Month: September 2020

Enlarge / Attorney General William Barr . (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Attorney General William Barr is pressuring the career lawyers at the Department of Justice to complete work on a potential antitrust case against Google by the end of September, The New York Times reports. It's the latest sign of a long-simmering dispute within the government about the timing and scope of the government's attack on the Silicon Valley behemoth.

Antitrust enforcement against Google has become a rare issue of broad bipartisan agreement. Fifty states and territories have joined a coalition preparing to bring its own antitrust lawsuit against Google. That means that most Republican-controlled states are participating in the effort, as are most Democratic-controlled states.

Liberals have traditionally favored vigorous enforcement of antitrust law across the economy. Conservatives have traditionally favored more restraint, but they seem particularly keen to enforce antitrust law against technology platforms they view as biased against conservatives.

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg speaking at Facebook's F8 developer summit in 2018. (credit: JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Although it may feel like the campaigns have been going on forever and will continue forever, linear time inexorably marches on and we are, at last, exactly two months away from the 2020 US presidential election. The logistics alone are more complicated than ever this year, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, and voters around the nation are likely to encounter complications of one kind or another.

Into this milieu we now add Facebook. The company has a bad track record of being used as a tool of misinformation and manipulation when it comes to elections. In a Facebook post today, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined a whole bunch of new steps the company will be taking to "protect our democracy" this year. Some of those measures, alas, feel like shutting the barn door when the horse left so long ago you forgot you ever even had one.

"This election is not going to be business as usual," Zuckerberg began, accurately. Misinformation about voting, the election, and both candidates for the presidency is already rampant on Facebook and every other media platform, and it's being spread by actors both foreign and domestic. So what is Facebook going to do about it? "Helping people register and vote, clearing up confusion about how this election will work, and taking steps to reduce the chances of violence and unrest," Zuckerberg promised.

Movie theaters are starting to open up again in spots around the globe—basically, anywhere that has gotten coronavirus outbreaks under control. So now is the perfect time to remind frustrated filmgoers about No Time To Die, the next film in the James Bond franchise, starring Daniel Craig in his fifth and final outing as 007. A fresh trailer just dropped, with a scheduled release date of November 12 in the United Kingdom and November 20 in the United States (as always, coronavirus willing).

(Spoilers for the 2015 film Spectre below.)

This 25th installment in the franchise is co-produced by MGM and Eon Productions, with United Artists and Universal serving as distributors in North America and internationally, respectively. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (True Detective, Beast of No Nation), the film takes place about five years after the capture of Spectre's archvillain, Ernst Stavro Blofield (Christoph Waltz), a criminal mastermind and head of the organization SPECTRE. (Ian Fleming's original character inspired Dr. Evil and his cat, Mr. Bigglesworth, in the Austin Powers film series.)

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

If anyone was going to be enthusiastic about online voting, it would be Ben Adida. After starting multiple dot-com startups in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Adida earned a computer science PhD from MIT in 2006. Studying under legendary cryptographer Ron Rivest (the "R" in RSA) at MIT, Adida explored how to use advanced cryptography to hold provably secure elections.

Adida created open-source online voting software called Helios based on that research. And more recently, he founded VotingWorks, a non-profit organization that creates open-source software for ballot-marking machines and post-election auditing.

"If I felt like Internet voting was viable, I would be really well-positioned to do it," Adida told Ars in a recent phone interview. "I did my PhD on it. I run Helios as a side project."

Enlarge / From left to right: the iPhone 8, the iPhone XS, the iPhone XR, and the iPhone XS Max. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has postponed full enforcement of a feature of its upcoming iOS 14 software for iPhones that would require app developers to request users' permission to track them across apps for advertising purposes. This announcement comes in the wake of a public complaint from Facebook that the privacy policy could negatively impact the ad market in Apple's ecosystem.

The feature, announced at Apple's annual developer conference in June, would require app developers to notify a user of an app's intent to track the user's IDFA (ID for Advertisers). IDFA is used to track the user's behavior across multiple apps and deliver targeted ads based on that behavior. The change would also require the user to opt in to that tracking.

Apple now says that, while developers will be able to implement this notification and request for permission, doing so will no longer be mandatory when iOS 14 launches sometime in the next couple of months. However, Apple was careful to clarify that it still intends to establish the requirement in the future, and that this is only a delay "to give developers time to make necessary changes."

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  At first glance this looks like just another Land Rover Defender, but this one has been restomodded by ECD Automotive. [credit: ECD Automotive ]

There's just something about Land Rovers that makes people want to fill them full of batteries and an electric motor. A few weeks ago, we learned about the Twisted NAS-E, a restored and modified Land Rover Defender that now runs on electrons instead of gasoline or diesel. But if you've got a hankering for an electric Land Rover but you think the NAS-E is too common, you might be interested in ECD Automotive Design's newest restomod, the Electric Defender, which combines the right-angles of a Land Rover with the battery and electric motor from a Tesla.

The first Land Rover went into production in the aftermath of World War II as Britain's answer to the Willys Jeep. A boxy off-roader meant for farmers that predated the SUV by several decades, in recent years, old Land Rovers have become quite the It Car here in America. ECD Automotive bears a lot of responsibility for that—it's been restomodding Land Rovers since 2013, stripping them down and rebuilding them to a standard commensurate with the six-figure price tag. Think Singer, but with more right angles and slower lap times.

Until now, part of its process has involved replacing the Land Rover's original engine with one of General Motors' V8s. But over in the UK, Electric Classic Cars—who you might know from the TV show Vintage Voltage—recently figured out how to convert the four-wheel-drive Land Rover Defender into an electric vehicle, using the rear-drive motor from a Tesla Model S, along with a Model S battery pack. And ECD has partnered up with ECC to offer this powertrain option as an alternative to a GM LT4.