An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [T]he U.S. has traditionally paid for the upkeep of its roads via direct taxation of gasoline and diesel fuel, which means that as our fleet becomes more fuel-efficient, that revenue will drop in relation to the total number of vehicle miles traveled each year. As a result, some states are starting to grapple with the problem of how to get drivers to pay for the roads they use in cars that use less or even no gas per mile. At the start of this year, Utah has begun a pilot Road Usage Charge program, coupled to an increase in registration fees for alternative fuel vehicles. Assuming a state gas tax of 30c/gallon and 15,542 miles/year driven, Utah says it collects $777 a year from a 6mpg heavy truck, $311 from a pickup getting 15mpg, $187 from a 25mpg sedan, $93 from a 50mpg hybrid, and nothing from anyone driving a battery EV.

So in 2020, Utah is increasing vehicle registration fees. In 2019, registering a BEV in Utah would cost $60; in 2020 that will be $90, increasing to $120 in 2021. PHEV fees were $26 in 2019, increasing to $39 this year and $52 in 2021, and not-plug-in hybrid fees have gone from $10 to $15, increasing to $20 next year. An extra $30 a year -- or even $60 a year -- is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, particularly considering how much cheaper an EV is to run. But Utahns with EVs have an alternative. Instead of paying that flat fee, they can enroll in the pilot program that involves fitting a telematics device to the car. The device tracks the actual number of miles driven on Utah's roads. These are billed at a rate of 1.5c/mile, but only until the total equals whatever that year's registration fee for the vehicle would have been; participating in the pilot means you could pay less than you would otherwise, but Utah's Department of Transportation says that participants would not ever be charged more than that year's registration fee. The data will be collected by a contractor called Emovis, which operates toll roads around the U.S. As for Oregon -- another state working to solve this problem, the state is increasing its state gas tax by 2c/gallon, and like Utah, it's also increasing vehicle registration fees. "Now, fees for registering your car in Oregon will depend on how many miles per gallon your car gets; a two-year registration for something that gets below 19mpg will cost $122, rising to $132 for a vehicle between 20â"39mpg, then $152 for a vehicle that gets 40mpg or better, and $306 for a BEV," reports Ars Technica.

Thankfully, if you own a 40+mpg vehicle or a BEV, you can cut that two-year fee to $86 by enrolling in OReGO. However, you will need to fit your qualifying car with a telematics device to track the actual miles traveled on the state's roads. "Those are billed at 1.8c/mile -- Oregon evidently decided its roads are worth a little more than those in Utah -- but you can then get credited for any fuel tax you pay in the state," the report adds.

A U.S. judge has awarded $12.8 million to 22 unnamed women, ruling that they were tricked into appearing in widely distributed online porn videos. The BBC reports: Some of the models duped by the owners and operators of the GirlsDoPorn website had become suicidal, he said. They were told the videos were for a private collector or overseas DVDs, according to the 181-page judgement. The women -- aged 18-23 when they shot the videos -- were also assured the videos would never appear online. But they were uploaded to GirlsDoPorn's subscription-based amateur porn website, and clips were shared on some of the world's most popular free-to-view adult websites.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright ordered GirlsDoPorn chief executive Michael Pratt, 36, videographer Matthew Wolfe, 37, and porn actor Ruben Garcia, 31, to take the videos down from GirlsDoPorn and take steps to get them removed from other sites too. GirlsDoPorn markets itself on the premise that the women in the videos are not professional porn stars.

SpankiMonki shares a report from CNBC: Tesla said it delivered 92,550 Model 3 cars and 19,450 Model S and X vehicles during the fourth quarter. The company was expected to deliver 87,900 Model 3, 9,800 Model S and 9,300 Model X vehicles, according to an average of analysts surveyed by FactSet. Investors were also watching production numbers. In the second and third quarters of 2019, Tesla delivered more cars than it produced. The production versus deliveries gap widened in the fourth quarter. In the third quarter, Tesla manufactured 96,155 vehicles and delivered 97,000 vehicles. In the fourth quarter, it manufactured 104,891 vehicles and delivered 112,000. The electric-car maker said it has produced just under 1,000 cars that are ready for sale at its new factory in Shanghai. Tesla started delivering vehicles to Chinese customers late last month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple has expanded a lawsuit against an iOS virtualization company, claiming that its actions facilitate jailbreaking and violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibition on circumvention of copyright-protection systems. Apple sued Corellium, a company that sells access to virtual machines that run copies of the operating system used in iPhones and iPads, in August 2019. Apple said that Corellium sells "perfect replicas" of iOS without a license from Apple and markets its software as "a research tool for those trying to discover security vulnerabilities and other flaws in Apple's software." But instead of aiding good-faith security research, Corellium "encourages its users to sell any discovered information on the open market to the highest bidder," Apple alleged.

The first version of Apple's lawsuit accused Corellium of copyright infringement. A new version filed on December 27 alleges both copyright infringement and "unlawful trafficking of a product used to circumvent security measures in violation of 17 U.S.C. 1201," a statute that's part of the DMCA. Apple argued that Corellium gives users the ability to jailbreak iOS for either benign or malicious purposes. In response to the new allegations, Corellium CEO Amanda Gorton said "Apple's latest filing against Corellium should give all security researchers, app developers, and jailbreakers reason to be concerned."

Corellium is "deeply disappointed by Apple's persistent demonization of jailbreaking," with Gorton writing that "developers and researchers rely on jailbreaks to test the security of both their own apps and third-party apps." Apple's filing, according to Corellium, essentially "assert[s] that anyone who provides a tool that allows other people to jailbreak, and anyone who assists in creating such a tool, is violating the DMCA." Apple, Gorton wrote, "is using this case as a trial balloon in a new angle to crack down on jailbreaking" and "is seeking to set a precedent to eliminate public jailbreaks."

Many users have taken to the Lutris Forums to report that EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V. "Good friends, finally after some time without being able to play Battlefield V for Linux, this week I was using lutris-4.21, I was having fun when my anti-cheat, FairFight, blew me out of the game, so I was banned," writes one user. "As I was not using any cheating, I think the anti-cheat considered dxvk or the table layer that used at the time as cheating..." Another user said the "same problem" happened to them, and they "got banned on tuesday for cheating."

While some users await a response from EA, others have received an email confirming the action that was taken on their account. "... After thoroughly investigating your account and concern, we found that your account was actioned correctly and will not remove this sanction from your account," the email states.

We've seen this happen on multiple occasions with Blizzard, but they eventually fixed the problem the first time. In a comment on Hacker News, user jchw writes: "Anti-cheat software is an absolute shit show of cat-and-mouse tactics. It's often difficult to distinguish anti-cheat software from rootkits or spyware. They're invasive and user hostile, and they frequently cause collateral damage that is swept under the rug and that support tacitly refuses to acknowledge..."

New submitter grunby shares a report from Gothamist: The NYC Department of Transportation said in a statement that parking meters are not currently accepting credit card payments and pre-paid parking cards. "The outage was caused by a configuration error in the credit-card payment software used by Parkeon, a vendor for automated parking systems around the world," the DOT wrote. "The software in the model of Parkeon meter used in New York City had established an end date of January 1, 2020 -- and had never been updated by the company. Cities worldwide using the same meters/software began seeing a series of cascading credit card rejections, starting in Australia, as the calendar reached that date." NYC DOT crews are now in the field reconfiguring the software at individual meters -- the NY Times notes that NYC has 14,000 meters covering some 85,000 spaces, so it may take a little while longer to fix. The report notes that parking meters are still accepting coins, and the ParkNYC app is still working if you want to use credit cards.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: "We want to miniaturize accelerator technology in a way that makes it a more accessible research tool," explained project lead Jelena Vuckovic in a Stanford news release. But this wasn't designed like a traditional particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider or one at collaborator SLAC's National Accelerator Laboratory. Instead of engineering it from the bottom up, they fed their requirements to an "inverse design algorithm" that produced the kind of energy pattern they needed from the infrared radiation emitters they wanted to use. That's partly because infrared radiation has a much shorter wavelength than something like microwaves, meaning the mechanisms themselves can be made much smaller -- perhaps too small to adequately design the ordinary way. The algorithm's solution to the team's requirements led to an unusual structure that looks more like a Rorschach test than a particle accelerator. But these blobs and channels are precisely contoured to guide infrared laser light pulse in such a way that they push electrons along the center up to a significant proportion of the speed of light.

The resulting "accelerator on a chip" is only a few dozen microns across, making it comfortably smaller than a human hair and more than possible to stack a few on the head of a pin. A couple thousand of them, really. And it will take a couple thousand to get the electrons up to the energy levels needed to be useful -- but don't worry, that's all part of the plan. The chips are fully integrated but can be put in a series easily to create longer assemblies that produce larger powers. These won't be rivaling macro-size accelerators like SLAC's or the Large Hadron Collider, but they could be much more useful for research and clinical applications where planet-destroying power levels aren't required. For instance, a chip-sized electron accelerator might be able to direct radiation into a tumor surgically rather than through the skin. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

Google has begun sunsetting its print-replica magazine service. From a report: Paid Google Magazine users have reportedly begun receiving emails announcing that the service is shutting down. The email said that users won't be able to purchase new issues or renew magazine subscriptions via Google News, Android Police reported on Friday. The last subscription payment will be refunded within 30 days, the email said. The email said users will still be able to access previously-purchased issues in the Following or Favorites tab, depending on the app.

Helsinki, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Singapore, and other metros have been experimenting with on-demand buses -- and not seeing a lot of success. From a report: Since September, commuters using Shanghai's Number 9 bus route have had a new way of catching a ride. Rather than stand at a designated stop, they open a smartphone app and book a ride to wherever they're going. The service, provided by Alibaba, takes those reservations into account and calculates where the bus should go, using the company's artificial intelligence to customize the route. The idea is to boost ridership -- and curb traffic --by making public transit more convenient. Shanghai is just the latest city to give this sort of scheme a try. From Helsinki, Finland, to Sydney, cities around the world have spent the past few years trying to implement AI-fueled, on-demand bus services. Few have succeeded. Earlier this year, Singapore decided against renewing a pilot for on-demand buses. In Germany, microtransit company CleverShuttle -- which bills itself as more of a ride-pooling service than a bus -- pulled out of three of the eight cities it was operating in, citing economic and bureaucratic hurdles.

In a pilot project with shared rides company Via, bringing underserved residents to public transit nodes, Los Angeles Metro is spending $14.50 per trip -- twice what it spends on a regular bus trip. On-demand buses have been a thing for decades. Public transit agencies often call them demand-responsive buses, and deploy them to serve users who lack easy access to standard routes because they live especially far away, or may have special needs. Because they reach relatively few people, they're expensive to operate. They're inefficient too, often making riders wait undetermined amounts of time for a ride. So cities must strike a balance between making public transit accessible to the largest number of residents, and meeting their budget goals.

The dogs, known as Aibos, are companion robots made by Sony -- robots that don't necessarily do much apart from providing company and comfort. From a report: Every Aibo -- Japanese for "companion" -- is manufactured identically, besides a choice between silver and white or a brown, black, and white version. They all have rounded snouts that include a camera for facial recognition capability, large, oval eyes to reveal their expressions, and a body that can turn on 22 different axis points to give them a range of motion. The owner decides the gender when they set them up, which determines the pitch of its bark and how it moves. They're cute. They know when you're smiling. And through machine learning and recognizing people with its camera, Aibos also shift their personality over time based on their interactions with people they spend time with. Soon, they become much more than a store-bought toy.

Still in the "off" position in the cafe, the Aibos' paws remained outstretched and their heads turned to one side. But one by one, as their owners kneeled down to turn them on from a switch at the scruff of their neck, each came to life. The screen of their doll-like eyes blinked open, they lifted their heads, stretched out their plastic limbs, and leaned back on their hind legs before standing on all fours. Almost like real dogs, they shook their heads as if to ward off sleep after a nap, wagged their tails, and barked.

The tagline "Your best buys are always at Fry's" once blanketed Bay Area airwaves, but that's no longer true of the computer retailer's Palo Alto store. From a report: A temple of electronics known as "ground zero for geek culture," the Portage Avenue Fry's Electronics closed last week after almost 30 years in business. "The Palo Alto store was a fixture for techies everywhere. It's sad they closed," said Abbi Vakil, who works as a hardware engineer in the city. "You will not find an engineer in the Bay Area who hasn't gone to Fry's for some kind of prototype building." Fry's Electronics, a San Jose company that still has dozens of stores from California to Georgia, including seven in the Bay Area, said on Twitter that it had not been able to renew the Palo Alto store's lease. But customers from Sunnyvale to Seattle have been sharing photos and videos of empty shelves on social media for months, raising speculation that the chain may be heading for bankruptcy or shrinking significantly.

An Arkansas-based telemarketing firm sent home more than 300 employees and told them to find new jobs after IT recovery efforts didn't go according to plan following a ransomware incident that took place at the start of October 2019. From a report: Employees of Sherwood-based telemarketing firm The Heritage Company were notified of the decision just days before Christmas, via a letter sent by the company's CEO. Speaking with local media, employees said they had no idea the company had even suffered a ransomware attack, and the layoffs were unexpected, catching many off guard. "Unfortunately, approximately two months ago our Heritage servers were attacked by malicious software that basically 'held us hostage for ransom' and we were forced to pay the crooks to get the 'key' just to get our systems back up and running," wrote Sandra Franecke, the company's CEO, in the letter sent to employees. She goes on to say that data recovery efforts, initially estimated at one week, have not gone according to plan and the company had failed to recover full service by Christmas. Franecke said the company lost "hundreds of thousands of dollars" because of the incident and have been forced to "restructure different areas in the company." As a result of the botched ransomware recovery process, the company's leadership decided to suspend all services, leaving more than 300 employees without jobs.

Google Chrome will get support for error codes, similar to the ones seen on Windows blue screen of death (BSOD) crash pages. From a report: The idea is to provide Chrome users with a code they can search online and find debugging help for various types of crashes. Work on this new feature started in November last year, and the error codes are already under testing in current Chrome Canary (v81) releases. The error codes will appear on the so-called "sad tab" page, also known as the "Aw, Snap!" page, which Chrome displays when a tab crashes.

By the end of August 2019, the entire pig population of China had dropped by about 40 percent. China accounted for more than half of the global pig population in 2018, and the epidemic there alone has killed nearly one-quarter of all the world's pigs. From a report: By late September, the disease had cost economic losses of one trillion yuan (about $141 billion), according to Li Defa, dean of the College of Animal Science and Technology at China Agricultural University in Beijing. Qiu Huaji, a leading Chinese expert on porcine infectious diseases, has said that African swine fever has been no less devastating "than a war" -- in terms of "its effects on the national interest and people's livelihoods and its political, economic and social impact." "We lost hundreds of thousands of yuan," my sister-in-law bemoaned, several tens of thousands of dollars. "Haven't you been compensated by the government for the dead pigs?" I asked. "Only 100 yuan per head," less than $15, she said, "That didn't help."