Month: August 2021

Enlarge / Even though this stream bed is dry much of the year, it still may qualify for regulation under the Clean Water Act. (credit: Wild Horizon / Getty Images)

The latest legal decision in a years-long fight over how to implement the Clean Water Act has set rules back to where they were in the 1980s. The reversion is the product of the Trump Administration's haste to get rid of Obama-era regulations, leading to action that produced rules running counter to the Environmental Protection Agency's own scientific findings. As a result, a judge has decided that the rules cannot remain in place for the time that will be needed for the Biden Administration to formulate replacements.

Defining water

The long-running saga is the product of the Clean Water Act's remarkably vague protections. The act seeks to control pollution via a permitting process that applies to the “waters of the United States," but it doesn't define what constitutes said waters.

While the process would clearly apply to a flowing river, it's less clear whether the act would regulate the pollution of a stream bed only filled seasonally or following heavy rains—even though the stream bed can flow directly into a river that is active year-round. Similar issues apply to items like man-made ponds that connect to other bodies via groundwater flow.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

Over 135 subreddits have gone dark this week in protest of Reddit's refusal to ban communities that spread misinformation about the COVID pandemic and vaccines.

Subreddits that went private include two with 10 million or more subscribers, namely r/Futurology and r/TIFU. The PokemonGo community is one of 15 other subreddits with at least 1 million subscribers that went private; another 15 subreddits with at least 500,000 subscribers also went private. They're all listed in a post on "r/VaxxHappened" which has been coordinating opposition to Reddit management's stance on pandemic misinformation. More subreddits are being added as they join the protest.

"Futurology has gone private to protest Reddit's inaction on COVID-19 misinformation," a message on that subreddit says. "Reddit won't enforce their policies against misinformation, brigading, and spamming. Misinformation subreddits such as NoNewNormal and r/conspiracy must be shut down. People are dying from misinformation."

• 

  Bose's latest wireless noise-canceling headphones: the QuietComfort 45. [credit: Bose ]

Bose on Tuesday announced its latest set of wireless noise-canceling headphones, the QuietComfort 45.

The new headphones cost $330 and are up for preorder today, with shipping to begin on September 23.

A familiar design

The QuietComfort line has proven popular for Bose over the years, so it may not be a surprise to see that the QuietComfort 45 does not significantly diverge from its predecessor, the QuietComfort 35 II, which launched roughly four years ago.

Enlarge / Elizabeth Holmes, founder and former CEO of Theranos, arrives for motion hearing on Monday, November 4, 2019, at the US District Court House in San Jose, California. (credit: Getty | Yichuan Cao)

Nearly a decade ago, Theranos touted a revolutionary diagnostic device that could run myriad medical tests without having to draw blood through a needle. Today, the startup’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, goes to court, where she’s facing 12 criminal counts for statements she made to investors and consumers about her company’s technology.

Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University at the age of 19. Driven by her phobia of needles, Holmes wanted to create diagnostic tests that use blood from finger pricks rather than from needles. The idea caught on, attracting well-connected board members like Henry Kissinger and James Mattis, drawing over $400 million in investments from wealthy investors including Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch, and securing lucrative partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway. At its peak, Theranos was worth over $9 billion.

But Theranos’ myth started unwinding in 2015 when a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that the company had been performing most of its tests on traditional blood diagnostic machines rather than its own “Einstein” device. The company’s own employees doubted the machine’s accuracy.

Enlarge / Let's see, you landed on my "Google Ads" space, and with three houses, that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)

South Korea will soon pass a law banning Apple's and Google's app store payment requirements. An amendment to South Korea’s Telecommunications Business Act will stop app store owners from requiring developers to use in-house payment systems. The law also bans app store owners from unreasonably delaying the approval of apps or deleting them from the marketplace, which the country fears is used as a method of retaliation. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the law has passed South Korea's National Assembly (the country's Congress equivalent), and President Moon Jae-in is expected to sign the bill into law.

In the rest of the world, Apple and Google get a 30 percent cut of most app purchases, in-app sales, and subscriptions, and the companies don't allow developers to use alternative payment options. Once the bill passes in South Korea, app developers will be free to search for a payments provider that offers them the best deal. Google's and Apple's stores do provide some benefits, like user authentication for purchases, friction-free purchases thanks to stored payment information, and easy data hosting and distribution for digital goods. If developers don't need any of those things or are willing to roll their own solutions, standard credit card processors usually only take a 1-3 percent cut of sales.

The Verge received statements from both Google and Apple. A Google spokesperson told the site, “Just as it costs developers money to build an app, it costs us money to build and maintain an operating system and app store. We’ll reflect on how to comply with this law while maintaining a model that supports a high-quality operating system and app store, and we will share more in the coming weeks."

Roughly six weeks before Far Cry 6's upcoming launch on PC and consoles, Ubisoft elected to unlock the entirety of this first-person shooter's opening beats for a press-only, hands-on demo. This kind of access differs from the carefully selected "slices" we sometimes play in preview events, as those are meant to show an unfinished game in its best light.

But after going hands-on with Far Cry 6 for nearly four hours, I was reminded why game studios are sometimes cagey about prerelease reveals.

The demo I played was equal parts massive and unwieldy. I couldn't help but feel like hundreds of Ubisoft staffers' efforts to create a beautiful and convincing pseudo-Cuban adventure wound up squeezed into a single, tiny clown car of a package. The issues didn't end with game-breaking bugs and wonky AI, which may very well be resolved on, erm, October 7. At this point, I'm more concerned about uninspiring new loadout systems, a narrative tone that can't make up its mind, and an absolute yawn of a return to the Ubisoft open-world bloat of old.