Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Shortly after a database leak, this official image from the upcoming Final Fantasy VII Remake demo was taken down. And, gosh, did this leaked demo contain a lot of stuff. (credit: Square Enix)

We've taken care to hide spoilers after a certain point in the article, in case you'd like to read about how the December 2019 leak happened while otherwise remaining ignorant to its most tantalizing contents.

Update, March 2: Roughly two months after a Final Fantasy VII Remake demo leaked, its official, free download is now live across all territories on PlayStation 4's online store. Thanks to dataminers tearing through the late 2019 leak, we already know a ton, which you can read about below. Our original January report also summarizes our impressions of the demo, which we already played at E3 2019—and quite enjoyed.

But if you're spoiler-averse and simply want to go hands-on with Square-Enix's refreshed version of Midgar—and, more importantly, its action-RPG combat stylings—you can click here (in the US) to automatically queue the demo's download on your PS4, should you be away from your living room and have your console set to "rest" mode.

Enlarge / Ocean temperatures between 20 and 30°C before Hurricane Florence made landfall in North Carolina. (The dashed white line shows the threshold of temperatures warm enough to support a hurricane, around 28°C.) (credit: NASA EO)

It was the first scientific attempt of its kind—assessing the impact of climate change on a hurricane before the storm had even made landfall. And the results (which we covered at the time) were remarkable, suggesting that 2018's Hurricane Florence would be dropping 50 percent more rainfall and span an extra 80 kilometers (50 miles) because of a warmer world.

Increased rainfall would hardly be a surprise. Results from many previous tropical cyclones have found that a warmer atmosphere, which holds more moisture, is expected to boost storm precipitation totals. But 50 percent would be exceptional, as previous studies had fallen somewhere between 6 and 38 percent, depending on the storm.

The scientists weren't able to explain why they got that high number at the time, considering they had only a few days to get the model forecast simulations run and out the door. With the benefit of time, the scientists have now published an evaluation of their groundbreaking effort. Unfortunately, it shows that mistakes were made.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Nora Carol Photography)

The Internal Revenue Service's new agreement with the tax-software industry prohibits companies from hiding their free options from search engines and allows the IRS to offer its own tax-return software in competition against TurboTax. That doesn't mean the IRS will offer its own software, but the agency has officially rescinded its promise not to compete against the industry.

As ProPublica reported in April 2019, TurboTax maker Intuit used a robots.txt file to "deliberately hid[e] its Free File page from search engines." TurboTax subsequently changed the code on its Free File page so it wouldn't be hidden from Google and other search engines anymore, but at least five US states opened investigations into TurboTax's marketing and provision of its free tax programs. H&R Block was also hiding its free tax service from Google search using the same method, ProPublica reported at the time, but H&R Block seems to have lifted that restriction based on searches we conducted today.

With the industry under legal pressure, the IRS extracted new promises from Free File, an industry consortium that represents Intuit, H&R Block, and other tax-prep-software makers. The changes were announced by the IRS on December 30 and put into an addendum to the 18-year-old IRS/Free File agreement that requires free services for low- and mid-range incomes.

Enlarge / Audi's A8 is one of the first cars with lidar. (credit: Audi)

Auto-parts maker Bosch is getting into the lidar business, the company said in a Thursday announcement. That's significant because Bosch is a "tier 1" supplier—one of the few companies with the scale and infrastructure to supply parts directly to global car makers.

Little is known about Bosch's lidar. Bosch says the technology has been developed in-house and boasts a long range and a wide field of view. But the company declined to provide Ars Technica with hard numbers on range, field of view, cost, or other characteristics. That makes comparing Bosch's lidar to the competition a challenge.

But what Bosch's announcement does make clear is that lidar is about to shift from an experimental technology to an increasingly common feature on new cars. The fact that companies like Bosch are selling lidar means it will be feasible for major automakers to start offering lidar as an option.