Month: March 2021

Enlarge / Rep. Ken Buck (R-Co.) and Microsoft president Brad Smith at a House hearing on regulation and competition in the news media industry on March 12, 2021. (credit: Drew Angerer | Getty Images)

A group of US lawmakers is proposing new legislation that would allow media organizations to set terms with social media platforms for sharing their content, reminiscent of a controversial measure recently adopted in Australia.

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2021 basically creates a temporary 48-month carve-out to existing antitrust and competition law that would allow small news outlets to join forces to negotiate as a collective bloc with "online content distributors" such as Facebook and Google for favorable terms.

"A strong, diverse, free press is critical for any successful democracy. Access to trustworthy local journalism helps inform the public, hold powerful people accountable, and root out corruption," said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), when introducing the proposal. "This bill will give hardworking local reporters and publishers the helping hand they need right now, so they can continue to do their important work."

Enlarge / "Exploded" view of the new computer model of the Antikythera mechanism, showing how it might have worked. (credit: Tony Freeth)

Scientists have long struggled to solve the puzzle of the gearing system on the front of the so-called Antikythera mechanism—a fragmentary ancient Greek astronomical calculator, perhaps the earliest example of a geared device. Now, an interdisciplinary team at University College London (UCL) has come up with a computational model that reveals a dazzling display of the ancient Greek cosmos, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The team is currently building a replica mechanism, moving gears and all, using modern machinery. You can watch an extensive 11-minute video about the project here (embedding currently disabled).

"Ours is the first model that conforms to all the physical evidence and matches the descriptions in the scientific inscriptions engraved on the mechanism itself," said lead author Tony Freeth, a mechanical engineer at UCL. "The Sun, Moon, and planets are displayed in an impressive tour de force of ancient Greek brilliance."

“We believe that our reconstruction fits all the evidence that scientists have gleaned from the extant remains to date,” co-author Adam Wojcik, a materials scientist at UCL, told the Guardian.

Enlarge / An AT&T technician working on a fiber project. (credit: AT&T)

AT&T today said it will bring fiber Internet to a few million more homes and businesses by the end of this year. "In 2021, AT&T plans to increase its fiber footprint by an additional 3 million customer locations across more than 90 metro areas," AT&T said. This would raise AT&T's fiber deployment to about 18 million homes and businesses.

AT&T provided a list of the 90 metro areas here. The vast majority of them already have AT&T fiber access, as seen in this AT&T fiber map.

This likely means the 3 million new locations will primarily consist of homes and businesses close to AT&T's existing fiber installations instead of homes and businesses in entirely unserved areas. We asked AT&T for more details on the planned fiber deployment and will update this article if we get more information.

Enlarge / A shot from the upcoming Dune adaptation, which will hit theaters and HBO Max this summer. (credit: Chiabella James/Warner Bros.)

This June, HBO Max will get a cheaper, ad-supported subscription plan, parent company AT&T told investors today. However, a specific price and launch date have not been announced. Right now, an ad-free subscription to HBO Max costs $14.99 monthly in the United States.

There is one major catch, though: the ad-supported version of the service will not stream the much-hyped Warner Bros theatrical releases. Those films include Wonder Woman 1984, which showed simultaneously on HBO Max and in theaters in December of 2020, and Dune, which is expected to premiere this summer.

HBO will join Paramount+, Hulu, and some other streaming services in offering (at least) two tiers—one relatively low-cost one that involves pre-roll or mid-roll advertising, and one with a higher monthly fee that involves no ads. Still, some of HBO Max's competitors, like Disney+ or Netflix, do not do sold advertising at all.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

The short-selling firm Hindenburg Research has published a new report alleging that startup electric truckmaker Lordstown Motors has been exaggerating customer demand to aid in fundraising. CEO Steve Burns has claimed that Lordstown already has more than 100,000 pre-orders—enough to keep its Ohio factory busy for more than a year once the company starts production. In reality, these pre-orders are non-binding. And Hindenburg claims that some of the supposed customers don't seem to have the financial resources to make good on their multi-million dollar orders even if they wanted to.

Hindenburg is in the business of selling a company's stock short and then publishing damaging research about the firm. If the stock falls, the company makes a profit. That strategy seems to be working with Lordstown. As I write this, Lordstown's stock is down about 15 percent for the day.

The company made its name with a September exposé of another electric truckmaker, Nikola. Hindenburg's report revealed that a promotional video of the Nikola One truck "in motion" actually showed it rolling down a hill, with the camera tilted slightly so it appeared to be driving on level ground. Nikola's stock has fallen about 60 percent since Hindenburg published its initial report.

Enlarge / Before anyone else runs to the comments to point it out, almost no adaptive cruise control systems will engage at speeds above 95mph. (credit: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images)

Another day, another Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study looking at how people are using advanced driver assistance systems. Like the study we covered on Wednesday, this one also concerns adaptive cruise control (ACC), which uses forward-looking radar to control the distance to a vehicle in front (unlike old-fashioned cruise control, which will happily rear-end someone if you don't turn it off). Sadly, the findings are not encouraging. In its study, the IIHS found that drivers were much more likely to speed while using ACC.

Back in the mid-'90s, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration evaluated the then-new technology (PDF), logging 35,000 test miles (56,000 km). The NHTSA found that "ACC is remarkably attractive to most drivers. The research indicates that, because ACC is so pleasing, people tend to utilize it over a broad range of conditions and to adopt tactics that prolong the time span of each continuous engagement." However, the agency's results also suggested "that ACC usage has induced some elevation in the speeds that would otherwise prevail in conventional (i.e., manual and [conventional cruise control]) driving."

The IIHS notes that ACC is marketed as a convenience feature, not a safety feature, but also notes that some studies have linked it to a decrease in crashes and insurance claims. However, this link may be muddied by the fact that the system is usually used in combination with forward collision warning or automatic emergency braking. For example, the claims that Tesla Autopilot reduced crashes by 40 percent actually turned into a finding that it increased crash rates by 59 percent once properly analyzed.

Enlarge / Virginia urologists with a slam-dunk vasectomy campaign. (credit: Youtube | Virginia Urology)

For one shining moment, urologists in Virginia were hoping to have patients icing on the bench as they watched this year’s NCAA basketball tournament. But the college athletics association has called a foul.

In a February filing with the US Patent and Trademark Office, the NCAA claims that a trademarked advertising campaign by Virginia Urology Center called “Vasectomy Mayhem” is “confusingly similar” to the association’s trademarked “March Madness.”

The continued use of “Vasectomy Mayhem” is “likely to result in confusion, mistake, or deception” that the campaign and/or the urologists are “in some way legitimately connected with, or sponsored, licensed, or approved by” the NCAA, the association claimed.

Enlarge / The keyboard on the 2016 Touch Bar MacBook Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple sued a former employee on Thursday, alleging that he leaked trade secrets to a reporter and sought favors from the reporter in exchange.

The lawsuit was filed against Simon Lancaster in US District Court for the Northern District of California. Lancaster spent 11 years at Apple before taking a job as head of consumer products at Arris Composites in late 2019. Lancaster was advanced materials lead and product design architect at Apple, where he "was instrumental in the development of the 13"/15" MacBook Pro with the touch bar, and the design of unreleased Apple products," an Arris Composites press release said at the time.

Apple's lawsuit alleged: