Month: November 2019

Passengers and crew aboard a luxury spaceship find themselves in grave danger in Avenue 5, the new "space tourism" comedy series from HBO. Judging by the first teaser, the show looks like it could be a sharp, witty addition to the cable giant's slate of programming.

Clearly there's an appetite for space-based comedy in Hollywood these days, as Netflix teased its own comedy series, Space Force, earlier this year, with three major vets of TV's The Office on board, including Steve Carell as both a co-creator and a star. Netflix has yet to release many details about the series. All we know is that "The goal of the new branch is 'to defend satellites from attack' and 'perform other space-related tasks'... or something," per the Space Force teaser text. "This is the story of the men and women who have to figure it out."

We don't know much more about Avenue 5, but it also boasts some serious comedic chops. The series is the brainchild of Armando Iannucci, best for creating the stellar HBO comedy series, Veep, which won multiple Emmy awards over its seven-season run. And before he was Dr. Gregory House in the US, Laurie was best known across the pond for yukking it up as one-half of the comedy duo in A Bit of Fry and Laurie (with Stephen Fry), as well as his hilarious turns in Jeeves and Wooster and the various Blackadder series.

Enlarge / Yep, it's real—and here's what we know so far. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Valve)

For a certain class of video game fan, no news could be bigger than today's: Half-Life is back. In VR. As an entirely new game from the series' creators at Valve.

We're here to connect the dots between what's been announced, what's been rumored, and what we've heard from well-placed sources. Rise and shine, Half-Life fans. We have a lot for you today.

Months of rumors, then a TGA leak

We should probably begin with the game's name, as revealed in a leaked Game Awards 2019 presentation and confirmed hours later by an official post from Valve. Half-Life: Alyx is a brand-new game in the Half-Life universe designed exclusively for PC virtual reality systems (Valve Index, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality).

Enlarge / But what does that car think that the spectator is thinking? (credit: China News Service)

Imagine you're trying to make a left turn onto a busy road. Car after car rolls past, keeping you trapped as your frustration rises. Finally, a generous driver decelerates enough to create a gap. A check of the traffic from the opposite direction, a quick bit of acceleration, and you're successfully merged into traffic.

This same scene plays out across the world countless times a day. And it's a situation where inferring both the physics and the motives of your fellow drivers is difficult, as evidenced by the fact that the United States sees 1.4 million accidents each year from drivers in the process of turning. Now imagine throwing autonomous vehicles into the mix. These are typically limited to evaluating only the physics and to make conservative decisions in situations where information is ambiguous.

Now, a group of computer scientists has figured out how to improve autonomous vehicle (AV) performance in these circumstances. The scientists have essentially given their AVs a limited theory of mind, allowing the vehicles to better interpret what the behaviors of their nearby human drives are telling them.

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  Removing the scissor switch in the new keyboards. [credit: iFixit ]

iFixit's teardown of the 16-inch MacBook Pro uncovered a laptop that is a sort of hybrid between the 2015 MacBook Pro and its butterfly keyboard-equipped successors. iFixit performs and publishes these teardowns both to advocate for repairable devices and to drive its own revenue by selling fix kits to readers.

The team found that the new scissor-switch keyboard has deep similarities to Apple's time-tested, standalone Magic Keyboard, as well as to the keyboards found in Mac laptops before the introduction of the butterfly mechanism. In fact, you can even swap in some of the old Magic Keyboard keycaps. The teardown writeup notes that there is no dust-proofing membrane on the keyboard switches, suggesting that Apple does not expect the same problems caused by particulate matter that users repeatedly ran into with the butterfly switches.

However, the keyboard assembly is still riveted in place, and repairing damaged switches is likely to be no more convenient or cost-effective than has been the case with the butterfly keyboards. Given the positive track record of the Magic Keyboard, you're much less likely to see failures in this keyboard—but if you do, you'll still be dependent on either your warranty or AppleCare to save you from big costs. Even most savvy users likely won't be able to perform the repairs themselves. For this reason and others, iFixit gave the new MacBook Pro a 1 out of 10 repairability rating.

Enlarge / Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets makes the game-winning shot against the Philadelphia 76ers on November 8, 2019 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado. (credit: Getty Images | Bart Young )

A lawsuit filed against Comcast today accuses the cable company of using its market power to try to drive a regional sports network out of business.

The lawsuit was filed in US District Court in Colorado by Altitude Sports, a network that broadcasts games played by the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, and other local professional and college teams. Altitude has been blacked out on Comcast since August 31, as the companies haven't agreed on what price Comcast should pay to carry the network.

Filing a lawsuit is at least partly a negotiating tactic in cases like this one, but Altitude claims that this is more than a simple price dispute. Comcast is offering less than Altitude's actual costs because it wants to drive Altitude out of business and then acquire the TV rights to the Denver sports teams itself, Altitude alleges.

Enlarge / Indiana Supreme Court Justice Steven David (credit: Indiana Supreme Court)

Back in 2012, the US Supreme Court ruled that it's illegal for the police to attach a GPS tracking device to someone's car without a warrant. But what if you find a GPS tracking device on your car? Can you remove it?

A little more than a year ago, the state of Indiana charged a suspected drug dealer with theft for removing a government-owned GPS tracking device from his SUV. This month, the state's Supreme Court began considering the case, and some justices seemed skeptical of the government's argument.

"I'm really struggling with how is that theft," said Justice Steven David during recent oral arguments.

Enlarge / A sign outside Huawai's offices in Santa Clara, California, August 17, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado )

For six months now, the Trump Administration has had an executive order in place that bans US companies from doing business with Huawei. Nearly the entire time, there has also been a "temporary general export license" in place that allows current Huawei customers to continue to receive support for existing devices. The original order in May gave existing customers a 90 day license, and it was then extended for another 90 days after that. That leads us to November 18, and today the US has given Huawei a third 90 day support window.

Huawei is the world's largest telecommunications-equipment manufacturer and second largest smartphone manufacturer after Samsung (and before Apple). The company doesn't have a huge presence in the US in part because, for years, the US House Intelligence Committee has flagged Huawei as security threat thanks to its close ties to the Chinese government. The US government has banned federal agencies from using Huawei  equipment, and it has used political pressure to shut down consumer deals with US carriers. Huawei has still managed to get some telecommunication equipment in the US, though, particularly thanks to rural carriers in states like Wyoming and Oregon. A coalition of these smaller carriers, the Rural Wireless Association, estimates replacing Huawei and ZTE equipment could cost its members up to a billion dollars.

“There are enough problems with telephone service in the rural communities—we don’t want to knock them out," Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Fox Business Network on Friday. "So, one of the main purposes of the temporary general licenses is to let those rural guys continue to operate.”

Enlarge / The Interpol HQ in France. (credit: Massimiliano Mariani, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Justice Department officials have long pushed for some sort of backdoor to permit warranted surveillance and searches of encrypted communications. Recently, that push has been taken international with Attorney General William Barr and his counterparts from the United Kingdom and Australia making an open plea to Facebook to delay plans to use end-to-end encryption across all the company's messaging tools.

Now, the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation are attempting to get an even larger international consensus on banning end-to-end encryption by way of a draft resolution authored by officials at the FBI for the International Criminal Police Organization's 37th Meeting of the INTERPOL Specialists Group on Crimes against Children. The event took place from November 12 to November 15 at INTERPOL headquarters in Lyon, France.

A draft of the resolution viewed by Ars Technica stated that INTERPOL would "strongly urge providers of technology services to allow for lawful access to encrypted data enabled or facilitated by their systems" in the interest of fighting child sexual exploitation. Currently, it is not clear whether Interpol will ultimately issue a statement.