Author: Megan Geuss

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that two anonymous sources briefed on the matter agreed that Volkswagen Group would buy back nearly 500,000 2.0L engine diesel vehicles equipped with illegal defeat devices as part of an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A third person briefed on the matter added that VW Group would set up a compensation fund for people who had purchased the Volkswagen and Audi diesels, although that source did not specify how much each diesel purchaser would get from the fund. Reuters reports that the compensation fund represents more than $1 billion.

The diesels were discovered in September to be equipped with illegal defeat devices, sending the German automaker’s stock in a tailspin and setting off a ripple effect of scandal throughout the company. The EPA discovered that the 500,000 US diesels were cheating its emissions tests, using software to keep the car within permissible emissions ranges during laboratory tests, but then switching off that emissions control system when the car was being driven in real-world conditions.

The EPA estimated that VW Group’s 2.0L engines were emitting up to 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) as was allowable by federal regulations.

On Tuesday, credit card network Visa announced plans to offer an update to Point of Sale (POS) systems to make using an EMV chip-enabled card faster at the checkout line. (EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, the creators of the credit card specification.) Visa is calling the new specification “Quick Chip,” and it says it will bring the time it takes for a terminal to read the card’s chip down to two seconds.

Those seconds mean something. In 2014, Ars argued that the inconvenience of a few extra seconds caused by dipping a card in the terminal at a checkout stand would drive people to use mobile payments like Apple Pay and Android Pay more often. Those payment platforms rely on EMV’s Near Field Communication (NFC) standard, and transactions are much faster because of it. Although it's hard to say if such a shift in preference is occurring, especially with the uneven rollout of EMV-capable terminals, customers trying to use chip cards must dip them into a checkout terminal and leave them there while the transaction is being processed—a serious change of pace and potential source of frustration for Americans used to the speed of swiping a magnetic stripe card.

That time barrier, as well as the fear that customers might be confused as to how to use a chip card, caused merchants to postpone upgrading their terminals to support the EMV standard over the holidays, traditionally the most important time for businesses. But magnetic stripe cards are very fraud-prone, and EMV cards are less so (although not entirely fraud-proof), so card networks are insisting that it’s time to make the change.

On Monday, Kanye West fan Justin Baker-Rhett sued (PDF) West and S. Carter Enterprises (SCE), the company that owns music streaming service Tidal. Baker-Rhett alleges that the rapper and the streaming platform falsely promised that West’s most recent album, The Life of Pablo, would be exclusive to Tidal and would never show up on any other competing streaming service, nor would it be sold for download or in any physical media format. But just a month and a half after the release of Life of Pablo on Tidal, the album showed up on Apple Music and Spotify.

Baker-Rhett is asking the court to certify a class action against West and SCE, which is owned by rapper Jay-Z. The plaintiff claims that West and Tidal defrauded customers, engaged in false advertising, practiced unfair competition, and enjoyed unjust enrichment from the millions of subscribers who handed over their personal information to the company to sign up for the service because they believed Life of Pablo wouldn't be available anywhere else.

The complaint claims that Tidal found itself struggling to gain subscribers after its launch. But when West, who is an investor in Tidal and has a financial interest in the platform’s success, tweeted “My album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale... You can only get it on Tidal,” the platform’s subscription numbers allegedly jumped from 1 million to 3 million. Those 2 million subscribers were given a free trial period in exchange for submitting their credit card information, which was automatically charged if they did not cancel the subscription before the free period was over.

This week, film director James Cameron announced that he will be making four sequels to his 2009 box-office smash Avatar.

Following in the hallowed footsteps of other filmmakers who sought to unnecessarily increase the number of installments that a story really needs, Cameron decided to go big. "He first envisioned two sequels,” Variety reported. "But after meeting with a team of four screenwriters and a group of 'some of the top artists and designers in the world,' he realized that he had way too much material for just two films.” Clearly, no one has told the great filmmakers of our day about killing your darlings.

The original Avatar still holds the record for all-time worldwide box office sales. It follows a human’s attempt to infiltrate an alien civilization known as the Na’vi by adopting a Na’vi body. The Na'vi populate the planet of Pandora, which contains a precious metal that Earth-dwellers want to mine. Instead of learning how to manipulate the Na’vi into giving the humans a pass to mine the planet, the main character develops sympathies for the Na’vi, and therein lies the friction.

Not two years after Aereo’s business model was shot down by the Supreme Court, another, slightly different attempt at pushing local TV onto the Internet for streaming could be coming from a partnership between Dish Network’s SlingTV and EchoStar’s Sling Media.

On Friday, Dave Zatz of Zatz Not Funny! said he had received a tip from a source indicating that Sling Media would be pushing out what is essentially a set-top box that would help Sling TV subscribers watch local TV from the Sling TV app. If that’s not confusing enough, the box will apparently be called AirTV, per an Echostar trademark application Zatz reported on last year.

As a result, customers of Sling TV will be able to buy an AirTV box that will look very similar to Sling Media’s M1 Slingbox, which will connect to your home antenna and your home network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet to push local channels to your mobile device or browser. “I’ll go ahead and assume the ultimate goal here is for the OTA channels from one’s residence to be co-located amongst the pay television channels of Sling TV’s $20 streaming service in a unified guide,” Zatz wrote.

This month the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) updated its offender handbook (PDF) to stipulate that inmates are not allowed to have social media accounts. While blog posts are still permitted, a spokesperson for the TDCJ told Ars that the rule was developed to get social media platforms to comply with the corrections department’s takedown requests more readily.

Since Texas inmates are not allowed Internet access, this rule applies to social media accounts managed by friends or family. As Fusion explains, "Prisoners write posts, send them to a friend or family member through snail mail, and ask the friend to post them on Facebook.” If an inmate is caught having a friend or family member update an account for them, they’re charged with a "level three violation,” which TDCJ characterizes as the lowest level of violation in the Texas prison system.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), however, says that level three violations can result in loss of privileges, extra work duty, or confinement to an inmate’s cell for up to 45 days. The EFF objects to the new rules in Texas, arguing that "a person does not lose all of their rights to participate in public discourse when they are incarcerated… This policy would not only prohibit the prisoners’ exercise of their First Amendment rights, but also prevent the public from exercising their First Amendment rights to gather information about the criminal justice system from those most affected by it.” The TDCJ had no response to the EFF’s argument.

On Wednesday, ESPN announced a partnership with the International Drone Racing Association (IDRA) to stream drone races online and use the footage in edited TV segments.

The multiyear contract will kick off with IDRA’s US National Drone Racing Championships in New York City in August. The three-day event will be streamed live on ESPN3, and then footage will be edited down to a one-hour special to air on one of ESPN’s TV networks. In a joint press release, IDRA and the sports network said they would be streaming first-person-view footage from the racing drones, "offering jaw-dropping views of both lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.“

Drone operators in first-person-view drone races wear goggles that show them a stream from a camera on the front of the drone. The drone operator must navigate their drone through the race's course, and the winning drone is the one that completes the course the fastest.

On Tuesday, Tesla Motors said that it would be adding features to new Tesla Model S electric vehicles, including a HEPA filter that was previously only available on the Model X cars, as well as a new charger that will speed up charging time when the car is connected to higher-amperage sources.

Other new features include a similar front fascia to the Model X and adaptive headlights that turn in order to better light the path of the car on winding roads. "Figured Ash Wood" and "Dark Ash Wood" interior accents are also now available.

All these items now come standard on Tesla’s most popular luxury sedan in production.

SoCal Gas and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) are at odds over how quickly the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility will be reopened after a devastating leak that released tens of thousands of tons of methane into the atmosphere this past winter.

SoCal Gas, which operates the 115-well Aliso Canyon field, says the field can be up and running again, minus the broken well that had leaked for months, by late summer. But in a Friday meeting of energy officials and residents of the impacted Porter Ranch community, CPUC President Michael Picker said, "I assume we won't have Aliso Canyon back on-line this year,” according to local public radio station KPCC.

Ars contacted CPUC for clarification, but we have not yet received a response.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) recently handed down one of the strictest penalties it has ever levied on Donnie Tyndall, the head coach of the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) men’s basketball team. The athletic group says Tyndall organized a cheating ring to help recruits satisfy academic standards, even flying graduate student assistants to the recruits’ homes to complete their online coursework.

The NCAA slapped Tyndall with a 10-year show-cause order, which effectively prevents him from working in the NCAA for that time period, according to the Washington Post. That's the longest show-cause order the NCAA has ever handed out and its length is likely due to the fact that Tyndall and several of his colleagues denied their involvement to the NCAA until the organization's enforcement staff discovered oddities in the metadata from the online coursework, tipping them off to a coverup.

In a Public Infractions Decision (PDF) released on Friday, the NCAA said that Tyndall began finding ways to help students cheat only six weeks after starting as head coach at USM. Ultimately, Tyndall, two assistant coaches, and two graduate student assistant managers helped seven prospective players cheat on online classes. "A majority of the prospects used the credits to attain immediate eligibility for competition upon their transfer to the institution,” the decision stated.