. The phones usually get a wider distribution than your typical Xiaomi phones (watch out for the LTE bands, though), so even if you're not in Europe, they're usually easy to pick up on a site like Amazon.

Xiaomi is going with a notched front design for the Mi A3. There's a tiny teardrop notch at the top of the phone, a medium-sized bottom bezel, and rounded display corners. The front and back of the phone is made of Gorilla Glass 5. On the back, you'll find a triple camera setup, and on the front is an optical fingerprint reader in the display. Xiaomi is taking a page out of Google's playbook with wacky color names. There are three colors: "More than White," "Kind of Gray," and "Not just Blue." Xiaomi says there's a "nano-level holographic pattern" on the blue and white models.

(credit: Sam Churchill / Flickr)

Google has ended all work on its censored Chinese search engine, a company representative testified on Tuesday.

“We have terminated Project Dragonfly,” said Karan Bhatia, Google's vice president of public policy, at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The secret project was first revealed by the Intercept a year ago. The new search engine would have initially been offered as an Android app, and it would have reportedly blacklisted "websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest," according to the Intercept.

Enlarge / Paul Ledger and Véronique Forbes examining the cultural horizon. (credit: Linus Girdland-Flink)

L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is famed for being a site where Norse travelers set up a colony hundreds of years before Europe at large became aware of North America's existence. The colony was thought to be short-lived, but a new find may extend the length of its occupancy.

While taking sediment cores from a nearby peat bog to help study the ancient environment, archaeologist Paul Ledger and his colleagues discovered a previously unknown chapter in the story of L’Anse aux Meadows. Buried about 35cm (14 inches) beneath the modern surface, they found signs of an ancient occupancy: a layer of trampled mud littered with woodworking debris, charcoal, and the remains of plants and insects.

Based on its depth and the insect species present, the layer looks like similar surfaces from the edges of Viking Age Norse settlements in Greenland and Iceland. But organic material from the layer radiocarbon dated to the late 1100s or early 1200s, long after the Norse were thought to have left Newfoundland for good.

Enlarge / Illustration of a OneWeb satellite. (credit: OneWeb)

OneWeb says a test of its low-Earth orbit satellites has delivered broadband speeds of more than 400Mbps with average latency of 32ms.

"The tests, which took place in Seoul, South Korea, represent the most significant demonstration of the OneWeb constellation to date, proving its ability to provide superior broadband connectivity anywhere on the planet," OneWeb said in an announcement yesterday.

The company said it's on track toward creating "a fully functioning global constellation in 2021 and delivering partial service beginning as early as 2020." The test described yesterday involved six OneWeb satellites that were launched in February. OneWeb says its commercial network "will start with an initial 650 satellites and grow up to 1,980 satellites."

Enlarge / NASA Administrator James Bridenstine testifies before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on July 17, 2019. (credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

As recently as last month, both NASA planning documents and officials with Boeing said the space agency was still working toward a 2020 launch of the Artemis-1 mission. This is the first launch of the large, costly, and delayed Space Launch System rocket that NASA hopes will serve as the backbone for its efforts to explore the Moon and eventually Mars with humans.

This uncrewed test flight, which will boost an Orion capsule to the Moon, is the first of three main missions in NASA's Artemis campaign to land humans on the Moon by 2024. However, for the first time, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on Wednesday foreclosed the possibility of a 2020 launch date.

Twice during testimony before the US Senate Committee Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Bridenstine referenced 2021 as the expected launch date for Artemis-1. "I think 2021 is definitely achievable for the Artemis-1 launch vehicle," Bridenstine said in response to a question from Sen. Roger Wicker, the Mississippi Republican who chairs the committee.

Is it better to build a game by hand, piece by piece, or to program a computer that can build that game for you? In the cast of MotionTwin's Dead Cells, the answer is a little mix of both.

In Ars Technica's latest War Stories video, Motion Twin's "Lead Whatever" (as he calls himself) Sebastien Bénard, talks about the difficulty of designing interesting and playable environments for the game. At one point, the game was "traumatized by huge levels with no actual meaning," he told us. That's because, while the team's computer algorithm was good at generating maze-like rooms, it couldn't tell when it had created a "good result."

After that, the team transitioned to a hybrid approach, hand-designing individual rooms with distinct entrances and exits and a strong sense of flow. Then they designed a computer algorithm that could link these rooms together into a game that felt fresh but also well-designed every time.

Enlarge (credit: Ford)

Did you know that July 17 is World Emoji Day? No, me neither—at least not until Ford used the celebration of these 21st century hieroglyphs to announce that it wants a pickup truck emoji. In fact, Ford was so serious about the idea that in 2018, it submitted an official proposal to the Unicode Consortium to make that happen. On Wednesday, it revealed that the little blue truck had made it as far as the short list for inclusion in the next official emoji update, which is scheduled for 2020.

"When customers started demanding a truck emoji, we knew we had to help make it happen," said Joe Hinrichs, Ford's president of automotive. "Given the popularity of Ford trucks globally, there's no one better than Ford to help bring an all-new pickup truck emoji to hard-working texters around the globe."

The emoji as proposed by Ford is unmistakable as a pickup truck, but it's generic enough to work for any make or model of pickup. (Although, as the cheeseburger emoji scandal of 2017 proved, that might not stop some app or OS team from implementing their version with the wheels on the top, or the load bed out front of the cab.)