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(credit: Erik B)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Volkswagen Group of America (VGoA) on Tuesday, alleging that VGoA deceived American consumers with its “Clean Diesel” ad campaign. The FTC charged that "Super Bowl ads, online social media campaigns, and print advertising,” targeted environmentally conscious consumers, when in reality, Volkswagen’s Jettas, Passats, Golfs, and other diesel vehicles were the opposite of environmentally conscious.

Volkswagen Group was charged with a Notice of Violation from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in September, alleging that the automaker had installed so-called defeat devices, or illegal software, on its 2009-2015 diesel cars that made them emit up to 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) as is legally allowed under normal driving conditions. The cars had been certified by the EPA because during EPA lab tests, VW’s software would sense that the car was being tested in a lab and let the emissions control system work properly under those conditions.

Volkswagen later admitted that up to 11 million diesel vehicles were equipped with the software, prompting investigations in the US and Europe. The Department of Justice sued VW Group in January, and the company has been in ongoing negotiations with the EPA and California’s air regulator to find a fix for the cars that would put them in compliance with the Clean Air Act.

We're in a surprisingly warm and pleasant San Francisco for Microsoft's annual developer conference, Build, and we'll be liveblogging the opening keynote.

Festivities start at 8:30 PDT. We're expecting to hear all about the next steps in Windows 10's development, including support for the Xbox One, more HoloLens software to show off Microsoft's augmented reality vision, and according to some last-minute leaks, a new way of running Ubuntu on Windows. We're also hoping to hear just how many people are running Windows 10.

The blue line is the Moon's present axis of rotation, but there's evidence that it used to rotate around the green line—the hot, red portion of the Moon in the right of the image could be responsible for the shift. (credit: James Tuttle Keane)

Billions of years ago, the Moon would have looked larger in the sky, as it has very gradually drifted away from the Earth over time. But in addition to its apparent size changing, the face of our companion satellite has probably tilted a smidgen.

That’s the conclusion of a new study from a group led by Matthew Siegler, Richard Miller, and James Keane, who based their analysis on some old data. In 1998, the Lunar Prospector mission was launched to map, among other things, deposits of water ice expected to exist at the Moon’s poles. Because the Moon’s axis of rotation is nearly perpendicular to the plane of its path around the Sun, it has no seasons, so the ever-dark bottoms of craters at the poles are fiercely cold. With temperatures that cold, any water ice that found its way there could be protected from turning to gas and escaping to space.

But instead of being restricted to a small circle at extreme latitudes, there’s an errant bulge of ice at both poles. If you draw a straight line through the center of the Moon—about six degrees off from its axis—you can connect the two bulges. Was that line once the Moon’s axis of rotation?

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler testifying before the House Communications and Technology Subcommittee. (credit: House Energy and Commerce Committee)

Legislation that would ban rate regulation of Internet service providers could prevent the Federal Communications Commission from enforcing net neutrality rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization, according to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.

Although the FCC decided not to regulate the monthly prices charged by broadband providers, the commission's net neutrality rules rely partially on rate-oversight authority over common carriers. The relevant sections of the Communications Act say that the prices charged by common carriers have to be just and reasonable; those sections also ban "unreasonable discrimination" in charges and practices.

This rate-oversight power, along with other authority, was used by the FCC to justify the three so-called "bright-line" rules that prevent blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. That's why the Republican-sponsored "No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act" could threaten the FCC's core net neutrality rules, Wheeler told lawmakers in a letter dated March 14 and posted on the FCC's website last week.

(credit: Acer)

Chromebooks continue to be some of the more affordable laptops available, but many manufacturers are trying to make their cheapest notebooks stand out. Acer just added the Acer Chromebook 14 to its lineup, which addresses two of the bigger issues for Chrome OS users by offering 14 hours of battery life and 4GB of RAM.

First, let's talk about the Chromebook 14's design. This is Acer's first all-metal Chromebook, featuring an aluminum chassis with rounded corners that weighs just 3.42 pounds. The initial images of the Chromebook 14 show a sleek laptop but not necessarily an inspired design. One of the first Chromebooks to look like a MacBook Pro clone was the Toshiba Chromebook 2, and Acer's Chromebook 14 fits that bill as well.

Another first for Acer comes in the laptop's display: it's the company's first Chromebook to sport a 14-inch IPS screen, which is notable as most Chromebooks still suffer from lackluster displays. However, the screen is also a key factor in battery life. The Chromebook 14 is available with 1080p and 1366×768 screen options, and you'll have to get the regular 1366×768 model for the 14-hour battery life. The 1080p model should get at least 12 hours on a single charge.

Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer in 2012. Auernheimer told the New York Times he was behind a wave of racist print jobs that hit universities across the US. (credit: pinguino k)

Public networked printers at a number of universities were part of the target pool of a massive print job sent out by hacker and Internet troll Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer. At least seven universities were among those that printed out flyers laden with swastikas and a white-supremacist message.

Since Auernheimer merely sent printouts to the printers and didn't actually do anything to gain access to the printers that would fall into the realm of unauthorized access, it's unlikely that he will be prosecuted in any way. Auernheimer exploited the open nature of university networks to send print jobs to the networked printers, which in some cases were deliberately left open to the Internet to allow faculty and students to print documents remotely. These printers could easily be found with a network scan of public Internet addresses.

The New York Times reports that the flyers were printed at Princeton University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Brown University, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College, as well as others. Auernheimer took credit for the printouts in an interview with the Times, saying that he had not specifically targeted the universities but had sent the flyer print job to every publicly accessible printer in North America.

It takes sophisticated software to measure a rocket's health during a launch countdown. (credit: NASA)

During a launch countdown, rockets must be continually checked to ensure that control pumps, motors, fuel levels, and myriad other systems and subsystems are operating normally. It takes sophisticated software to oversee this, and it is this software that will often autonomously make the call to terminate a launch right up until T-minus zero.

As it builds the Space Launch System rocket, NASA is updating this Spaceport Command and Control System software for the Kennedy Space Center. However, a new report by the space agency's inspector general, Paul Martin, finds this decade-long software development effort has fallen behind schedule and is on track to exceed its initial budget of $117.3 million by 77 percent, with cost estimates now increased to $207.4 million. Moreover, the inspector general criticized NASA for not adopting cheaper, commercially available launch software already used by Orbital ATK and SpaceX to launch their rockets.

To develop its new launch software, NASA has essentially kluged together a bunch of different software packages, Martin noted in his report. "The root of these issues largely results from NASA’s implementation of its June 2006 decision to integrate multiple products or, in some cases, parts of products rather than developing software in-house or buying an off-the-shelf product," the report states. "Writing computer code to 'glue' together disparate products has turned out to be more complex and expensive than anticipated. As of January 2016, Agency personnel had developed 2.5 million lines of 'glue-ware,' with almost two more years of development activity planned."