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(credit: Mike Mozart)

As expected, Comcast will officially offer a paid television service over the Internet. For now, the new service will only allow Roku and Samsung Smart TV owners to purchase access to the cable giant’s broadcast offerings. The program likely will be expanded over time.

As Ars reported two months ago, the Federal Communications Commission approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would force pay-TV companies to provide content and programming information to makers of third-party hardware and applications. This would create a software-based replacement for CableCard, allowing other companies to build set-top boxes or mobile applications that display a pay-TV subscriber's channels without a physical CableCard. (That vote has gotten support from the White House as recently as last week.)

Comcast’s new "Xfinity TV Partner Program" appears to be in direct response to that FCC move, although the company stated earlier this year in an FAQ that such a service was coming in 2016.

(credit: Valentina Palladino)

NEW YORK—Acer has been busy, and the company showed off some of its latest work at an event in New York City today. Acer announced a slew of new laptops and PCs, many of which build upon some of its other recently released products.

The Switch Alpha 12 laptop is the juiced-up version of its Aspire Switch 12 S that was announced back at CES. Instead of the Switch 12 S's Core M processor, the Alpha 12 supports sixth-generation Core i3U, i5, and i7 processors.

But Acer is pushing this device as an efficient and cool laptop above anything else. Engineers built the Switch Alpha 12 with a liquid cooling system and a fanless design. The heat created from the device powers the cooling system, keeping temperatures down. And since it lacks a fan altogether, operating sounds are kept quiet.

Convenient timing, HBO and Microsoft. Convenient. (credit: Xbox)

Last night while asking HBO's press relations team to look the other way and slip us Obama's copy of the Game of Thrones season six premiere, we also asked whether HBO Now would ever launch on a game console.

The video-streaming app, which lets users pay to watch all of HBO's programming without a cable subscription, has appeared on a number of streaming devices, but game consoles from Sony and Microsoft have been stuck in the old HBO GO days. For now, those users must instead steal passwords from cable-subscribing aunts and uncles rather than paying for their own a la carte HBO access.

We wondered if that situation might change in light of a new Game of Thrones season starting this weekend, as HBO has a precedent there. The company launched the Xbox 360's HBO GO app the same day as GoT's second season premiere in 2012. As it turns out, our hunch was right. With no advance notice, HBO Now rolled out its first console apps on Thursday, and they're landing exclusively on Xbox systems—both the Xbox One and the Xbox 360. An Xbox Live subscription is not required for either console.

(credit: Wikipedia)

The UK's intelligence agencies (MI5, MI6, and GCHQ) are spying on everything you do, and with only the flimsiest of safeguards in place to prevent abuse, according to more than a thousand pages of documents published today as a result of a lawsuit filed by Privacy International.

The documents reveal the details of so-called "Bulk Personal Datasets," or BPDs, which can contain "hundreds to millions of records" on people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.

These records can be “anything from your private medical records, your correspondence with your doctor or lawyer, even what petitions you have signed, your financial data, and commercial activities,” Privacy International's legal officer Millie Graham Wood said in a statement. "The information revealed by this disclosure shows the staggering extent to which the intelligence agencies hoover up our data."

Audi has tested a number of autonomous cars at the race track. There was Shelley, a TTS it built with the Revs program at Stanford. And a pair of autonomous RS7s have given demos and passenger rides at Hockenheim in Germany and Sonoma Raceway in the US. (credit: Audi)

Taking a vehicle to the race track to improve it has been a thing almost as long as we've had cars. Henry Ford built his brand's name on his early racing exploits, and so have countless others. So it's natural that some of the people interested in self-driving cars have been thinking about how the track can benefit this new technology. Joshua Schachter is one such person, and he's organizing the first autonomous track day, to be held on May 28th-29th at Thunderhill Raceway in Willow, California.

Self-driving cars and racing are two of my favorite things, so I spoke to Schachter to find out more. The idea is to create a venue where you can "run what you brung," whether it's a fully autonomous car (or kart), a set of sensors, or maybe some control software. "If you squint at it, and it's automotive, come try it on the track," he said.

Interest in autonomous race cars is starting to build. Later this year, a series called Roborace will support Formula E in 2016-2017, for example. But Roborace will provide all the teams with identical cars; the job of the teams will be to write algorithms to make their car the fastest on the track.

(credit: Spanish Coches)

In San Francisco this morning, US District Judge Charles Breyer said Volkswagen Group would buy back nearly 500,000 2.0L diesel vehicles which were discovered in September to have software that illegally disabled the emissions control system during normal driving conditions.

VW Group is facing some 600 lawsuits that Judge Breyer is overseeing collectively, and the German automaker was compelled by court order to present a plan for fixing the faulty vehicles by today. Specifics of the plan will be hammered out in the coming months.

Volkswagen will also set up a fund for people who bought certain diesel Jettas, Golfs, Passats, Beetles, and Audi A3s after 2009. Breyer said this would offer customers "substantial compensation," on top of the car buyback.