Author: Megan Geuss

US District Judge Charles Breyer told Volkswagen and regulators that they have until April 21 to present a plan to bring over 600,000 Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche diesel vehicles into compliance with emissions regulations.

VW Group was supposed to have presented a detailed explanation of how it will fix its diesel vehicles to the San Francisco-based judge today, but Judge Breyer granted the company a month extension. VW’s diesel models made after 2009 were discovered to be equipped with illegal software that circumvented the cars’ emissions control system, allowing the cars to spew between up to 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) permits.

Judge Breyer will preside over the lawsuit that VW Group faces from the Department of Justice, as well as a consolidated class action suit that represents more than 500 separate lawsuits against Volkswagen. The judge said that he permitted the extension because former FBI director Robert Mueller, who Breyer appointed to oversee negotiations between air regulators and Volkswagen, assured Breyer that the two parties, "had made substantial progress toward a resolution that would get the polluting cars off the road,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Today, two representatives from the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee sent a letter (PDF) to Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency (NSA), asking him to discontinue any plans to expand the list of who the NSA shares certain information with.

In late February, the New York Times reported that the Obama Administration was working with the NSA to craft new rules and procedures to allow domestic law enforcement organizations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) access to the digital communications information that the NSA collects through programs like PRISM. Under the new rules, domestic law enforcement agencies would be able to access raw information that the NSA collects, without the so-called “minimization” process that the NSA has formerly employed to scrub surveillance information of identifying data pertaining to American citizens before handing it over to the requesting agency.

”We are alarmed by press reports that state National Security Agency (NSA) data may soon routinely be used for domestic policing,” Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Representative Blake Farenthold (R-TX) wrote. "If media accounts are true, this radical policy shift by the NSA would be unconstitutional, and dangerous.”

Randall Munroe, creator of popular webcomic XKCD, recently published a new book called Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, in which he uses only the thousand most common words in the English language to explain how a variety of things work, from locks to nuclear bombs. Monroe’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, also publishes textbooks, and when editors in the textbook division saw proofs of Monroe’s Thing Explainer, they realized that his simple explanations could be used to augment high school textbooks.

You know, the old strategy employed ineffectively by dad joke-tellers everywhere: get the #teens on your side with humor.

Luckily, Munroe's Thing Explainer comics are absurd enough in their hyper-simplicity that they have a shot at breaking down the walls of sarcasm and ennui encircling the most eye-rolling of high school students.

Tesla has decided that it won’t be making the 10kWh stationary storage batteries it unveiled last April, instead focusing exclusively on the 7kWh version.

The 10kWh version of Tesla’s Powerwall was made to be used as backup storage only—its nickel-cobalt chemistry limited the user to cycling the battery 500 times, so daily use was out of the question. The 7kWh battery, on the other hand, is made to integrate with solar panels, and due to its nickel-manganese chemistry, Tesla said it could be cycled 5,000 times.

After Tesla quietly removed the option for a 10kWh battery on its website, the company confirmed in an e-mail to Greentech Media that the larger version had been discontinued. "The Daily Powerwall supports daily use applications like solar self-consumption plus backup power applications, and can offer backup simply by modifying the way it is installed in a home," the e-mail read. "Due to the interest, we have decided to focus entirely on building and deploying the 7kWh Daily Powerwall at this time."

A recent paper co-authored by MIT researchers did the math on how best to allow competing traffic through an intersection. The results, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, suggest that once cars can connect to city infrastructure, traffic lights will be a suboptimal way to regulate traffic through city streets.

Instead, the paper suggests, cars should talk to computers at intersections and be allowed through the crossing via a slot-based system, without the need for yellow lights. Better yet, once fully autonomous vehicles hit the road, even greater efficiencies could be realized by having the cars talk to each other to form platoons that move through intersections.

The researchers start by acknowledging the inadequacies of the 150-year-old traffic light—at any given intersection, they say, there are so many variables that any one breakdown in the flow of traffic can be disastrous for the whole intersection. "This explains why traffic can rapidly deteriorate in cities, resulting in widespread congestion and immense societal and environmental costs,” the paper notes.

On Thursday, the US Department of Transportation (DOT) announced that it would partner with Sidewalk Labs, a city-focused research group that’s a subsidiary of Alphabet (formerly known as Google), to give one US city an overhaul of its traffic analytics infrastructure.

The two institutions said they’d give the chosen city free access to a new analytics platform developed by Sidewalk Labs called Flow, which takes data from Google Maps, Waze and a variety of unspecified sensors to tell city planners which areas of the city are congested, which would be better served by mass transit, and where the city’s transportation resources should be pooled.

The city that gets access to Flow will be the winner of the Smart City Challenge, an ongoing contest sponsored by the DOT in which participant cities must show that they have plans to work technology into their existing transportation network. The finalist cities include Austin, TX; Columbus, OH; Denver, CO; Kansas City, MO; Pittsburgh, PA; Portland, OR; and San Francisco, CA.

On Friday, United Airlines announced that its flights between Los Angeles International Airport and San Francisco International Airport will now be partly powered by a biofuel mix supplied by an LA-based company called AltAir Fuels.

United runs four or five flights between LAX and SFO every day, and it will fill these planes up with a combination of 30 percent biofuel and 70 percent traditional jet fuel, according to the Washington Post. The biofuel portion of the mix will be made with a range of biological source materials “from used cooking oil to algae,” the Post writes; it was developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The airline has agreed to purchase 15 million gallons of the mix over the next three years from AltAir. Still, the Los Angeles Times points out that United burned through 3.2 billion gallons of traditional jet fuel last year, so that 15 million gallons is just a proverbial drop in the jet fuel barrel.

Back in December, CBS and Paramount threw cold water on the grand plans of Axanar Productions, a company formed by Star Trek fans, to produce what would have been one of the most elaborate and professional-looking installments of fanfic in the Star Trek universe. Now, the Star Trek rights holders are back with an amended complaint (PDF) that lists many of the specific instances in which Axanar Productions has included something “substantially similar” to a copyrighted element in Star Trek, including races like Klingons and Vulcans, the cowl-neck uniform that Majel Barrett wore as the Enterprise’s first officer in The Original Series episode The Cage, and the concept of “Stardate."

Axanar Productions wasn’t too worried about copyright infringement when it set out to make its movies, which currently include a 20-minute prequel called Prelude to Axanar and a forthcoming feature-length film called Axanar. After all, fans had been making Star Trek fanfic for decades, and CBS had either encouraged it or turned a blind eye.

But that tacit approval stopped after Axanar Productions was able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Axanar’s writer and producer, Alec Peters assured CBS and Paramount that he and others working on the project would not make any profit—all the money they raised would go directly to making Axanar.

A former Volkswagen Group employee has sued the auto company, saying he was fired after he told VW’s in-house lawyers and its information technology manager that data was being illegally automatically deleted off the company’s system in the aftermath of a Notice of Violation from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The plaintiff, Daniel Donovan, had been a technical project manager at Volkswagen since 2008, working out of the company’s Michigan office. After the EPA announced that it had discovered illegal defeat devices meant to spoof emissions control systems on VW Group’s diesel vehicles, Donovan received notice from his immediate supervisor that Volkswagen had to stop deleting data “effective immediately pursuant to a Department of Justice hold,” according to Bloomberg.

However, Donovan says deletion of data did not stop until three days after that hold was put in place. He also alleges that additional backup disks of the information were not preserved as Volkswagen was required to do, according to the Wall Street Journal. As Courthouse News Service reports, Donovan was fired after he "refused to take part” in activities that could lead to “significant legal sanctions" and took his concerns to a supervisor.

A Florida-based supermarket and liquor store chain has sued a variety of card networks and card issuers (PDF)—including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Wells Fargo, and a number of others—over a recent shift in credit card technology that took place in the US last fall.

While the rest of the world has been migrating from insecure, magnetic stripe cards to relatively more secure chip-embedded cards for more than a decade, card networks and card-issuing banks in the US are only now demanding that retailers stop running mag stripe cards in favor of EMV cards. (EMV is eponymous for EuroPay, MasterCard, and Visa, the three corporations that developed the chip card standard.) The card networks decided years ago that by October 1, 2015, all retailers had to accept chip cards. If retailers couldn’t accept chip cards, then any time someone fraudulently used a card to make a purchase at that retailer, the retailer would have to pay for the chargeback instead of the issuer paying for the chargeback, as is common.

The liability shift was supposed to be the stick that would incentivize business owners to buy new terminals to accept chip cards. But Florida’s B&R Supermarket, which owns Milam’s Market and Grove Liquors, says it did all that—it bought new NCR Equinox L5300 card readers “well prior to the Liability Shift," installed them, and trained its staff to use them. But it never got “EMV certified” by the card-network consortium that has been managing the rollout, despite having notified the card networks and issuers that B&R Supermarket companies were ready to be certified. B&R Supermarket charges that this delay is part of MasterCard and Visa’s plan to make small businesses pay for fraud liability as long as possible.