In 2021, Apple was considered the frontrunner to secure streaming rights to the National Football League’s Sunday Ticket package. Now, a year later, the company has reportedly dropped out of negotiations. The tidbit comes from a Puck article about Bob …
Apple has reportedly dropped out of NFL Sunday Ticket negotiations
In 2021, Apple was considered the frontrunner to secure streaming rights to the National Football League’s Sunday Ticket package. Now, a year later, the company has reportedly dropped out of negotiations. The tidbit comes from a Puck article about Bob …
Twitter reinstates accounts of some suspended journalists and Mastodon
Twitter has announced through its Safety account that it has “identified several policies where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules.” The website has already started reinstating accounts that were suspended for violating those rules, the tweet continued, and it will lift more suspensions every week over the next month. Twitter didn’t specify the policies it’s talking about and which accounts will be reinstated. But upon checking, the accounts of Mastodon and the journalists recently banned due to the website’s new doxxing rules are up and running again.
To understand what happened, we have to go back a few days. The website banned several accounts over the past week, starting with @ElonJet, the account that tracked flights of Elon Musk’s private jet using publicly available data. Other accounts that also tracked the planes of government agencies and high-profile individuals were banned, as well.
On his account, Musk announced that any account “doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended.” In a follow-up tweet, he said that a car carrying his child was “followed by crazy stalker” and that he was taking legal action against Jack Sweeney, the college student who ran @ElonJet, and “organizations who supported harm to [his] family.” As of this writing, the @ElonJet account is still suspended.
We’ve identified several policies where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules. We recently started reinstating accounts that were suspended for violations of these policies and plan to expand to more accounts weekly over the next 30 days.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) December 17, 2022
Shortly after that, Twitter also suspended the account of its rival social network Mastodon when it tweeted a link to the account tracking Musk’s jet on its own service. It’s worth noting that Twitter seems to have started flagging posts containing the word “Mastodon” as “sensitive content” days before this happened. Users also found themselves unable to post links to Mastodon servers.
In addition to Mastodon, Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists who report on Elon Musk and the social network itself. Most of them talked about Sweeney or linked to @ElonJet in some way, and based on Musk’s responses to questions about the event, the journalists were suspended due to Twitter’s new doxxing rules. One of the banned journalists, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, posted a screenshot of the tweet that the website had flagged for doxxing: It was a report about Mastodon’s suspension for tweeting a link to it service’s own @ElonJet account.
Following the journalists’ suspensions, Musk posted a poll asking people whether he should reinstate the accounts of users who doxxed his exact location in real time “now” or “in 7 days.” The “now” option won, and Musk promised that those accounts will be restored. So far, Twitter has reinstated Harwell’s account, along with the accounts of The New York Times’Ryan Mac, Mashable’sMatt Binder, The Intercept’sMicah Lee and CNN’sDonie O’Sullivan. Keith Olbermann’s account is still suspended, and it’s unclear if Twitter will lift @ElonJet’s suspension in the coming days.
John Carmack leaves Meta with a memo criticizing the company’s efficiency
John Carmack, the virtual reality pioneer who joined Meta from Oculus after its $2 billion acquisition, has left the social network. Business Insider first reported his departure, citing people familiar with the company, and published pieces of his int…
Google, Apple and Mozilla team up to build a better browser benchmark
Google, Apple and Mozilla are collaborating on a better web browser benchmark. Speedometer 3 will be a “cross-industry collaborative effort” from the Chrome, Safari and Firefox makers to create a new model that balances the companies’ visions for measuring responsiveness.
Three companies making a tool that will rate the effectiveness of their competing products sounds like a recipe for disaster. However, Speedometer’s governance policy includes a consent system that differs based on potential ramifications. For example, significant changes will require approval from the other two companies, while “non-trivial changes” will need consent from one of the other two parties. Meanwhile, “trivial changes” can be green-lit by a reviewer from any of the three browser makers. The policy’s aim is that “the working team should be able to move quickly for most changes, with a higher level of process and consensus expected based on the impact of the change.”
Unlike some past benchmarks, Speedometer 3 is being started as a cross-industry collaborative effort.
Building this will be hard work, and working together gives us a chance to build the best version to help make the Web faster for years to come. https://t.co/lZyegpIAeW— Mozilla Developer 👩🏾💻 (@mozhacks) December 15, 2022
The project will follow Speedometer 2, the current de facto benchmark developed by Apple’s WebKit team. Chrome, Safari and Firefox are three of the four most-used browsers today. That fourth browser, Microsoft Edge, doesn’t run its own engine, instead relying on Google’s open-sourced Chromium with Blink and V8 engines.
The Speedometer 3 project is still in its infancy, and its GitHub page warns that it is “in active development and is unstable.” The groups recommend using Speedometer 2.1 until development is further along, though we don’t yet know when Speedometer 3 will be ready.
Six things we learned from Formula E’s preseason test
The first in-depth testing for Formula E’s Gen3 car took place this week in Valencia, just one month away from the start of Season 9 in Mexico City. Across three full days, one simulated race and an added one-hour jaunt on a planned media day, some teams ran nearly 600 laps and over 2,000 kilometers to get a handle on what the new cars are capable of. The week wasn’t without incidents, of course, but Formula E co-founder and chief championship officer Alberto Longo said the sessions were “very successful.”
“The teams and drivers are obviously still learning and integrating the new system,” Longo explained. “We know that [going] from Gen2 to Gen3 is much harder to navigate than from Gen 1 to Gen 2, so it’s great to see that we are already much quicker than where we were with Gen2.”
After this week’s testing in Spain, here are the biggest things we learned about Formula E’s pending Gen3 debut next month.
The Gen3 cars look great on track
I’ll be the first to admit that when Formula E pulled the wraps off the Gen3 car in Monaco last April, I was a bit skeptical of the new, bold look. Once the teams started revealing their final liveries in the lead up to the Valencia test, I started to see the potential. All of the teams have been posting clips this week and Formula E has compiled footage as well, showing that the new cars do indeed look great on track despite their fighter jet-esque design.
The Gen3 car isn’t that much faster than Gen2 yet
When the Gen3 car was first revealed one of the main points Formula E hyped up was how much faster the new trim would be. That included a top speed of up to 200MPH. Of course, speed is dependent on a number of factors, including the circuit, but on paper the new cars should be much quicker than the Gen2 EVs. In the first practice session of the week, Maserati MSG Racing’s Maximilian Günther posted the quickest official time of 1:26.096, slower than the fastest lap of Valencia testing last year in the Gen2 car of 1:25.763. The quickest lap this week came when Günther notched a 1:25.127 on the final day.
“When developing a new car, it’s really important to collect as much data as possible and to get a good feel for the car, and I believe that we have achieved this over the past few days,” Günther said. “Now, we just need to refine some aspects of our performance and continue with our preparations ahead of the first race of the season in Mexico.”
Maserati MSG Racing
With the Gen3 cars being lighter and more powerful, an added 100kW to be exact, you’d expect the lap times to fall from the previous generation running. However, with limited testing, specifically in regards to the new tires, teams haven’t dialed-in their setups to take full advantage of the new cars just yet. Hankook told The Race that some drivers experienced the new compound “for the first time in their life” during the initial session in Valencia.
The new tires are posing a challenge
For the first eight seasons, Formula E ran Michelin tires. Starting with Season 9, however, the series is making the switch to Hankook. More specifically, it moved to a more sustainable compound that aligns with Formula E’s green initiatives. 30 percent of the new tires are made from environmentally-friendlier materials like natural rubber. The challenge for Hankook is not only does the tire have to be better for the Earth, it also has to work well in both wet and dry conditions since Formula E only runs one compound.
Autosport reports that Hankook tested “maybe even 80 different specs” of tire compounds during the development phase, according to the company’s head of motorsport Manfred Sandbichler. The end result is a tire where the inside is softer and the outside is harder – a combination that could have implications for how teams tackle corners at each circuit.
One thing that’s clear throughout the paddock is that the new Hankook tires are more durable than the final spec of Michelins. McLaren Racing’s Jake Hughes told Engadget recently that the new tires “behave very differently” and that they’re “a bit harder, a bit stiffer.” The harder tire should be more durable than what Formula E ran in the past, according to Hughes, as the degradation on the Michlins would lead to the treaded tire being nearly slick by the end of the race.
“We need to try to understand how we can maximize it,” he explained. “At some point we’re talking in miniscule details to try to find an advantage over the competition.”
Teams are dealing with reliability concerns
Formula E
With limited testing ahead of the official preseason sessions in Valencia, teams are finding issues with their cars. The Race reports that some teams were in such a crunch to make it to Spain that they didn’t have time to shakedown their cars beforehand to make sure the basic systems were functioning properly due to parts that arrived late. According to that report, around-the-clock work shifts were required for some to make it to testing.
During a mock race this week, eight of 22 cars retired before the end of the trial event. One car didn’t make the start due to battery issues and two others had to pit on the first lap. A handful of others had to visit pitlane, which doesn’t happen during a Formula E race unless you have an issue (until the series institutes charging stops at least). The two biggest problems seem to be with the Williams Advanced Engineering battery setups and the brakes, both of which The Race reported teams were having issues with in early November. Formula E is said to be working on a secondary braking system after a number crashes in testing prior to Valencia, but The Race understands that it won’t be available during the first two E-Prix in Mexico City and Diriyah.
Teams expect Gen3 cars to improve quickly and drastically
Maserati MSG Racing
This isn’t exactly a new development, but teams up and down the paddock echoed the sentiment after the handful of test runs. McLaren’s team principal Ian James told Engadget that he expects “a development rather than a complete evolution.”
“As much as we’ll prepare the best we can for Mexico and that first race, undoubtedly there’s going to be a very steep learning curve as we get into the new season,” he explained. “And a fast rate of development as well.”
Drivers are also clear there’s “a lot to learn and plenty of work to do” before the first race, as Maserati’s Edoardo Mortara explained. “This week of testing has been intense but overall positive, and although we’re still understanding the finer points of the Gen3, I think we are in a strong position,” he said. “From here, we will fully analyze our data, debrief and continue to gather simulations from HQ.”
The first race in Mexico City could be… interesting
The issues with batteries and brakes aside, there are a number of elements of a proper Formula E E-Prix that could make the first full race quite an adventure. The new tires pose a challenge on a full street circuit, as opposed to the smooth track in Valencia. Getting the rubber in the proper window for qualifying and managing any degradation over the course of the race will be key.
There are also some unknowns with race format as well, as Formula E plans to test a mandatory Attack Charge stop in certain races in Season 9. Attack Charge will give drivers a temporary power boost much like Attack Mode has in previous seasons. Formula E says the 30-second stop can deliver 4kWh of energy to power an “enhanced” Attack Mode where the power of the Gen3 cars increases from 300kW to 350kW. It’s unclear where the Attack Charge trials will take place as specific races weren’t announced when the updated sporting regulations were revealed last month.
NHTSA opens probe into GM’s autonomous driving technology
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration announced Thursday that it is opening an investigation into the self-driving technology behind General Motors’ robotaxi fleet. This announcement follows three reported accidents allegedly caused by Cruise vehicles braking hard or otherwise becoming immobilized in traffic, creating unannounced obstacles for other vehicles and resulting in rear-end collisions with other motorists.
“With respect to the incidents of hard braking, NHTSA has received three reports of the ADS initiating a hard braking maneuver in response to another road user that was quickly approaching from the rear,” the agency reports, noting that human supervisors were aboard for each incident. “In each case, the other road user subsequently struck the rear of the ADS-equipped vehicle.”
“With respect to the incidents of vehicle immobilization, NHTSA has been notified of multiple reports involving Cruise ADS equipped vehicles, operating without onboard human supervision, becoming immobilized,” the report continues. “When this occurs, the vehicle may strand vehicle passengers in unsafe locations, such as lanes of travel or intersections, and become an unexpected obstacle to other road users.”
In response the company touted its technology’s history of safe operations. “Cruise’s safety record is publicly reported and includes having driven nearly 700,000 fully autonomous miles in an extremely complex urban environment with zero life-threatening injuries or fatalities,” Hannah Lindow, Cruise spokesperson, told Engadget via email. “This is against the backdrop of over 40,000 deaths each year on American roads. There’s always a balance between healthy regulatory scrutiny and the innovation we desperately need to save lives, which is why we’ll continue to fully cooperate with NHTSA or any regulator in achieving that shared goal.”
The company goes on to argue that in the cases of hard braking, the vehicles were reacting to the actions of other drivers, had a human operator onboard (though the ADS was in control at the time), and has already met with the NHTSA regarding each incident. Cruise frames the immobilization events as equivalent to a flat tire, wherein the ADS encounters an unexpected and potentially dangerous situation, turns on the vehicle’s hazards and pulls off to the side of the road.
Cruise LLC is headquartered in San Francisco and was founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan. GM acquired the autonomous driving technology company three years later. Since then, General Motors has lavished its subsidiary with funding, facilities and staffing, even going so far as to develop its own processor chips for the Origin autonomous shuttle bus. The company began testing ADS rides in San Francisco in June, 2021 and earlier this year earned regulatory approval to charge for driverless taxi services within the city.
The company has also suffered setbacks in its pursuit of self-driving taxis. Division CEO Dan Ammann stepped down from his position in June, replaced for the interim by CTO and founder Kyle Vogt. Cruise made headlines in April when a police officer tried and failed to pull one over during a traffic stop and again in June when seemingly all of them decided that the corner of Gough and Fulton would make for a perfect impromptu parking lot.
As the NHTSA is sure it’s aware of every braking/immobilization incident to date, the agency is opening a preliminary evaluation,”to determine the scope and severity of the potential problem and fully assess the potential safety-related issues posed by these two types of incidents.” It has not announced a timeline for publication of the PE’s findings.
Ford F-150 Lightning prices are going up again
Ford F-150 Lightning prices are going up again. The US automaker is raising the electric pickup’s starting cost by $4,000, bringing the new entry price to $55,974. That’s a 40 percent increase over the electric vehicle’s initial starting price in May 2021.
Ford toldCNBC today that it is changing pricing “as a normal course of business due to rising material costs, market factors, and ongoing supply chain constraints.” Raw material costs of nickel, cobalt and lithium — crucial to electric car batteries — have soared alongside EV demand.
Through the end of November, Ford has only sold 13,258 F-150 Lightning units, but that number is a reflection of supply constraints rather than low demand (on the contrary, the truck is still a hot commodity). The company plans to boost production to 150,000 units by next fall — and it said earlier this week that it’s still on track to meet that goal. It recently added a third shift of workers to a Michigan production plant to help meet that goal.
Ford is the second-biggest American seller of electric vehicles (behind Tesla), and the F-150 Lightning is the top-selling electric truck. Considering Ford F-series trucks have been the best-selling vehicles in the US for three decades, that customer loyalty appears to be carrying over to EVs. Earlier this year, Engadget’s Roberto Baldwin rode along for a test drive and commented on how much it felt like a standard F-150.
Apple’s 2022 MacBook Air is down to $999, plus the rest of this week’s best tech deals
The cut-off dates for holiday shopping have mostly passed, but that doesn’t mean the deals have disappeared. We’re seeing prices that match Black Friday, like the Beats Fit Pro for just $160 and Bose’s QuietComfort Earbuds II for $249. Some items have …
Waymo now offers driverless rides between Downtown Phoenix and Sky Harbor Airport
Starting today, human-averse travelers in Phoenix can book a fully autonomous Waymo ride between the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and downtown. The Alphabet-owned company, which is also doubling its fully automated coverage area in the city, says the new route is the world’s only fully autonomous airport robotaxi service.
Waymo has accelerated its public rollout lately. In March, it received permission to charge for rides with a human safety driver in San Francisco. It also got approval last month to offer fully driverless cars there before rolling out service to the public earlier in December. San Francisco riders can now book a Waymo robotaxi across “a large portion of the city, including every neighborhood along the 17-mile Crosstown Trail.”
However, the company is still waiting for approval to charge for rider-only cars in San Francisco. It currently only offers service to Waymo employees, their guests and select members of the public. Waymo was the second fully autonomous service operating in San Francisco, behind GM-owned rival Cruise (although it only offers fully automated rides at night).
Waymo’s expansion means more Americans can book a driverless car, but it’s still modest compared to what you’ll see in China. Baidu’s robotaxi service is available to the public in larger Chinese cities, although with limitations on cars without a safety driver.