Month: September 2020

Enlarge / There both is and is not a ban in effect on WeChat. (credit: Budrul Chukrut | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)

A federal judge in California put a temporary halt on the White House's efforts to ban WeChat inside the United States, preventing that ban from going into effect at midnight tonight.

"The plaintiffs have shown serious questions going to the merits of their First Amendment Claim," US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler wrote in her ruling (PDF) early this morning.

The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed by a group of WeChat users inside the US. The group, organized as the US WeChat Users Alliance, argued in their complaint that the ban violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Administrative Procedures Act. The group also argues that the law cited in the executive order banning WeChat does not in fact give President Donald Trump the authority claimed in the order.

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  BMW has given the current X5 and X6 SUVs the M treatment. [credit: BMW ]

Yes. Another SUV review. Sorry, but couples, families, singles, alt-lifestylers, outdoor-seekers, bankers, lawyers, doctors, musicians, actors, and even website developers are continuing to drive the SUV segment into utter dominance. And it doesn't matter where you live: the sales figures in Europe are accelerating more swiftly to the SUV camp than in North America, where it's dominated for many years already. This is not a value judgment on the goodness or evil of SUVs. It just is. And consider this: of BMW's 15 different lines of automobiles, seven of them are SUVs. Mercedes has a staggering eight lines of SUVs.

But BMW is nothing if not a company aware of and amenable to splitting niches, be they product lines (like all those hatchback variations on sedans) or ultra-high-performance flavors of big SUVs. That's where we pick up this particular train coming into the station: the 2020 X5 M and the related X6 M. These two add the engine and legs of a thoroughbred sports sedan to the sport-utility, resulting in SUVs with not just room and girth but also abilities in the twisties and the vast open road on the order of a top sports sedan.

The new Ms snarl with 600hp (447kW) from their twin-turbo, 4.4L V8 engines, though that figure can be boosted even more to 617hp (460kW) with the lily-gilding optional Competition Package. (We can't help thinking that any 5,200-plus-pound SUV wearing a badge that reads "Competition" is just a trifle incongruous, unless it's an eating competition.) And yes, that's damn near twice the output of the base X5 and X6 powertrain (in the US market), which puffs out a comparatively paltry 335hp (250kW), though no one would could legitimately call that engine deficient.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Barwick / Getty Images)

Spare bedrooms and living rooms could soon become part of vibrant trading floors as one of the world’s biggest investment banks considers providing staff with augmented reality headsets.

UBS has experimented with issuing its London-based traders with Microsoft HoloLenses, which would allow staff to recreate the experience of working in a packed trading floor without leaving their homes.

Banks have been desperate to bring workers back to the office, especially for regulatory-sensitive roles such as trading, but surges in coronavirus infection rates have meant many staff are wary about using public transport.

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

We've established a bit of a tradition here at Ars. Every year at Google I/O, we have a sit-down talk to learn more about Android directly from the people that make it. Of course, this year, just about every major event was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, nothing is really normal, and Google I/O never happened.

We can still do interviews over the Internet though! So while it happened later in the year than normal, we were still able to hold our annual chat with some of the most important Googlers at Android HQ: Dave Burke, Android's VP of Engineering, and Iliyan Malchev, Principal Engineer at Android and the lead of Project Treble.

We came prepped with questions about the more mysterious corners of Android 11, which actually led to a lot of interesting talk about the future. You'll learn about a coming re-write of the Bluetooth stack, and there's lots of talk about modularity and easy updating (like plans will hopefully, someday, allow you to update the Linux kernel and developer APIs as easily as you download an app update).

Enlarge (credit: Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Google and Apple have taken steps this year they say will help users shield themselves from hundreds of companies that compile profiles based on online behavior. Meanwhile, other companies are devising new ways to probe more deeply into other aspects of our lives.

In January, Google said it would phase out third-party cookies on its Chrome browser, making it harder for advertisers to track our browsing habits. Publishers and advertisers use cookies to compile our shopping, browsing, and search data into extensive user profiles. These profiles reflect our political interests, health, shopping behavior, race, gender, and more. Tellingly, Google will still collect data from its own search engine, plus sites like YouTube or Gmail.

Apple, meanwhile, says it will require apps in a forthcoming version of iOS to ask users before tracking them across services, though it delayed the effective date until next year after complaints from Facebook. A poll from June showed as many as 80 percent of respondents would not opt in to such tracking.