Technology News

Enlarge / Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan arrives to testify before the House Appropriations Subcommittee at the Rayburn House Office Building on May 15, 2024 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch )

A federal judge in Texas yesterday blocked the Federal Trade Commission's attempt to ban noncompete agreements that make it difficult for workers to change jobs or start new businesses. Judge Ada Brown in the Northern District of Texas granted a motion for summary judgment that was requested by a tax services firm and business groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce.

"The Court sets aside the Non-Compete Rule. Consequently, the Rule shall not be enforced or otherwise take effect on its effective date of September 4, 2024 or thereafter," the ruling said.

The judge wrote in a previous ruling that the FTC lacks authority to issue a rule banning noncompete agreements and granted a preliminary injunction. But that previous ruling only postponed the effective date of the rule as it applied to the plaintiffs, whereas yesterday's order blocks the FTC rule entirely.

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Enlarge / Ford hoped to build 600,000 EVs a year by now, a mix of Mustang Mach-E crossovers, E-Transit vans, and F-150 Lightning pickups. This year, sales are up 71 percent so far; by the end of June, Ford had sold almost 45,000 EVs. (credit: Ford)

Ford has scrapped plans to build some big three-row electric SUVs and is revising its North American electrification roadmap, the company announced this morning. The automaker, which comes in at a distant second to Tesla in the US electric vehicle sales charts, says the focus will now be on cheaper, more efficient EVs, including some new commercial vehicles. Those big SUVs will still show up at some time, but they'll be hybrids, not fully electric.

Ford has never been afraid to tear up an existing plan, particularly when it comes to EVs. The Mustang Mach-E was supposed to be a much more boring compliance car until an internal skunkworks called Team Edison came up with the idea of a crossover that could only be a Ford in 2017.

But it also had big ambitions for its EVs. It created a new division, called "Model e," to be responsible for EVs and announced it had locked up supplies for 600,000 EV batteries a year from 2023. In addition to the midsize Mach-E crossover, it created a fully electric version of its best-selling F-150 pickup truck and an electric E-Transit van.

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The AI ethics nonprofit Humane Intelligence and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology are launching a series of contests to get more people probing for problems in generative AI systems.

If you’re flying for the first time in a while—or just taking a particularly long trip—here are some ways to help you stay sane, healthy, and hydrated.

The automaker is killing its electric three-row SUV, delaying a next-gen pickup, and committing to future gas and diesel vehicles, citing a lack of consumer interest in full-EV cars.

The automaker is killing its electric three-row SUV, delaying a next-gen pickup, and committing to future gas and diesel vehicles, citing a lack of consumer interest in full-EV cars.

Enlarge / Shares in SentinelOne and Palo Alto Networks have risen since July’s IT outage, while CrowdStrike has shed almost a quarter of its market value. (credit: Getty Images)

CrowdStrike’s president hit out at “shady” efforts by its cyber security rivals to scare its customers and steal market share in the month since its botched software update sparked a global IT outage.

Michael Sentonas told the Financial Times that attempts by competitors to use the July 19 disruption to promote their own products were “misguided.”

After criticism from rivals including SentinelOne and Trellix, the CrowdStrike executive said no vendor could “technically” guarantee that their own software would never cause a similar incident.

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Enlarge / Eight years after the concept first wowed crowds, the Volkswagen ID. Buzz is ready to go on sale in the US. (credit: James Lipman/VW)

If it feels like many years since you first saw Volkswagen's retro electric microbus, the ID. Buzz, you're not wrong. It's surprisingly aptly named; I can't think of another car during the past decade that has aroused so much interest among people who don't usually care about four-wheeled transport. Nearly eight years after the concept made its debut, the Buzz is on sale in Europe and has been for a year. Now it's time for America to get its turn, with deliveries starting later this year.

We drove the Euro-spec Buzz almost two years ago, but it's fair to say the version that's coming to the US is a better proposition. The Buzz we drove had a shorter wheelbase, a smaller-capacity battery, and seats only for five, and if you sat in the back, there was no ventilation, and the windows couldn't be opened.

The US market will only receive the longer-wheelbase Buzz, which adds about 10 inches (250 mm) between the axles. This adds room for a third row of seats, making it a proper seven-seater. It should be a bit more humane sitting in the back, as there are air vents—we're waiting to drive it to find out if any windows open back there.

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Focus on your words and not on your toolbars with these eight minimal writing apps for your computer, your tablet, and even your phone.

These handy light bars have me quitting light strips.

The latest Covid-19 surge reportedly has officials considering approval of the new strain-matched vaccine as soon as this week.

With punchy lows, a brilliant midrange, and nearly sky-high detail levels, there's no denying these are among the best-sounding in-ears around.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Last Tuesday, loads of Linux users—many running packages released as early as this year—started reporting their devices were failing to boot. Instead, they received a cryptic error message that included the phrase: “Something has gone seriously wrong.”

The cause: an update Microsoft issued as part of its monthly patch release. It was intended to close a 2-year-old vulnerability in GRUB, an open source boot loader used to start up many Linux devices. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 8.6 out of 10, made it possible for hackers to bypass secure boot, the industry standard for ensuring that devices running Windows or other operating systems don’t load malicious firmware or software during the bootup process. CVE-2022-2601 was discovered in 2022, but for unclear reasons, Microsoft patched it only last Tuesday.

Multiple distros, both new and old, affected

Tuesday’s update left dual-boot devices—meaning those configured to run both Windows and Linux—no longer able to boot into the latter when Secure Boot was enforced. When users tried to load Linux, they received the message: “Verifying shim SBAT data failed: Security Policy Violation. Something has gone seriously wrong: SBAT self-check failed: Security Policy Violation.” Almost immediately support and discussion forums lit up with ​​reports of the failure.

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Amazon has updated its instructions for how customers should more securely implement AWS's traffic-routing service known as Application Load Balancer, but it's not clear everyone will get the memo.

Enlarge / We have doubts that any amount of Force powers will bring the show back. (credit: YouTube/Disney+)

In news that will delight some and disappoint others, Disney has canceled Star Wars series The Acolyte after just one season, Deadline Hollywood reports. The eight-episode series got off to a fairly strong start, with mostly positive reviews and solid ratings, albeit lower than prior Star Wars series. But it couldn't maintain and build upon that early momentum, and given the production costs, it's not especially surprising that Disney pulled the plug.

The Acolyte arguably wrapped up its major narrative arc pretty neatly in the season finale, but it also took pains to set the stage for a possible sophomore season. In this streaming age, no series is ever guaranteed renewal. Still, it would have been nice to see what showrunner Leslye Headland had planned; when given the chance, many shows hit their stride on those second-season outings.

(Spoilers for the series below. We'll give you another heads-up when we get to major spoilers.)

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Enlarge / Hospital staff and community members held a protest in front of Carney Hospital in Boston on August 5 as Steward has announced it will close the hospital. "Ralph" refers to Steward's CEO, Ralph de la Torre, who owns a yacht. (credit: Getty | Suzanne Kreiter)

As the more than 30 hospitals in the Steward Health Care System scrounged for cash to cover supplies, shuttered pediatric and neonatal units, closed maternity wards, laid off hundreds of health care workers, and put patients in danger, the system paid out at least $250 million to its CEO and his companies, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

The newly revealed financial details bring yet more scrutiny to Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre, a Harvard University-trained cardiac surgeon who, in 2020, took over majority ownership of Steward from the private equity firm Cerberus. De la Torre and his companies were reportedly paid at least $250 million since that takeover. In May, Steward, which has hospitals in eight states, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Critics—including members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP)—allege that de la Torre stripped the system's hospitals of assets, siphoned payments from them, and loaded them with debt, all while reaping huge payouts that made him obscenely wealthy.

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Enlarge / Firaxis has upped the ante on presentation for the cities. It's still a bit abstract and removed, but they have more vibrancy, detail, and movement than before. (credit: 2K Games)

2K Games provided a flight from Chicago to Baltimore and accommodation for two nights so that Ars could participate in the preview opportunity for Civilization VII. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

From squares to hexes, from tech trees to civic trees, over its more than 30 years across seven mainline entries, the Civilization franchise continues to evolve.

Firaxis, the studio that has developed the Civilization games for many years, has a mantra when making a sequel: 33 percent of the game stays the same, 33 percent gets updated, and 33 percent is brand new.

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• Welcome back to Albion. [credit: 22cans ]

If you're a gamer of a certain age, you probably have fond memories of Peter Molyneux as the mind behind ambitious games like Populous, Dungeon Keeper, and the Fable series. If you're of a slightly younger age, you probably remember him as the serial overpromiser behind Project Godus and a recent NFT game that somehow attracted $54 million in player pre-investment (it did actually launch in some form last year).

I bring up this history because, after years of keeping his head down, Molyneux made a surprise appearance at Gamescom's Opening Night Live event. He was there to introduce Masters of Albion, a title that host Geoff Keighley said Molyneux has "secretly been working on for the past three years" and which Molyneux himself describes as "an open-world god game full of combat, choices, mysteries, and story."

A short early trailer for the game takes us back to Fable's "familiar vast world of Albion, packed with stories, quests, treasures, and monsters." There, the residents of the town of Oakridge have to work to gather and process resources by day and then defend themselves from hordes of creatures by night.

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It's time to put away the pool noodles and get those butts back in seats. Save on backpacks, iPads, laptops, and more.

Enlarge / A time traveler with a flashlight would blow Indiana Jones' mind.

At first glance, Wolfenstein: The New Order developer MachineGames might seem like an awkward fit for the first (non-Lego) Indiana Jones video game since the Wii era. While there's some overlap in the over-the-top Nazi villain department, the "shoot your way through every obstacle" nature of the new Wolfenstein games doesn't seem to lend itself well to Indy's more free-wheeling, adventurous exploration style.

For the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, director Jerk Gustafsson said that going from first-person shooter to a "MachineGames adventure" style change has been a difficult tightrope walk for the developers. While the team never wanted to prevent the player from using their revolver during action scenes, there was the potential that giving a player that freedom would allow them to "just shoot their way through" in a way that's antithetical to Jones' character.

To help avoid this problem, Creative Director Alex Torvenius said most of the game has been balanced so that "it's dangerous to shoot your gun and it's dangerous to be shot at." Guns-blazing action will be a winning strategy in some in-game situations, but "[there are] many scenarios where you can go through the environment without using guns at all," he continued.

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