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(credit: We Like Cars)

According to sources speaking to Bloomberg on Tuesday, Volkswagen Group is close to proposing a fix for its 3.0L diesel engines found in Audi, Porsche, and VW models that were sold with built-in software that's illegal in the US. These approximately 85,000 cars spew more than the federal legal limit of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) when driven under normal driving conditions. The illegal software helps the cars pass emissions tests when it senses the car is being tested in a lab.

This batch of cars is separate from the nearly 500,000 2.0L diesel engine Volkswagens and Audis found with similar illegal software installed on them. Volkswagen recently said in federal court that it would be buying back those 2.0L cars from their owners after the California Air Resources Board initially rejected Volkswagen’s proposed fix. The buyback plan has not yet been made official, as it’s part of ongoing settlement proceedings.

In all, Volkswagen Group has set aside $18 billion to cover the costs of that buyback plan and associated legal fees.

(credit: Fox16.com)

An Arkansas local judge resigned Monday following an ethics commission inquiry that concluded he had traded sex for reduced sentences and stored pictures of nude defendants on his home computer. The commission alleged he also housed child porn on that computer.

Cross County District Judge Joseph Boeckmann's resignation comes months after the state Judicial Discipline & Disability Commission concluded that the judge gave male defendants a hand-written note in court with his phone number on it instructing them that they could perform a "community service" at his house as part of a "substitutionary" sentence.

In a letter to the judge last week, the commission said it was in the process of recovering some 4,500 photos from the judge's computer.

With a 6.44-inch display, the Mi Max will make anyone's hands look small.

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Overnight, Xiaomi launched the Mi Max, a massive 6.44-inch smartphone, and a new version of its Android skin, MIUI 8.

We'll start with the phone. For RMB1499 ($230/£159) you get a crazy-big 6.44-inch, 1920×1080 (342ppi) display, a Snapdragon 650 SoC, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (plus a MicroSD slot), a 16MP rear camera, a 5MP front camera, and a 4850 mAh battery. The Snapdragon 650 is a six-core SoC with the usual big.LITTLE architecture, which gives you a set of power-hungry "big" cores for the heavy lifting and a set of "little" cores for low power and idle operations. On the Snapdragon 650, you usually get two 1.8GHz Cortex-A72 cores for the heavy lifting and four 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 cores for the "little" cores, but Xiaomi doesn't have the CPU clock speeds listed.

Things get complicated with the more expensive models, which don't just offer more storage but also upgrade the SoC and RAM. For RMB1699 (~$260/£180) you can upgrade to the 64GB version, which changes the SoC to a Snapdragon 652. The 652 adds an extra two "big" cores over the Snapdragon 650 for an even, eight-core chip with four big cores and four little ones. For RMB1999 (~$307/£212) you can have the 128GB version, which keeps the Snapdragon 652 SoC and adds an extra GB of RAM for 4GB total.

(credit: US Army Africa)

After decades of trying to zap malaria once and for all, researchers are buzzing about a new experimental vaccine against the mosquito-transmitted infection. If results from early trials hold up, the vaccine could one day significantly help slap down malaria’s infectious toll, which hit 214 million documented illnesses and more than 400,000 deaths in 2015 alone.

In a phase I trial—the stage at which scientists test safety and dosage levels in a small number of people—the experimental vaccine spared up to 55 percent of participants from getting sick after they were bitten by malaria-loaded mosquitoes. For some of the test subjects, that protection lasted a year, researchers reported in Nature Medicine.

Those stats may seem like low bars to call a vaccine "promising," but the results actually beat out other vaccine candidates tested so far. Previously, the most well-studied malaria vaccine, called RTS,S, fared even worse in similar tests. It only protected 22 percent of healthy adults subjected to disease-toting mosquitoes, and the protection was tested up to just five months. Nevertheless, RTS,S made it to a phase III trial—the stage at which scientists test efficacy in large numbers of people. In that trial, the vaccine did slightly better, keeping up to 36 percent of kids from getting documented cases of malaria for up to two years. European regulators subsequently approved the use of that vaccine in 2015.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

SAN FRANCISCO—"I always have to think when I write this out, because I'm not used to writing billions," Oracle lawyer Peter Bicks told a jury here as he wrote out "3,000,000,000" on a large sheet of paper.

"Three billion mobile phones have been activated with Oracle's property on them," he said. There are 100,000 Android phones being activated each hour, he continued. "$42 billion in revenue through all of those activations. Each with our client's property in them. Valuable computer code."

Bicks' verbal assault was the first volley in the second Oracle v. Google trial, a month-long legal showdown that could end with one of the largest civil verdicts in history.

(credit: Joe Shlabotnik)

Accidental fiber cuts caused by construction workers took out telecommunications service for more than 750,000 customers in the New York City area yesterday.

The fiber cuts hit the network of Level 3, an Internet backbone provider, and lasted for hours before being fixed. Problems hit several states: customer reports on DownDetector indicate that outages primarily affected Time Warner Cable (TWC) in New York and Cox Communications in large parts of Connecticut and Rhode Island and small parts of Massachusetts. Level 3's network serves both TWC and Cox.

The most specific outage numbers came from New York. The New York Department of Public Service (NYDPS) issued a statement saying that "more than 750,000 customers in the New York City area were unable to complete telephone calls." Most or all of those customers are apparently Time Warner Cable users. Internet and TV service was also affected.