Month: January 2020

CBS has made the entirety of the first episode of its new series Star Trek: Picard freely and publicly available as a YouTube video. This is an opportunity for viewers curious about the show to see if Picard is worth subscribing to the network's streaming service, CBS All Access, to watch the rest of the series.

The episode on YouTube is the same as the pilot episode that premiered on CBS All Access last week. The second episode of Picard began streaming on CBS All Access yesterday, and the network plans to release episodes at a weekly cadence. CBS has not said whether it plans to make other episodes available for free on YouTube in the future, but it seems likely.

The description for the video says the episode will only be available "for a limited time" and that it's presented by Geico. It does not, however, clarify how long "a limited time" is or when the video might become unavailable.

Enlarge / The United States' first offshore wind farm. (credit: University of Rhode Island)

Each year, the US Energy Information Agency is required to track trends in the nation's energy markets and project those trends forward. Projections based on 2019's trends were released this week, and for the first time, the EIA's default projection places renewables as the largest single source of electricity generation, with renewables surpassing natural gas somewhere around 2040.

These reports are very conservative due to some of the assumptions that are included in the projections, and they've done a terrible job projecting the rapid growth of renewable power. And despite the current report showing steady growth of renewables, there are indications it may still be underestimating renewables' potential. But the report is still worth looking at, as it can help to understand how more realistic assumptions could change the future direction of the United States' energy mix.

How to project

Some of the issues with the EIA's projections are baked into the system. For example, the reports are required to assume existing government policies are the only ones that apply. So while there is some talk of extending tax credits for renewable energy facilities, which has happened in the past, the report assumes that these policies will terminate in the near future as planned.

Enlarge / Only a few thousand people are seeing free scenes like this streamed via their Stadia Pro subscriptions, according to leaderboard data. (credit: Drool)

The Google Stadia version of Thumper, which is being offered for free to all paid Stadia Pro subscribers, has only seen a few thousand players, based on leaderboard data reviewed by Ars Technica. The numbers suggest significant struggles as the new streaming gaming service from Google, launched in November, tries to attract players away from traditional gaming platforms.

Thumper, along with Rise of the Tomb Raider, was a free Stadia Pro title for the month of January, meaning everyone who paid $129 for the service's "Founder's Edition" and "Premiere Edition" bundles has access to it (those bundles, which are the only current way to access Stadia, include three months of Stadia Pro service). As of this morning, though, only 5,515 people have registered a score on the leaderboards for the first stage of the Stadia version of the game, which separates such leaderboards by platform. That number was at 4,563 on January 15, when Ars conducted a spot check.

That doesn't mean that Stadia Pro only has 5,515 users, of course. For one thing, not everyone who has played the game has finished the first stage (which takes about 10 minutes to complete, depending on personal performance). Trophy data for the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game, though, suggests that almost 70 percent of all Thumper players do manage to pass this low bar, which would translate to about 8,000 total players so far for the Stadia version.

Enlarge (credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla and Google are cracking down on malicious and abusive extensions available for the Firefox and Chrome browsers, respectively. The moves come in response to the recent detection of add-ons that turned out to violate the browser maker's policies, despite review processes designed to weed out wares that are malicious or have the potential to be malicious.

The most significant move was Mozilla's ouster over the past month of almost 200 extensions. The majority of them—129, to be exact—were developed by 2Ring, a maker of business software. There's no evidence the extensions were malicious, but Mozilla officials found they executed code hosted on a remote server, in violation of Mozilla policies. The representative added that current installations aren't affected and users who want to install an extension can still do so manually.

A 2Ring representative said that company officials have contacted Mozilla about the move and are awaiting a response. The representative added that the extensions, which businesses use to integrate select CRM systems with apps installed in customer contact centers, interact only with user white-listed applications specified in the extension's configuration.

Enlarge / An AT&T sign outside a company office in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Roberto Machado Noa )

AT&T slashed capital expenditures by more than $1.6 billion in 2019 and projects a capital-investment cut of more than $3 billion in 2020.

AT&T's capital expenditures for the full year of 2019 totaled $19.64 billion, down from $21.25 billion in 2018, an AT&T investor briefing released yesterday said.

The broadband industry and Federal Communications Commission officials have used capital expenditures as a measure of broadband-network investment and have claimed that eliminating net neutrality rules and other regulations would cause such investment to rise. But some of the biggest ISPs, such as Comcast and Charter, have been reducing capital expenditures despite getting their sought-after net neutrality repeal and a large corporate tax cut.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Apple owes the California Institute of Technology $837 million for selling devices with patent-infringing Wi-Fi chips, a Los Angeles federal jury ruled on Wednesday. Broadcom, which sold the chips to Apple, owes Caltech another $270 million.

The nine-person jury in the US District Court for the Central District of California reached its verdict after a two-week trial, the Los Angeles Times and Law360 report. Apple and Broadcom plan to appeal the decision.

The patents claim irregular repeat-accumulate codes, a mathematical technique for encoding data that allows it to be reconstructed if some bits are scrambled during transmission. Error-correcting codes have been used in communications networks for decades, but IRA codes offered a better tradeoff between robustness and decoding time than previous techniques. Researchers at Caltech published a paper about the technique in 2000 and filed several patent applications around the same time.

Enlarge / World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaks during a press conference following a WHO Emergency committee to discuss whether the Coronavirus, the SARS-like virus, outbreak that began in China constitutes an international health emergency, on January 30, 2020 in Geneva. (credit: Getty | AFP)

The World Health Organization announced today, January 30, that the outbreak of respiratory disease from the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China constitutes a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).”

PHEICs are declared in extraordinary situations, such as when public health is threatened by an infectious disease that could spread internationally and requires international responses and collaboration to address. The declaration prompts additional international support efforts and releases financial resources.

In a press conference today, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (who goes by Dr. Tedros) praised China for its response efforts to the outbreak so far. The country’s efforts and commitment to transparency is “very impressive,” he said.