Author: Megan Geuss

(credit: Mitchell Weinstock)

Director Gavin Hood is bursting to talk about his new project, Eye in the Sky. That's probably because his film, which debuts this weekend, involves many modern-day topics of discussion—things like the evolution of drone technology or the ethical implications of autonomous warfare.

What catches your eye first about Eye in the Sky is the tech. Even though Hood's movie is about drone warfare, the military-grade drone cruising over Kenya is not really what Eye in the Sky is about. Besides a few quick CGI-ish shots of a Reaper in flight, the bulk of the spying is done by an amusingly mechanical hummingbird drone and a tiny, camera-rigged mechanical beetle. Hood said that while the two drones aren't exactly plucked from a current military reality, both are based on prototypes that have been built (in the case of the hummingbird) or described as micro-air vehicles or MAVs (in the case of the beetle).

The director added that he didn't want to get too hung up on what's current today, because drone technology is changing quickly:

This has been a big week and a big year for small autonomous vehicle startups. This morning, General Motors announced that it had purchased Cruise Automation, a Silicon Valley-based autonomous vehicle startup of 40 people that already has a permit from the California DMV to test its systems on public roads in that state. And on Wednesday, Toyota hired all 16 employees of Jaybridge Robotics, a Massachusetts-based self-driving car company.

In GM’s case, Re/code reports that anonymous sources say the American automaker spent more than $1 billion to acquire Cruise, which will remain in Silicon Valley while it works under GM’s umbrella. Cruise had previously raised $18.8 million in funding, and it recently released a $10,000 after-market system that would make an Audi A4 or S4 self-driving.

GM is hardly being under-the-radar about its self-driving car ambitions. Earlier this year, the automaker pledged $500 million to Lyft to partner with the ride-sharing company in autonomous taxi research. A few weeks later, it also bought the defunct ride-sharing service Sidecar.

(credit: Erik B)

On Wednesday afternoon, Volkswagen Group said that the head of the US branch of the company, Michael Horn, will be stepping down to "pursue other opportunities immediately,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Horn led Volkswagen’s US operations since January 2014, and his departure comes as VW Group is under extreme scrutiny for building its cars with "defeat devices,” or software on the car’s engine management system that disables the car’s emissions control system when its driving under normal conditions, but which enables the emissions control system when the car has to pass laboratory testing.

Volkswagen said Horn’s resignation decision was reached in "mutual agreement.” Hinrich J. Woebcken, a Volkswagen Group chairman and the head of VW’s North America operations, will lead the US division in the interim.

Amazon has signed a lease on 20 Boeing 767 freighter planes, according to Reuters. This comes at a time when the company has been making quiet moves to invest in a variety of logistics-focused services, presumably to gain more control over how and when its packages are delivered.

A big part of Amazon’s value proposition is that it can get items to customers fast enough that they’d prefer to buy the item online as opposed to in a brick-and-mortar store. The company has experimented with conveniently located lockers in city centers, and it has proposed schemes to deliver items via drone.

In January, Amazon China also registered to become an “ocean freight forwarder,” essentially giving the company the right to subcontract shipments from China to the US. An Amazon-owned subcontracting permit would help the company compete with other overseas suppliers and could give the company a leg-up if it wanted to get into the logistics industry.

(credit: Bleecker Street)

While there have been no shortage of lackluster dramas featuring drones, there has yet to be a definitive Saving Private Ryan or Apocalypse Now-type war epic that really brings drama and pathos to drone warfare. Eye in the Sky, opening March 11 in the US, aims to be that movie. And it does a remarkably good job, not only of building tension around the act of firing a missile from a drone, but also of making the bureaucratic arguments behind the drone strike seem as interesting as the action.

Part of the horror of drone warfare is that the drama is one-sided—only the victim has a full story to tell. The drone is emotionless. Even for the drone operator, killing becomes the cold-blooded entry of GPS coordinates, a joystick maneuver, the calm pull of a trigger in a quiet room. If pathos exists within this narrative, it merely runs in parallel to the calculating and detached drone operations.

But with Eye in the Sky, director Gavin Hood tries to capture some of the human emotion that goes on between the command to fire a missile and the pull of the trigger. The plot goes like this: Helen Mirren plays Colonel Katherine Powell, a British military officer who’s been following a number of targets, including a British woman who has been working with Somalian terrorist group al-Shabaab in Kenya. When Powell gets word that a number of her targets, including the British woman, will be meeting at the same house, she asks for assistance from the US military for the capture mission.

On Tuesday, The Guardian reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has changed its rules regarding how it redacts Americans’ information when it takes international communications from the National Security Agency’s (NSA) database. The paper confirmed the classified rule change with unnamed US officials, but details on the new rules remain murky.

The new rules, which were approved by the secret US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), deal with how the FBI handles information it gleans from the National Security Agency (NSA). Although the NSA is technically tasked with surveillance of communications involving foreigners, information on US citizens is inevitably sucked up, too. The FBI is then allowed to search through that data without any “minimization” from the NSA—a term that refers to redacting Americans’ identifiable information unless there is a warrant to justify surveillance on that person.

The FBI enjoys privileged access to this information trove that includes e-mails, texts, and phone call metadata that are sent or received internationally. Recently, the Obama administration said it was working on new rules to allow other US government agencies similar access to the NSA’s database.

BMW

The Vision Next 100 is inspired by BMW designers' dreams of the future.

4 more images in gallery

BMW announced a concept car today that will be on display this year as part of the company’s 100-year anniversary celebration. The car, a sedan that BMW is calling the “Vision Next 100," eschews excessive homage to the past and leans hard on a future-focused aesthetic. It almost looks as if the car is wearing one of those gold-and-silver jumpsuits that will be the uniform of the citizenry in 2100.

In a statement, Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG Harald Krüger said that the concept was meant to embody how BMW is looking forward to the next century of auto trends. “We have demonstrated on many occasions throughout our history that we are capable of learning fast and taking bold steps,” Krüger said.

The Vision Next 100 is a vehicle with both autonomous and manual driving options, something that’s been popular in concept cars from automakers in the past year (check out our article on Volvo’s autonomous/manual hybrid car for reference). It seems automakers are anticipating a world where autonomous driving is an option, but not the only option. In the future, dealers can still up-sell customers on how well a car drives because customers won’t want to be driven by a computer all the time, or so luxury automakers are betting.

On Monday, the US Supreme Court declined to hear Apple’s request for an appeal on a ruling that said the company was liable for violating antitrust laws and engaging in price-fixing by letting publishers set prices for e-books sold on Apple's iBooks platform. Now out of options, Apple will have to pay $400 million to e-book consumers and $50 million to plaintiff’s lawyers, as per a settlement that the company reached in 2014.

In 2012, Apple and five publishers (Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan) were sued by the Department of Justice and 33 states’ attorney general offices for conspiring to offer e-books at a higher price than Amazon’s loss-leading $9.99. The publishers all eventually settled for a total of $166 million to states and consumers, but Apple held out and eventually lost a judgement in Manhattan district court.

The company then appealed to the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that it had actually boosted competition by offering new-release books for $12.99 to $14.99. "Antitrust laws are intended to foster competition, not keep prices down at any cost,” Apple wrote in a rebuttal to the district judge’s ruling in 2014.

(credit: tokyoform)

On Friday Japan’s Ministry of Transportation said that it had found discrepancies between lab and real-world emissions measurements for diesel vehicles from Toyota, Nissan, and Mitsubishi. However, the ministry said that it had not found any illegal software on the vehicles and that the automakers had not violated any of Japan’s regulations.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Toyota’s Hiace van and the Land Cruiser Prado sport-utility vehicle, as well as Nissan’s X-Trail SUV and Mitsubishi’s Delica D:5 all emitted between four and 10 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) that is allowed in Japan's real-world driving tests.

Japan has been testing vehicles sold in the country after the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) discovered that diesel vehicles sold by Volkswagen Group were emitting many times the legal limit of NO_x due to illegal software placed on the cars that let them cheat on lab testing conducted by regulators. The ensuing scandal has sent Volkswagen’s stock into a nosedive and has potentially put the company on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in fines.

(credit: ahhhhhlexis)

In a public statement on Wednesday evening, Volkswagen AG said that its top executives had been briefed on issues relating to the diesel emissions scandal prior to the time that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the company a Notice of Violation last fall. Still, the company maintains that its CEO may not have understood the gravity of the situation.

VW Group has previously been cagey about whether top executives knew that engineers had been installing illegal defeat devices in diesel vehicles. (The term “defeat device” here refers to lines of code in the engine management software.) So-called defeat devices suppress the car’s emissions control system when it’s being driven normally, allowing the system to work when the car is being tested in a lab. This setup resulted in diesel Volkswagens, Audis, and Porsches releasing many times the allowed limit of NO_x emissions every time the car got on the road.

If top executives knew about the defeat devices, they could face additional lawsuits from shareholders on top of the billions in fines that the EPA and the Department of Justice have sued VW Group for. The company also must account for the cost to fix or buy back the affected cars.