Month: September 2017

Enlarge / Wolfgang Hatz, head of development at Porsche AG, speaks during a presentation to announce the expansion of the luxury automaker's research and development center in Weissach, Germany on Friday, July 18, 2014. Photographer: Martin Leissl/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty Images)

On Thursday, Wolfgang Hatz, former engine chief for Volkswagen and Audi and later the head of research and development at Porsche, was arrested in Munich. With Hatz's arrest, the slow-moving investigations of Volkswagen Group in the aftermath of the 2015 emissions scandal seem to be gathering momentum, according to reports from German paper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the New York Times.

The news comes by way of anonymous sources, as German privacy law prohibits the government from disclosing the identities of suspects. German authorities confirmed to the New York Times that a suspect was arraigned on Thursday morning in connection with the ongoing investigation of VW Group’s Audi unit.

Hatz was the engine chief at Audi between 2001 and 2007, right around the time that the company began implementing a software-based “acoustic condition” workaround for its diesel engines. According to court filings and academic research, Audi allegedly wanted to get rid of the rattling noise that some diesel engines make on startup, so it created software to inject extra fuel into the engine on ignition. The company then worked to mask the extra emissions created by this fix, and from there, the emissions cheating software apparently grew as the company demanded different and increasingly hard-to-achieve features for its diesel engines. There’s evidence that the Audi software was then borrowed by Volkswagen for its line of diesels, which were aggressively marketed as “clean diesel cars” in the US.

Iliyan Malchev

A major change in the maintenance lifecycle of Linux kernels is coming. During a Linaro Connect 2017 presentation on Android's Project Treble, Googler Iliyan Malchev announced that Linux LTS (Long Term Support) kernels were switching from a two-year lifecycle to a whopping six years of support.

The free and open source Linux kernel powers most of the devices around us. It's not only present in computers and servers, it also powers most of the ARM devices on earth, so it's present in Android devices, the Internet of things, and almost anything else you can call "smart." Major new versions of the Linux kernel arrive about every 70 days. Not everyone wants to upend their existing system every 70 days to upgrade to the new kernel, though, so to help with this, the Linux kernel has traditionally had a "Long Term Support (LTS)" kernel, which is supported for two years. Rather than do a major kernel bump, devices can keep running an LTS kernel and regularly get bug and security fixes, which aren't as disruptive as full releases.

Enlarge / Soeul, South Korea. (credit: Mario Sánchez Prada)

South Korea announced a broad ban on initial coin offerings on Friday, following the lead of China, which banned the practice earlier this month.

"The Financial Services Commission said all kinds of initial coin offerings (ICO) will be banned as trading of virtual currencies needs to be tightly controlled and monitored," Reuters reports. Anyone who issues ICOs in South Korea will face "stern penalties," Korean authorities announced.

"There is a situation where money has been flooded into an unproductive and speculative direction," said Kim Yong-beom, vice chairman of the commission.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai listens during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC on June 20, 2017.

In his ongoing push to get rid of net neutrality rules, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai claimed this month that the rules caused capital investment in wireless networks to drop in 2016. But in doing so, Pai hasn't addressed data from earlier years that doesn't fit his anti-net neutrality narrative.

"The most concerning emerging issue we are seeing is that investment in wireless networks was down significantly in 2016," Pai said in a speech at Mobile World Congress on September 12. "According to the UBS Wireless 411 report, in fact, investment was down 9 percent, a huge drop outside of a recession."

Eliminating net neutrality rules and the related classification of broadband providers as common carriers will reverse the trend, Pai predicted. "In our Restoring Internet Freedom proceeding, the FCC is currently examining whether we should change our Internet regulations in order to encourage greater deployment and investment and bring digital opportunity to more Americans," he said.

Enlarge / No, that isn't concept art. That's the actual game.

When I was a young boy playing games on the NES, I dreamed of the day when 2D games would grow from the blocky, pixellated graphics of the time to controllable cartoons that resembled the detailed cartoons found in the instruction booklets. Perhaps more than any game that has come before, Cuphead is the realization of this dream; a fully controllable wonderland that plays like a controllable version of an early 20th century animated film short. It's also a throwback to those 8-bit days of "Nintendo hard" games that extended their limited content mainly by being controller-throwingly difficult.

Let's start with the look, which is the first thing that will attract anyone's potential interest in Cuphead. An in-game conceit puts a "1930" (sorry, "MCMXXX") trademark on the entire production, and the animation is an almost perfect throwback to that era's style of ultra-expressive, bouncy animated shorts. Characters, objects, and even pieces of background scenery wind up, squash, stretch, slide, and bounce with infectious energy.

Cuphead's cast is almost as ridiculous as it is diverse. Monstrous flowers, spear-wielding seeds, oversized bouncing candies, somersaulting frogs, and a woman who transforms into various Zodiac creatures are just some of the game's many wild characters. They already look detailed and lively in static screenshots, but that's only the beginning. Each character vibrates with a manic, animated energy driven by the game's peppy, big-band jazz soundtrack. Idle characters don't just flip through a couple of frames of placeholder animation, but, rather, they twist and coil with the hidden menace of potential energy waiting to be let out. Every screen is a riot of color and motion that I can say without hyperbole is like nothing I've ever seen in a game before.