Month: February 2021

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

A US magistrate judge has ordered Valve to provide sales data to Apple in response to a subpoena issued amid Apple's continuing legal fight with Epic Games.

In addition to some aggregate sales data for the entirety of Steam, Valve will only have to provide specific, per-title pricing and sales data for "436 specific apps that are available on both Steam and the Epic Games Store," according to the order. That's a significant decrease from the 30,000+ titles Apple for which Apple originally requested data.

In resisting the subpoena, Valve argued that its Steam sales data was irrelevant to questions about the purely mobile app marketplaces at issue in the case. Refocusing the request only on games available on both Steam and the Epic Games Store makes it more directly relevant to the questions of mobile competition in the case, Judge Thomas Hixson writes in his order.

Enlarge / Some good Dragon Age news, at least from our perspective. (credit: EA / Sam Machkovech)

As it turns out, EA's recent bloodbath over online BioWare multiplayer games was larger than we thought. And in today's case, a behind-the-scenes report seems to offer good news on that front.

After yesterday's official confirmation from EA that "Anthem Next" was no more, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier has arrived with news about another dramatic change to a BioWare game: the unnamed Dragon Age sequel (which we'll call Dragon Age 4 for convenience' sake) will be a single-player game.

Uh, what?

The way Schreier tells it, EA as a publisher is now "allowing" the Dragon Age 4 team to "remove all planned multiplayer components from the game"—and that use of "allowing" implies that this was a butting of heads between those who wanted online components in this famously single-player RPG series (EA) and those who didn't (BioWare).

Enlarge / A Wear OS watch. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Poor, dying Wear OS.

Apparently, the Google Assistant on Wear OS has been broken for months, and until now, no one at Google has noticed. About four months ago, diehard Wear OS users started a thread on the public Android issue tracker saying that the "OK Google" hotword no longer worked on Wear OS, and several claimed that the feature has been broken for months. Recently, news of the 900-user-strong thread spilled over to the Android subreddit, and after 9to5Google and other news sites picked it up, Google has finally commented on the issue.

The Verge quotes a Google spokesperson as saying the company is “aware of the issues some users have been encountering,” and it will “address these and improve the overall experience.” Google didn't give an ETA on how long a fix would take. Google offered a similar boiler-plate response back in that November thread, with a rep saying, "We’ve shared this with our engineering teams and will continue to provide updates as more information becomes available."

Enlarge / Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. (credit: Sam Mooy/Getty Images)

The Parliament of Australia has passed a final version of legislation designed to force Google and Facebook to pay to link to news articles. The passage of the News Media Bargaining Code marks the end of a contentious months-long negotiation between the Australian government and the two technology giants—which are singled out in the code.

Google and Facebook have long argued that they shouldn't have to pay a dime to link to news articles, since the links send valuable traffic to news sites. Over the last decade, Google has successfully beaten back efforts to undermine the principle of free linking.

But over the last couple of years, governments in Australia and Europe have become more determined to force American technology giants to financially support their domestic news industries. In 2019, the European Parliament created a new "neighboring right" giving news sites the right to control the use of "snippets" in search results, and French regulators made it clear that Google wasn't allowed to simply stop showing snippets—Google needed to cough up some cash.

Enlarge / Berlin, Germany - October 21, 2020: Electric vehicles on a public parking space on a street. (credit: Getty Images)

2020 actually wasn't a bad year in terms of global electric vehicle adoption. More than 3.2 million plug-in hybrid and battery EVs found new homes—a 43 percent increase year on year, despite the worst pandemic in several generations. Most of the credit belongs to Europe, where 1.4 million new EVs were sold, a tenth of all new light vehicle sales for the region and a 134 percent increase over 2019.

Unfortunately, things didn't look so great here in the US. Plug-in sales outperformed the overall car-buying slump, but depending on where you look, we're either up only four percent or down just over 10 percent last year.

The good news is that there's no mystery involved in boosting those numbers—we already know several ways to get people to switch to EVs. Europe's newfound fervor for EVs is being driven by the threat of massive fines for automakers whose fleets emit too much CO2. Policy levers don't have to be hitting sticks, though; there are efforts here in the US to extend the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs to cover the first 600,000 vehicles sold by an OEM, although that of course depends on congressional action.

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Most of Texas endured record or near-record low temperatures last week as a late-season (for Texas, at least) arctic cold front sagged down across the state. In the week leading up to the event, forecasters warned residents to prepare for the kind of cold common in more northern climates but exceedingly rare for most of us down here—temperatures in the teens or even high single-digits (think lows around -12 to -10 degrees C for you folks who don't use Freedom Units)—and even (gasp!) snow. Along the Gulf Coast where Ars Space Editor Eric Berger and I live, the combination of low temperatures and wintry precipitation was a once-in-30-years kind of event. (Indeed, the last time it got this cold here was in December 1989.)

The cold was expected, and while it's unpleasant as hell to deal with in a city built for summer heat and not winter cold, it would have been manageable on its own. But what we weren't expecting—well, most of us, at least—was having to deal with this rare low-temperature excursion without power or heat. As the front plowed across the state on the evening of Valentine's Day, demand on the state's power grid spiked to a record 69GW as residents turned on heaters to combat temperatures sliding down into the teens. (That level of power demand beat even the predicted extreme weather peak of 67GW and was higher than the previous February 2011 cold-weather-demand peak of 59GW.) As demand spiked, the state's electrical grid operators had to take emergency measures to stave off total collapse.

And thus began a week of freezing misery for more than 4 million Texans who had to endure the coldest weather in decades without any power or heat, in homes designed to release summer heat rather than keep it in. The majority of the power-loss issues occurred in Houston.