Author: Megan Geuss

A recent study from market research group Phoenix Marketing International has found that although more people have reported using Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay have adoption rates on par with where Apple Pay was several months into its launch. This suggests the two competing mobile payment technologies aren't far behind Apple in capturing market share.

Phoenix surveyed 3,004 credit card holders and concluded that an estimated 23 percent of the market had linked a credit card, debit card, or pre-paid card to either Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, or some combination thereof. (The survey reported its results as weighted percentages, however, as the company said it over-sampled millennials and affluent credit card holders. In raw data, 779 respondents, or 26 percent, had linked a card to one of the three mobile payment apps. All other percentages in this report are weighted.) Of those who had linked a card to a Pay app, up to 93 percent made at least one mobile payment purchase in a store, and about 81 percent have made at least one in-app purchase.

The survey also found that roughly 18 percent of card holders had signed up for Apple Pay, 11 percent for Android Pay, and 12 percent for Samsung Pay.

On Wednesday afternoon, Uber said that it had received a $3.5 billion investment from the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund. That makes it the biggest investment ever raised in a single round by a venture-backed company. In exchange, a managing director at the Saudi fund, Yasir Al Rumayyan, will take a seat on Uber’s board, according to the New York Times.

Uber has been a presence in Saudi Arabia since 2014, and it’s grown rapidly from there. In the country, women aren’t allowed to drive and their travel is often restricted without the permission of a male guardian. To get around, women either hire private drivers or go through licensed taxi or limo companies to travel throughout the country’s major cities. Speaking to male strangers is also verboten, and according to Fast Company, Uber only works through those licensed limo companies that had been operating with the monarchy's permission for years before Uber’s arrival. The company has said that approximately 80 percent of riders in Saudi Arabia are women.

Uber’s value proposition is that it consolidates taxi and limo information, making it easier to order a car and reducing wait times for rides. The company also helps with residency and work permit paperwork for foreign drivers in the country.

Electric vehicle startup Faraday Future doesn’t have a production-ready car yet, but it has said it wants to get to that milestone within two years. The company just broke ground on a $1 billion (£0.7 billion), 3 million-square-foot factory in North Las Vegas in April, and now it wants another factory on Mare Island, a former naval shipyard located in Vallejo, a city north of San Francisco.

On Tuesday evening, the Vallejo City Council unanimously approved a six-month exclusive negotiating contract with FF LLC, a special-purpose subsidiary of Faraday Future, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Over the next six months, the company will solidify its proposal for the 157-acre site and present it to third-party lawyers and consultants representing the city. Faraday Future has agreed that it will pay the city’s legal and consulting fees as well as a $200,000 non-refundable negotiation fee, the Times says.

Page Six, a gossip and culture spinoff of the New York Post, reported yesterday that Disney executives are unhappy with the current version of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the spinoff that’s supposed to tell the story in between Star Wars episodes III and IV. According to anonymous sources, the movie is now scheduled for an "expensive reshoot" over the summer, ahead of its December release.

A source elaborated that, "the movie isn’t testing well” and “Disney won’t take a back seat.”

Screen testing of a movie is common in Hollywood and tweaking the film according to the screen tester’s comments is routine, but the Page Six sources seem to suggest these alterations go beyond that.

Yesterday, Illinois senator Terry Link filed an amendment to the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) to relax rules on the collection of facial recognition data, and he attached that amendment to an unrelated bill pertaining to unclaimed property. But on Friday morning, the senator's spokesperson reached out to Ars saying that the bill "had been put on hold," although he would not comment on the reasons for the decision, nor would he speak to when or if the amendment might be revived. If it passes, the amendment would pull the rug out from under a number of lawsuits filed against Facebook, Google, and Snapchat for using facial recognition in photo tagging.

At first, it seemed that the amendment would be quietly pushed through the legislative process. A law firm representing plaintiffs in the Facebook case suggested that Sen. Link proposed the amendment yesterday and added it to a bill that has been languishing since February so that state representatives would move to quickly pass the amendment before Memorial Day.

But Link's amendment has drawn concern from privacy advocates. The Center for Democracy and Technology wrote that the piece of legislation was proposed "without time for sufficient public debate, less than a week before the end of a legislative session" in an "undemocratic maneuver that minimizes the potential for public engagement on a vital issue of policy and technology." The Electronic Privacy Information Center also wrote that the amendment "would undercut legal protections, exempting facial recognition software from the law." Chris Dore, a partner at the firm representing the Illinois plaintiffs, said that the Illinois Attorney General had also come out this morning against Link's amendment. The Attorney General's Office confirmed to Ars that it is opposed to the changes, although it gave no further statement.

Nasdaq officials have told MassRoots, a sort of “Facebook for pot,” that it can't join the exchange.

The Denver-based social network has 775,000 users from the 24 states where marijuana is legal medicinally (including those states where it's also legal recreationally), who use the platform to find like-minded people in their area, learn about nearby dispensaries, and follow pot legalization news. MassRoots has said it meets the criteria for listing on Nasdaq—it has a $40 million market capitalization value and “well over 300 shareholders” through over-the-counter markets, according to CNN Money.

MassRoots alleges that the decision to deny the social media platform a place on Nasdaq was due to the fact that marijuana use and cultivation remains a federal crime. “On May 23, 2016, Nasdaq denied MassRoots' application to list on its exchange for being cannabis-related,” the company wrote. “We believe this dangerous precedent could prevent nearly every company in the regulated cannabis industry from listing on a national exchange, making it more difficult for cannabis entrepreneurs to raise capital and slow the progression of cannabis legalization in the United States.”

On Sunday evening, Japanese newspapers reported that an ATM heist involving around 1,400 machines in convenience stores resulted in the loss of 1.4 billion yen ($12.7 million).

The theft took place on May 15, a Sunday, between the hours of 5am and 8am. ATMs were targeted across Tokyo and 16 other prefectures in the country. Police said they believe up to 100 people were involved in the heist, according to the Kyodo News Agency. The thieves apparently went to ATMs like those found in 7-11s across Japan and swiped counterfeit South African credit cards, created using information from cards issued by South Africa's Standard Bank.

At each of the approximately 1,400 ATMs that were struck, the culprit withdrew 100,000 yen (about $900), which is the maximum withdrawal permitted on the machines.

On Friday evening at a Star Trek fan event, director J.J. Abrams indicated that CBS and Paramount would drop a copyright infringement lawsuit against Axanar Productions, a fan-led, crowd-funded production company created to make production-quality Star Trek fan fiction. CBS and Paramount confirmed Abrams' comment to Buzzfeed reporter Adam Vary after the event.

Vary also reported that Alec Peters, Axanar's executive producer who was in the audience on Friday night, was unaware that the two studios were intending to drop the suit against his company until he heard Abrams' story that evening.

CBS and Paramount filed the lawsuit against Axanar Productions and its executive producer, Alec Peters, in December. Although the two companies have encouraged fan fiction in the past, the Axanar project intended to make a professional-looking Star Trek feature film, even hiring people who had worked on canon Star Trek installments before, and CBS and Paramount took umbrage with that plan. In March, lawyers for CBS and Paramount detailed many of the specific instances in which Axanar Productions had allegedly infringed on the studios' copyrighted works during a 20-minute prequel called Prelude to Axanar. Although Axanar Productions filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, a judge ruled in early May that the fan-supported company would have to face the allegations from CBS and Paramount in court.

This week, some misaligned mirrors at the nation's biggest solar thermal energy plant caused an electrical fire that took out one of the plant's three boiler towers. The fire comes as the plant has been under pressure from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for failing to meet its productions targets in the two years since the plant opened.

The solar thermal plant, called the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, is distinct from photovoltaic solar plants in that it doesn't use solar panels. Instead, it relies on an array of 78-square-foot mirrors, known as heliostats, to direct the hot desert sun to one of three 459-foot-high boiler towers. The heat creates steam in the boiler towers, which powers generators to create energy, which is then sold to PG&E and Southern California Edison.

On Thursday morning around 9:30 am, according to the Associated Press, some poorly-aimed heliostats focused the sun's energy about two-thirds of the way up the tower instead of at the boiler at the top of the tower. This caused electrical cables to catch fire, melting and scorching steam ducts and water pipes on the tower. Even though the plant reported that its personnel put the fire out within 20 minutes, NRG Energy told the Associated Press that it did not know when the tower would be back online. A second tower is also down for maintenance, leaving only one boiler tower producing energy for Ivanpah.

This week brought confusion for General Motors and its German subsidiary Opel.

US-based General Motors told the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that it had misstated the fuel economy on some 130,000 Chevy Traverses, GMC Acadias, and Buick Enclaves from 2016, overestimating the cars' mileage by 1-2 miles per gallon. GM has said it will compensate customers for the miles per gallon they thought they were getting, possibly with gift cards. The automaker also halted the sales of another 60,000 affected vehicles.

GM said that the misstated mileage came from incorrect calculations made by the company when it was updating numbers for their 2016 models. The company said that new “emissions-related” hardware had changed the cars' miles per gallon, and GM failed to take that change into account. GM noted that its engineers discovered the error as they were working on the 2017 models.