If you’ve picked up a Switch you’ve no doubt been impressed by the games and the overall design, but decidedly underwhelmed by the display—which is uglier than the ones found on cheaper products like the $100 Amazon Fire. Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Nintendo is considering another model of the Switch—this time with a display that actually shows off all those pretty games.
The current Switch ships with a subpar 6.2-inch, 720p LCD display. The LCD is not pretty, with elevated black levels that remove the contrast from images and leave everything looking washed out compared to the same content on a television (or a phone). I couldn’t stand the display back when the Switch launched, and was still unimpressed when I revisited the Switch 18 months later. So the idea of a new Switch, with a proper display, is mighty appealing.
According to the Wall Street Journal the display would not be an OLED—as is popular in the iPhone XS and Samsung Note 9—but an LED. That’s the kind of display found in products like the Essential Phone and Apple’s upcoming iPhone XR. LED displays aren’t quite as power efficient as OLEDs and don’t produce as dark blacks, but they are less expensive and can produce richer colors.
A 6.2-inch LED display would make the Switch feel like a much more quality hand held product—though it should be noted that while such a display could improve battery life, display quality, and even make the Switch thinner, it would also, likely, result in a more expensive product—and potentially one that is more easily damaged than the current model.
It should also be reiterated that this is not a done deal on Nintendo’s part. The Wall Street Journal story notes that Nintendo is only considering a new Switch, and that the new display is just one redesign option on the table.
The Switch, while selling well, is starting to see sales stagnate. Thus the new model to encourage more sales.
It’s not unusual. The Nintendo 3DS has had six different models available since it launched in 2011. The Sony PS4, which launched in 2013, has seen at least three models—same for the Microsoft Xbox One which launched that same year. As the cycle between major console refreshes grows larger, the number of mid-cycle updates grows too.
As for when a Switch refresh could appear? The Wall Street Journal reports that Nintendo is eyeing a 2019 launch. Better start saving now. (I’m mainly talking to myself.)
Get ready for the next generation of wifi technology: Wi-fi 6 (for so it is named) is going to be appearing on devices from next year. But will you have to throw out your old router and get a new one? And is this going to make your Netflix run faster? Here’s everything you need to know about the new standard.
A brief history of wifi
Those of you of a certain age will remember when home internet access was very much wired—only one computer could get online, a single MP3 took half an hour to download, and you couldn’t use the landline phone at the same time.
Thank goodness for wifi technology then, which gradually became cheap and compact enough to fit inside a router suitable for home use. The first wifi protocol appeared in 1997, offering 2Mbit/s link speeds, but it was only with the arrival of 802.11b and 11Mbit/s speeds in 1999 that people seriously started thinking about home wifi.
Photo: Alex Cranz (Gizmodo)
Wifi standards, as well as a whole host of other electronics standards, are managed by the IEEE: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Specifically, IEEE 802 refers to local area network standards, and 802.11 focuses on wireless LAN. In the 20 years since 802.11b arrived, we’ve seen numerous new standards pushed out, though not all of them apply to home networking kit.
The introduction of 802.11g in 2003 (54Mbit/s) and 802.11n in 2009 (a whopping 600Mbit/s) were both significant moments in the history of wifi. Another significant step forward was the introduction of dual-band routers with both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, tied to the arrival of 802.11n, which could offer faster speeds at shorter ranges.
Today, with 802.11ac in place, that 5GHz band can push speeds of 1,300Mbit/s, so we’re talking speeds that are more than 600 times faster than they were in 1997. Wi-Fi 6 takes that another step forward, but it’s not just speed that’s improving.
Explaining wifi technology can get quite technical. A lot of recent improvements, including those arriving with Wi-Fi 6, involve some clever engineering to squeeze more bandwidth out of the existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz your router already employs. The end result is more capacity on the same channels, with less interference between them, as well as faster data transfer speeds.
Turning wifi up to six
One of the most important changes Wi-Fi 6 brings with it is, of course, the new naming system: Using a simple succession of numbers is going to make it a lot easier for consumers to keep track of standards and make sure they’ve got compatible kit set up. The more technical term for Wi-Fi 6 is 802.11ax, if you prefer the old naming.
Older standards are getting retroactively renamed too—the 802.11ac standard becomes Wi-Fi 5, the 802.11n standard becomes Wifi 4, and so on. Expect to see the new Wi-Fi 6 name on hardware products and inside software menus from 2019, as well as funky little logos not unlike the one Google uses for its Chromecast devices.
As always, the improvements with this latest generation of wifi are in two key areas: Raw speed and throughput (if wifi was a highway, we’d be talking about a higher maximum speed limit for vehicles, as well as more lanes to handle more vehicles at once). Wi-Fi 6 will support 8K video streaming, provided your internet supplier is going to give you access to sufficient download speeds in the first place.
In practice that means support for transfer rates of 1.1Gbit/s over the 2.4GHz band (with four streams available) and 4.8Gbit/s over the 5GHz band (with eight streams available), though the technology is still being refined ahead of its full launch next year—those speeds may, in fact, go up (it’s been hitting 10Gbit/s in the lab). Roughly speaking, you can look forward to 4x to 10x speed increases in your wifi.
Another improvement Wi-Fi 6 will bring is improved efficiency, which means a lower power draw, which means less of a strain on battery life (or lower figures on your electricity bill). It’s hard to quantify the difference exactly, especially as Wi-Fi 6 has yet to be finalized, but it’s another step in the right direction for wifi standards—it shouldn’t suck the life out of your phone or always-on laptop quite as quickly.
Refinements in Wi-Fi 6 hardware and firmware should also mean better performance in crowded environments. You might finally be able to get a strong signal at your sports bar of choice, though don’t hold your breath. As always, a host of other factors (walls, microwaves, the number of people streaming Netflix in your house) are going to have an impact on the final speeds you see.
What will you have to do?
Not a lot. As is usually the case, Wi-Fi 6 is going to be backwards compatible with all the existing wifi gear out there, so if you bring something home from the gadget shop that supports the new standard, it will work fine with your current setup—you just won’t be able to get the fastest speeds until everything is Wi-Fi 6 enabled.
How long that takes is going to depend on hardware manufacturers, software developers, internet service providers, and everyone else in the industry. You might just have to sit tight until your broadband provider of choice deems the time is right to upgrade the hardware it supplies to you (though you could just upgrade the router yourself).
Photo: Adam Clark Estes (Gizmodo)
When you’re out and about in the wider world you might start to see certain networks advertising faster speeds, using the new terminology, but this rebrand is brand new: We’ll just have to wait and see how these new names and logos get used in practice. Would you swap coffee shops for Wi-Fi 6?
Bear in mind that it’s also going to take a while for this to roll out properly. When we say 2019, that’s the very earliest that fully approved Wi-Fi 6 devices are going to start appearing on the scene, so it might be months or years before everyone catches up. Some early devices making use of the draft technology have already appeared on the scene.
Even if you have no problems with download and upload speeds right now, Wifi 6 is intended to fix some of the pain points that still exist: Trying to get decent wifi in a crowded space, for example, or trying to connect 20 different devices to the same home router without the wireless performance falling off a cliff.
If you think about the number of smart speakers and smart lights and streaming dongles set up in the modern-day home, anything that adds more capacity to the network is going to help. And of course, those faster data transfer speeds don’t hurt either.
Data center hardware used by Apple and Amazon may have been fitted with surveillance micro-chips by Chinese server company Super Micro, claims Bloomberg in a new report. Almost 30 US companies reportedly fell prey to the “attack,” with the chips used to snatch intellectual property and trade secrets, according to Bloomberg‘s anonymous government and corporate sources. The report notes that no “consumer data is known to have been stolen.”
Apple has flat-out denied the allegations, claiming that it did not find the chips, while Amazon said it had “found no evidence to support claims of malicious chips or hardware modifications.” As for Super Micro, it denied that it introduced the chips during the manufacturing phase. And China’s foreign ministry has said that the country “is a resolute defender of cybersecurity.”
That just leaves Bloomberg, which claims the issue was first discovered by Apple in May, 2015 and quietly reported to the FBI. Later, Amazon independently found the chip and also informed US authorities. Apple reportedly severed ties with Super Micro in 2016. A follow-up investigation was then conducted, which reportedly remains open to this day. Apple and Amazon, however, both deny working with the FBI on a top-secret probe. The report lays the blame for the so-called “hardware hack” squarely at the feet of China’s regime.
Apple — which tends to refrain from issuing direct responses to specific reports — has taken the unorthodox step of categorically denying Bloomberg‘s revelations. “Over the course of the past year, Bloomberg has contacted us multiple times with claims …of an alleged security incident at Apple,” the company said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg. “We have repeatedly and consistently offered factual responses, on the record, refuting virtually every aspect of Bloomberg‘s story relating to Apple.
“On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement.”
This isn’t the first time a Chinese company has come under fire for surveillance in the US. Earlier this year, Donald Trump signed an act banning government personnel from using Huawei and ZTE devices, following years of concerns over the companies’ ties to China’s government.
This week, the Senate passed the FAA Reauthorization Act, which, among other things, renews funding for the Federal Aviation Administration and introduces new rules for airports and aircraft. But the bill, which now just needs to be signed by the president, also addresses drones. And while parts of the bill extend some aspects of drone use — such as promoting drone package delivery and drone testing — it also gives the federal government power to take down a private drone if it’s seen as a “credible threat.”
The wording comes from another bill, the Preventing Emerging Threats Act of 2018, which was strongly supported by the Department of Homeland Security and absorbed into the FAA Reauthorization Act. In June, as part of its argument as to why it needed more leeway when it comes to drones, the agency said that terrorist groups overseas “use commercially available [unmanned aircraft systems] to drop explosive payloads, deliver harmful substances and conduct illicit surveillance,” and added that the devices are also used to transport drugs, interfere with law enforcement and expolit unsecured networks.
However, the bill’s vague language and lack of oversight measures attracted criticism from groups like the ACLU, which said earlier this year that the proposed law contained “insufficient protections to ensure that such authority is not used arbitrarily, abusively or unnecessarily, and would permit conduct that raises privacy and due process concerns.”
The bill says that when a “credible threat” is posed by a drone to a “covered facility or asset,” the federal government can “disrupt control” of that device, “seize or exercise control” of it, confiscate it or “use reasonable force, if necessary, to disable, damage or destroy the unmanned aircraft system.” In the bill, “credible threat” is left undefined.
The EFF expressed concern over the bill, telling TechCrunch, “If lawmakers want to give the government the power to hack or destroy private drones, then Congress and the public should have the opportunity to debate how best to provide adequate oversight and limit those powers to protect our right to use drones for journalism, activism and recreation.”
The ACLU reiterated its objections as well. “These provisions give the government virtually carte blanche to surveil, seize or even shoot a drone out of the sky — whether owned by journalists or commercial entities — with no oversight or due process,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.
President Trump is fully expected to sign the bill into law.
It’s not easy being a bee these days. Apis mellifera, the Western honey bee, is crucial to agriculture worldwide but faces a growing number of pests and pathogens against which beekeepers have few weapons.
But the bees themselves may be showing us the way forward: New research suggests the foraging insects may obtain protection against some viruses by consuming fungi, then returning to the hive to spread its medicinal value.
Honey bees contribute more than $15 billion annually to U.S
Back in February, I got very excited about the Cadillac CT6 sedan. It didn’t handle better than its competitors. It wasn’t faster or better put-together. But it did come with Super Cruise; a cutting edge semi-autonomous driving assist that combines HD mapping and a proper driver monitoring system. Super Cruise is geofenced, so it only works on divided lane highways. And only when it knows you’re looking at the road ahead, thanks to that driver monitoring system. That made it the best such system on the market—yes, even better than Tesla’s Autopilot—and it seems Consumer Reports agrees. On Thursday it published its first-ever ranking of semi-automated driving systems, putting Super Cruise in at the top.
The proliferation of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) across the auto industry has been quite a thing to watch. Some features are there for driver convenience, like adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. Others—collision warning or emergency braking for example—are more consciously safety features. But the rollout can also be a bit bewildering, particularly when it comes to relative performance. The problem is that comparative testing is easier said than done, at least without the right resources.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is one of the few groups to have been doing this with some rigor. Now Consumer Reports joins the fray. Like IIHS, its first results are from a rather limited sample—in this case, it tested Super Cruise in a Cadillac CT6; Autopilot in Tesla Models S, X, and 3; ProPilot Assist in an Infiniti QX50 and Nissan Leaf; and Pilot Assist in a Volvo XC40 and XC60. (With regard to software versions, Consumer Reports says it evaluated the systems as they were operating in September 2018.)
“We have been evaluating these systems on a case-by-case basis for a few years, but we are at a tipping point where they are now going mainstream,” says Jake Fisher, director of Auto Testing at Consumer Reports. “Stacked up against each other, you can really see significant differences. The best systems balance capability with safeguards—making driving easier and less stressful in the right situations. Without proper safeguards, over-reliance on the system is too easy, which puts drivers at risk.”
Consumer Reports
Consumer Reports says it tested “not only how well the technology works but also how well it monitors driver engagement and reacts if drivers don’t respond to warnings.” For that reason alone I’m not surprised Super Cruise won, as it remains the only system to take driver monitoring more seriously than using a torque sensor to measure steering input. It also rated GM highly for making it clear when it was safe to use the system.
Tesla got good marks for Autopilot’s capabilities but did not do well when it came to monitoring or alerting its driver. ProPilot Assist came third, with Volvo coming last, in part because its displays can cause mode confusion. I don’t do this job for validation, but it’s always nice when another august publication comes to the same conclusion I have—and I agree entirely with Consumer Reports’ take.
Super Cruise is the most complete system on the market, and anyone who is serious about offering this level of driver assist needs to provide proper driver monitoring. (GM also needs to hurry up and make it available in more models.) Autopilot is extremely capable but doesn’t have your back the way Super Cruise does. ProPilot Assist is indeed very good about avoiding mode confusion. And Pilot Assist is the only system with which I’ve experienced mode confusion, assuming it was engaged when it wasn’t. Twice.
As a responsible arbiter of information, Consumer Reports also stresses that these kind of assists are really there for convenience and that operating them introduces new safety risks. As we stress every time we cover the topic, no matter what a car calls its combination of adaptive cruise control and lane keeping, it’s not responsible for situational awareness: that responsibility lies with the human in the driver’s seat.
In early August, Boeing’s Leanne Caret and SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell took the stage at Johnson Space Center to announce the first astronauts who will fly on their commercial crew spacecraft. It was a significant moment to see two of the most powerful women in aerospace alongside one another—two fierce competitors coming together for the good of the country.
As president and chief executive officer of Boeing’s Defense, Space, & Security unit, Caret said the company took pride in working with NASA and the aerospace industry to bring a human space launch capability back to America. ”All of us are here today because we stand for something new and profound,” Caret said. “It is personal for all of us in this room, together, returning American astronauts on American rockets from US soil and creating endless possibilities for generations to come.”
Caret, center, and Shotwell, far right, at Johnson Space Center in August.
Eric Berger
Around this time, half a dozen newspapers across the country—several in key space markets—began publishing an op-ed that criticized the process by which Boeing competitor SpaceX fuels its Falcon 9 rocket. The first op-ed appeared in a Memphis newspaper a week before the commercial crew announcement. In recent weeks, copies of the op-ed have also appeared in the Houston Chronicle, various Alabama newspapers, Albuquerque Journal, Florida Today, and The Washington Times.
Who placed the op-eds?
All of these op-eds were bylined by “retired spacecraft operator” Richard Hagar, who worked for NASA during the Apollo program and now lives in Tennessee. (Based upon his limited social mediapostings, Hagar appears to be more interested in conservative politics than in space these days). Each op-ed cites Hagar’s work on NASA’s recovery from the Apollo 1 fire and the hard lessons NASA learned that day about human spaceflight.
The pieces then pivot to arguing that SpaceX’s load-and-go fueling process—in which the crew will board the Dragon spacecraft on top of the Falcon 9 rocket before it is fueled—ignores the lessons that Hagar’s generation learned during Apollo.
“It’s concerning to learn that some of the newer private space ventures launching today don’t appreciate the same safety standards we learned to emphasize on Apollo,” the op-ed states. “I suppose for Mr. Musk, inexperience is replacing the abundant safety protocols drilled into us after witnessing the Apollo 1 disaster. Astronaut safety is NASA’s number one priority on any space mission. There is no reason it should not be for private space travel, but commercial space companies like SpaceX play by different rules.”
The Houston Chronicle op-ed was not subtle with its imagery.
HoustonChronicle.com
There are some factual inaccuracies here. For one thing, SpaceX does play by the same rules as Boeing for commercial crew—astronaut safety rules that NASA itself wrote. Moreover, NASA has already provisionally cleared load-and-go for Falcon 9 launches that will send the Dragon spacecraft into orbit.
To try to understand his viewpoint, Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds.
In fact, based upon our research, at least four of the six op-eds that we located were submitted by two people with gmail.com addresses. Their names were Josh Brevik and Casey Murray. Further research revealed that two people with these names worked as “associates” at a Washington, DC-based public relations firm named Law Media Group or LMG. We reached out to multiple editors at papers that ran the op-eds, and they confirmed that no LMG affiliation was disclosed to them. Attempts to reach Julian Epstein, the chief executive of LMG, by phone and email were unsuccessful.
Who funded the campaign?
According to the LMG website, the 15-year-old firm “develops and executes public-, Hill-, and agency-facing issue advocacy campaigns that shift the narrative in a changing world.” More bluntly, the SourceWatch website calls LMG a “secretive Washington DC public affairs firm” with a history of placing op-eds, and it seeks to mask the op-eds’ financial sponsors.
This is the homepage for LMG Public Affairs. Note the slogan “Winning the narrative in a changing world” and the first featured narrative (Boeing).
LMG
Here’s what LMG, short for Law Media Group, does, according to LMG.
LMG
Here are more featured case studies.
LMG
Boeing’s case study involved the KC-46 aerial refueling tanker.
LMG
Best-in-class messaging to get YOUR STORY framed on the opinion pages.
LMG
A list of “past and present” clients.
LMG
All of them for completion’s sake.
LMG
Ars could not confirm the ultimate sponsor of the op-eds, but there are some potentially pertinent facts. For one, Boeing is touted on the LMG website as a client, and it is listed as one of LMG’s three main “featured narratives” on its homepage. (LMG says, as part of its campaign for a Boeing tanker plane, that it “developed and executed an aggressive ‘outside game’ campaign working with dozens of major grassroots organizations, labor unions, suppliers and vendors and national security experts to make the case for Boeing’s bid. We developed messaging… and helped manage a newly developed social media campaign amplifying our nationwide chorus of genuine American voices supporting Boeing.”)
Boeing, which is not mentioned in the op-eds, is also the only competitor to SpaceX in the commercial crew program. Could Boeing be the client behind the anti-SpaceX op-eds? A spokesman for Boeing, Jerry Drelling, told Ars, “We have no comment.”
Boeing and SpaceX are now in the midst of a heated race to become the first private company to fly astronauts into orbit. Although NASA and the two companies are focused on safely flying people to the International Space Station, considerable prestige will accrue to the first company that launches humans from Florida into orbit. This achievement will return to the United States a capability that has not existed since July 2011, when the space shuttle stopped flying.
There is little love lost between SpaceX and Boeing based upon their competition for federal and commercial contracts and across a variety of aerospace ventures. As part of this competition, Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg and SpaceX founder Elon Musk have clashed publicly over who will land humans on Mars first.
In the last year, there have been dozens of negative op-eds that have sought to stir discontent about SpaceX practices, though it has been unclear if a coordinated campaign was behind them.Until recently, these op-eds appeared primarily in conservative publications. One novel element of the Hagar op-eds is that they were published in mainstream newspapers—and in the home states of NASA’s three main human spaceflight field centers in Texas, Florida, and Alabama.
