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According to a testing company called Emissions Analytics, many diesel vehicles on the road in the European Union are emitting much more nitrogen oxide (NO_x) than expected at temperatures below 18 degrees Celsius (approximately 64 degrees Fahrenheit). While it’s public knowledge that automakers in the EU are allowed to kill the emissions control systems on their diesel vehicles in cold weather to prevent damage to the engine, it seems that “cold” has not been properly defined, and car engineers are taking advantage of that fact.

According to the BBC, Emissions Analytics tested 213 cars from 31 manufacturers and found that “millions of vehicles could be driving around much of the time with their pollution controls partly turned off.” Apparently, cars that adhere to the Euro 5 emissions control standard (which was announced in September 2009 but became mandatory in January 2011) are among the worst offenders. The more current Euro 6 cars did better on Emissions Analytics’ tests but also showed discrepancies at relatively warm temperatures.

While turning off the emissions control system can have benefits for the longevity of a diesel engine, it also can improve the car’s miles-per-gallon rating. That creates a tension between priorities—a car might release more NO_x but get better gas mileage, cutting down on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted. But NO_x is a potent greenhouse gas, too, and auto manufacturers might be motivated to hide how their cars cause pollution by favoring a high mpg number while the car is still belching toxic NO_x in order to market their cars to environmentally conscious customers.

(credit: C-SPAN)

If there's anything that members of Congress can agree on, it's that they can't agree on anything. So on Wednesday, Democrats took to the House floor to stage a sit-in and protest their GOP counterparts' refusal to consider gun control legislation in the wake of the recent Orlando mass shooting.

The GOP's response was to cut the C-SPAN feed of the floor protest. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who controls the House C-SPAN feed, decided censorship was the proper route. But the C-Span feed was quickly restored via Twitter-owned Periscope from Rep. Scott Peters, a Democrat from California. Here is Peters' feed. The video is spotty.

The Democrats are urging gun legislation to land on the House floor. Hopefully Peters' mobile phone has a big battery, as about 40 House Democrats vowed "to occupy the floor of the House until there is action."

(credit: Intel Free Press)

A mobile advertising company that tracked the locations of hundreds of millions of consumers without consent has agreed to pay $950,000 in civil penalties and implement a privacy program to settle charges that it violated federal law.

The US Federal Trade Commission alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday that Singapore-based InMobi undermined phone users' ability to make informed decisions about the collection of their location information. While InMobi claimed that its software collected geographical whereabouts only when end users provided opt-in consent, the software in fact used nearby Wi-Fi signals to infer locations when permission wasn't given, FTC officials alleged. InMobi then archived the location information and used it to push targeted advertisements to individual phone users.

Specifically, the FTC alleged, InMobi collected nearby basic service set identification addresses, which act as unique serial numbers for wireless access points. The company, which thousands of Android and iOS app makers use to deliver ads to end users, then fed each BSSID into a "geocorder" database to infer the phone user's latitude and longitude, even when an end user hadn't provided permission for location to be tracked through the phone's dedicated location feature.

US vs UK: Which Ars country wore E3 better? We scoured the show floor for gems that didn't quite make our top-ten list. (video link)

Truth be told, Ars Technica walked into this year's Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) with pretty low expectations. Before the doors opened, Nintendo and Sony had already confirmed that they wouldn't show off any brand-new consoles, and companies like Activision and EA excused themselves from the proceedings. But we still wound up discovering a ton of great stuff, mostly in the form of new games—so many, in fact, that we made our own War of 1812 out of it.

On E3's second day, Ars UK's Mark Walton proposed that I square off against him in a battle of international tastes with our camera crew in tow, and I obliged him. The premise was simple: which Ars nation could find cooler stuff on the E3 show floor? Spoiler alert: we both did fine, at least in terms of parsing the quality stuff from the hype.

(credit: Walt Feimer, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)

The LIGO detector has now seen at least two black hole mergers. The second merger it spotted was about what we would expect given a binary system of two massive stars. Both explode, leaving black holes behind that are just a bit more massive than the Sun; these later go on to merge.

But the first merger detected by LIGO was something rather unusual given that both black holes were around 30 times the Sun's mass. So far, we have not observed anything that could produce black holes in that mass range. Now, a new modeling study suggests that mergers with these sorts of masses might be common—but only if stars can collapse directly into a black hole without exploding first. This situation would require some of the Universe's most luminous stars to simply be winking out of existence.

The black holes involved in these mergers almost certainly began their existence as binary star systems. So in the new study, the authors performed a massive number of simulations of these systems using a modeling package called StarTrack. The simulations took into account the different amount of heavy elements present at different times in the Universe's existence—there are 32 different levels of heavy elements, and the team ran 20 million simulations at each of them. The simulations also took into account various models of the collapse of massive stars, as well as whether the process generated an asymmetrical force that could kick the resulting black hole into an energetic orbit.

Crater Lake National Park, Oregon, the site of some of Casey Nocket's vandalism. Story below includes links to some of the defacements. (credit: Howard Ignatius)

A woman who defaced national parks with graffiti was nabbed with the assistance of online outrage and, ultimately, the Reddit community.

The defendant, 23-year-old Casey Nocket from San Diego, was handed two years of probation and 200 hours of community service for using magic markers and acrylic paint (PDF) to deface rock formations in several national parks—from Death Valley in California to Zion National Park in Utah. The woman was also barred from all national parks and federal lands—which amounts to about one-fifth of the US.

Reddit users helped track down the woman who left the message "Creepytings" with her vandalism that occurred in 2014. What got her into trouble was her cavalier attitude about the vandalism on an Instagram post, which spread across the Internet and eventually to a hiking site and Reddit.

In the end, Mighty no. 9's launch couldn't live up to the optimism that's all over this colorful art.

Here at Ars Technica, we're used to crowdfunded projects failing to live up to expectations. Even by the standards of Kickstarter projects, though, this week's release of Mighty No. 9 is becoming a case study in launch debacles.

The full list of problems is quite lengthy, and middling to awful reviews for the game itself are just the start of it. Many backers and watchers began to worry last month when a tone-deaf, borderline insulting trailer showed a game with graphics reminiscent of those fan-made Net Yaroze games on the old PlayStation Underground discs.

A Eurogamer comparison video this week demonstrates that the final game looks markedly worse than the "evaluation test" showed to attract Kickstarter backers roughly three years ago. Considering the test footage reportedly took seven days to create and didn't have millions of crowdfunding dollars behind it yet, the difference is a bit baffling.