news.buyenne.com

The cars in question are tiny Japanese-market "Kei" cars. (credit: Wikimedia)

We've written extensively about Volkswagen Group and its attempt to pull a fast one with regard to diesel emissions here in the US and elsewhere. But VW isn't the only car maker to play fast and loose with regulators when it comes to emissions. VW's diesel scandal has resulted in increased scrutiny abroad; French authorities raided Renault in January and PSA Peugeot Citroen in April as part of ongoing investigations into diesel emissions. But the most breathtaking example must belong to Mitsubishi.

On April 21, we learned that the Japanese car maker had been falsifying fuel economy tests in its home market. This came to light after Nissan (which rebadges some Mitsubishi cars) discovered the engines couldn't match Mitsubishi's numbers. That alone would have been bad enough—indeed, it wiped out a third of Mitsubishi's share price—but it seems it was just the tip of the iceberg.

On Tuesday, Mitsubishi revealed it had been using the wrong fuel economy tests for "Kei" cars—small 0.6L cars made just for the Japanese domestic market—since 1991. More than 600,000 affected cars have been sold in Japan during that time.

(credit: Ron Amadeo)

BlackBerry recently dumped its in-house operating system—Blackberry 10—and became one of the newest Android OEMs. It launched the BlackBerry Priv with Android 5.1 in November last year, and today we're getting an idea of what the company's major update process looks like. The Priv is being updated to Android 6.0.

The initial launch of the Blackberry Priv gave us good reason to worry about BlackBerry's software acumen. It launched with Android 5.1 a month after Android 6.0 came out. What, we asked, would happen when it came time to update the Priv? If BlackBerry can't even launch with an up-to-date version of Android, how long would a big update take? The answer seems to be "six months." Marshmallow for the unlocked BlackBerry Priv is rolling out six months after the OS' release and five months after the release of the Priv.

Android 6.0 Marshmallow brings support for user-controllable app permissions—an ironic omission from the Priv given that the name stands for "Privacy." Adoptable storage will be great for the Priv's MicroSD—if BlackBerry doesn't disable it. This feature turns removable storage and internal storage into a single unified pool, allowing you to install apps, media, or whatever else you want on the SD card. Standby battery life should improve with the new "Doze" feature, too.

One of the two JLENS aerostats on the ground at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Two aerostats make up a JLENS "orbit."

The Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS) system program has been savaged by the House Armed Services Committee in its markup of the Defense Department's 2017 budget. The proposed cut in funding—from the $45 million requested by the Army to a mere $2.5 million—may signal the end of a program that was a source of controversy well before one of the program's radar aerostats broke loose and drifted hundreds of miles. But that incident, which caused power outages and property damage as the wayward blimp dragged its broken tether from Aberdeen, Maryland, into central Pennsylvania, was likely responsible for the program finally being brought to heel.

JLENS was originally intended to be a collection of paired radar dirigibles, tethered to the ground while floating at altitudes of up to 10,000 feet. Of each pair, one aerostat would be equipped with a sensitive "look-down" phased array search radar; the other would have a targeting radar for tracking targets and guiding weapons to them.

The system was intended, as the program's name suggests, to defend against submarine-launched and ship-launched cruise missiles, but it was also advertised as a way to spot low-flying aircraft, drones, swarms of small boats, and even some ground vehicles. Raytheon, the prime contractor for JLENS, and the Army tried to dispel concerns that JLENS could be used for domestic surveillance.

Artist's conception of Blizzard defending its legal rights.

Weeks after forcing the shutdown of a popular, fan-run "pirate" server that ran a classic version of World of Warcraft, Blizzard now says it basically had no choice but to go after Nostalrius to protect its legal rights.

"Why not just let Nostalrius continue the way it was? The honest answer is, failure to protect against intellectual property infringement would damage Blizzard’s rights," World of Warcraft Executive Producer and Vice President J. Allen Brack writes in a post on the official WoW forums. "This applies to anything that uses WoW’s IP, including unofficial servers. And while we’ve looked into the possibility—there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server."

In the narrowest sense, Blizzard's copyright wouldn't suddenly be invalidated if the company decided to look the other way for one popular "vanilla" server; you can't lose a copyright just by failing to defend it legally. Still, failure to go after Nostalrius would have done some damage to the idea that Blizzard is in full control of the World of Warcraft IP and could have encouraged others to think that such unofficial servers were OK. Even now, there are plenty of other pirate servers out there running previous, current, and/or modified versions of World of Warcraft, most of which have yet to draw Blizzard's legal fire.

iPhone sales account for a huge chunk of Apple's revenue, so slower iPhone sales means a lot less revenue. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple will report its earnings for the second quarter of fiscal 2016 at 5pm EDT/2pm PDT/10pm UK, and as usual Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson and I will be following along with the call and providing charts and commentary. Apple is expected to report its first year-over-year revenue decline since 2003, mainly due to lower iPhone sales.

Apple's own forecasts predict revenue between $50 billion and $53 billion, well short of the $58 billion it earned in Q2 of 2015 though still higher than the $45.6 billion in revenue it earned in Q2 of 2014. The outsized success of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus last year set a tough benchmark for the company, and pent-up demand for the larger phones left over from Q1 of 2015 also made Q2 sales higher than they may otherwise have been. A slowing economy in China, Apple's fastest-growing market, could also affect growth this quarter, while increased pressure from the Chinese government could impact future growth.

Apple introduced a handful of new products in the second quarter, which runs from the beginning of January to the end of March, but they were all introduced late enough in the quarter that we won't know how much of a difference they made until next quarter. New devices include the iPhone SE and 9.7-inch iPad Pro, though price drops for the iPad Air 2 and a new capacity for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro could conceivably shore up the perennially backsliding iPad sales.