Month: June 2020

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  Fig. 1: Dividing average PS4 game file sizes by average broadband speeds shows decreasing download times in recent years. [credit: Ars Technica ]

Anyone who downloads games regularly probably has a complaint about just how long it takes to download some of the bigger big-budget titles these days. Unless you want to buy your games on a physical disc or cartridge (or use a streaming gaming service), playing a new game these days means budgeting time for the raw files to get onto your system from centralized servers.

At a quick glance, it can feel like this problem is getting worse over time. Take a look at Red Dead Redemption 2 and Final Fantasy VII, for instance; two recent high-profile games that each push past a whopping 85GB for their PS4 downloads. The coming release of The Last of Us Part 2 continues the trend, with marketing materials warning that players will need 100GB of hard drive space. That's a big change from 2013, when a 50GB PS4 game download was considered shockingly large.

Those examples notwithstanding, though, the data shows that US console gamers are generally spending less time than ever downloading popular console games. In fact, an analysis conducted by Ars confirms that average broadband download speeds in the United States have been increasing faster than average game sizes for years now.

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  The Air looks superficially the same as when we saw it in 2017, but almost every body panel has changed. [credit: Lucid Motors ]

With a brand-new, state-of-the-art factory nearing completion in the southwest desert and an energy-dense battery pack using cylindrical cells, it's all-too tempting to set up a rivalry between Lucid Motors and Tesla. Heck, it's a trope that we've been guilty of using in the past. But it's a bad take, according to Peter Rawlinson, Lucid's CEO and CTO. "Please don't describe us as a Tesla killer," he told me. "The world's big enough that we can both thrive and prosper alongside each other."

It's been a while since we checked in with Lucid Motors. In 2017, we got our first look at the Air, a stylish sedan that Rawlinson says is targeting the Mercedes S-Class, not the Model S. Later that year, one of the company's alpha prototypes stunned us by achieving a remarkable 235mph (378km/h) in testing. But plans to enter production in 2019 were waylaid by a lack of funding.

"We saw our Series D funding take a little longer than anticipated. But it ended in an outstanding result with a public investment from Saudi Arabia that was over a billion dollars," he told me, referring to the big (if controversial) investment from the Middle East. Rawlinson said that the plan was always to go into production about two years after funding was secured, and were it not for the pandemic, that schedule would be on track.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a new discount on Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, as three-month subscription codes for the all-you-can-eat video game service are currently down to $25 at various retailers. That's $20 off the standard going rate and matches the previous low we saw during a sale last year. The deal is applicable to both new and existing Game Pass subscribers, so you can stock up if you wish to continue an ongoing membership.

We've highlighted various Xbox Game Pass Ultimate deals in the past, but the service remains an excellent value for those who play Xbox frequently. It rolls subscriptions to Xbox Live Gold, the standard Xbox Game Pass for consoles, and Xbox Game Pass for PC into a $15 monthly fee, which is equivalent to $180 a year. Individually, a year of Xbox Live Gold—which is required to play most Xbox games online and includes a few free games every month—normally costs $60, a year of standard Xbox Game Pass costs $120, and a year of Xbox Game Pass for PC costs $60.

A Game Pass Ultimate membership specifically is a better deal if you have a gaming PC capable of playing Xbox games, but at this deal price, the value is more apparent for a wider audience. Game Pass itself includes hundreds of downloadable games, including several we've given our own stamp of approval. These range from huge names like Red Dead Redemption 2, Gears 5, Minecraft Dungeons, and Forza Horizon 4—along with nearly every Microsoft-made game released in the past couple of years—to less-marketed gems like Outer Wilds, Subnautica, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and Streets of Rage 4, among many others.

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For the past two years, modern CPUs—particularly those made by Intel—have been under siege by an unending series of attacks that make it possible for highly skilled attackers to pluck passwords, encryption keys, and other secrets out of silicon-resident memory. On Tuesday, two separate academic teams disclosed two new and distinctive exploits that pierce Intel’s Software Guard eXtension, by far the most sensitive region of the company’s processors.

Abbreviated as SGX, the protection is designed to provide a Fort Knox of sorts for the safekeeping of encryption keys and other sensitive data even when the operating system or a virtual machine running on top is badly and maliciously compromised. SGX works by creating trusted execution environments that protect sensitive code and the data it works with from monitoring or tampering by anything else on the system.

Key to the security and authenticity assurances of SGX is its creation of what are called enclaves, or blocks of secure memory. Enclave contents are encrypted before they leave the processor and are written in RAM. They are decrypted only after they return. The job of SGX is to safeguard the enclave memory and block access to its contents by anything other than the trusted part of the CPU.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Juj Winn)

The Federal Communications Commission today proposed a $225 million fine for health-insurance telemarketers who "made approximately 1 billion spoofed robocalls across the country during the first four and a half months of 2019." But the FCC's track record in collecting on proposed fines is so poor that the fine is unlikely to ever be collected at anywhere close to the proposed amount.

Rising Eagle, a Texas-based health insurance telemarketer, made 1 billion calls "on behalf of clients that sell short-term, limited-duration health insurance plans," the FCC said. Here's how the FCC described the robocalls:

The robocalls falsely claimed to offer health insurance plans from well-known health insurance companies such as Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, and UnitedHealth Group. For example, one call stated: "Are you looking for affordable health insurance with benefits from a company you know? Policies have all been reduced nationwide such as Cigna, Blue Cross, Aetna, and United just a quick phone call away. Press 3 to get connected to a licensed agent or press 7 to be added to the Do Not Call list." If they did press 3, consumers were transferred to a call center with no affiliation to the named companies, where call center representatives then would attempt to convince the consumer to purchase an insurance product sold by one of Rising Eagle's clients. Rising Eagle's largest client, Health Advisors of America, was sued by the Missouri Attorney General for telemarketing violations in February 2019.

The proposed $225 million fine is for "apparent violations by John C. Spiller and Jakob A. Mears, who used business names including Rising Eagle and JSquared Telecom," the FCC said. It's a proposed fine because that's how the FCC process works: the commission issues a Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture containing allegations, and the alleged robocaller is given an opportunity to respond and provide evidence. The process can end in a settlement or a fine that cannot exceed the proposed amount of $225 million. The amount of $225 million would be the largest-ever FCC fine, but the commission has a disappointing track record in collecting on these proposed penalties.

After years of wheel-spinning, Google is frantically trying to compete in the video messaging space, where the coronavirus pandemic has led to an explosion in demand for video conferencing. Meet's latest feature is noise cancellation for video conferencing, which can cut out a lot of the annoying background noises you would normally encounter in video calls.

The feature was originally announced in April, but it is only starting to roll out now and could take another month to hit everyone's account. Serge Lachapelle, G Suite's director of product management, gave an interview to VentureBeat explaining how the new feature works.

"It is important to say that this project stands on the shoulders of giants," Lachapelle told VentureBeat. "Speech recognition and enhancement has been heavily invested in at Google over the years, and much of this work has been reused." Once you have AI that can detect speech, apparently you can also use that tech to detect things that are not speech and remove them from the audio.