evanak writes: Bill Godbout was one of the earliest and most influential supports of the S-100 bus in the mid-1970s. He passed away last week due to the Camp wildfire in Concow, California, according to a Vintage Computer Federation blog post. More than 50 other people also died in the fires, but chances are Mr. Godbout was the only one with a license to fly blimps. "Godbout was born October 2, 1939," the blog post reads. "He talked about his introduction to computing in an interview with InfoWorld magazine for their February 18, 1980 issue. 'My first job out of college was with IBM. I served a big-system apprenticeship there, but I think the thing that really triggered [my interest] was the introduction of the 8008 by Intel,' he said. 'I was fascinated that you could have that kind of capability in a little 18-pin package.'"

Godbout's family has set up a GoFundMe campaign to support their needs in this difficult time.

Raspberry Pi has introduced a new version of one of its most popular models just in time to stuff your stocking: the Model A+. And this time around, it's even more attractive. From a report: The Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ costs $25, $5 more than the previous generation, but has a lot more going for it. Just like the top-of-the-line Model B+, the new Model A+ has a 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, and you'll also get dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4GHz + 5 GHz), a feature that was missing from the previous A+. And you'll have to use it, since the A+ doesn't have an Ethernet port. It does, however, have Bluetooth 4.2 on board. For $10 less than the $35 Model B+, you'll also only get a single USB port (versus four on the B+) as well as 512MB of RAM (versus 1GB on the B+). But otherwise, the devices are identical, with a full-size HDMI port, CSI camera port, DSI display port, stereo output and composite video port, and a micro SD port. The Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ isn't the cheapest Pi model available -- the Zero costs $5 and the Zero W costs just $10 -- but it rounds out the options nicely. The new model is available now through Raspberry Pi retailers.

An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup: A former Tesla global supply manager was indicted Thursday by federal prosecutors alleging he embezzled more than $9 million from the Palo Alto electric car maker. Salil Parulekar, 32, is charged with felony wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Parulekar oversaw Tesla's dealings with certain auto parts and services vendors, and used that position to divert to a German auto parts company $9.3 million in payments intended for a Taiwanese supplier, according to the indictment. ... Parulekar, who was living in San Jose and working for Tesla in 2016 and 2017, falsified invoices, created fake accounts-payable documents, and impersonated an employee of the Taiwanese supplier to trick Tesla's accounts-payable department into switching the bank account information of the Taiwanese and German companies, the indictment alleged.

That Taiwanese firm's complaints to Tesla about missing money went to Parulekar, who responded by sending fake documents purporting to show the payments were made, the indictment claimed.

Daylight Saving Time ended in the United States on Sunday, bumping the clocks back an hour. The change happened in Europe a week earlier, meaning the time difference between the continents was momentarily smaller. It's another confusing wrinkle in a confusing temporal process that confounds the world. From a story: Today, 70 countries change their clocks midyear for Daylight Saving Time, including most of North America, Europe and parts of South America and New Zealand. China, Japan, India and most countries near the equator don't fall back or jump ahead. In much of Asia and South America, the Daylight Saving Time shift was adopted, but then abandoned. It has never been observed in most of Africa. While the United States extended its Daylight Saving Time in 2005 and Florida wants to make it its standard time, other countries are moving to ditch the practice.

The European Union is weighing a plan to abandon shifting from daylight saving time midyear. "Millions ... believe that summertime should be all the time," the European Union's chief executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, told German reporters in August. Juncker was referring, in part, to an online poll conducted by the E.U., which found that changing clocks is tremendously unpopular. (As my colleague Rick Noack pointed out, however, there are methodological problems: "The largest share of participants came from one country -- Germany -- where the time switch has been a somewhat odd front-page topic for years. But any E.U. decision would also impact the 27 other member states.")

"One hundred years after Congress passed the first daylight saving legislation, more and more people are doubting the wisdom of changing the clocks," writes PBS, noting that it actually makes Americans use more electricity and consume more gasoline.

"If you can find anyone who supports this, they're probably just trolling you," writes Inc magazine's contributor editor, adding "Literally everyone hates it... It's almost impossible to find anyone who still supports this insane, anachronistic idea, which is leftover from a German coal conservation idea during World War I, and our heck-we'll-try-anything panic during the energy crisis of the 1970s." In fact, one study found that while consumer spending increases a bit at the start of daylight savings, it drops a full 3.5 percent in the wrong direction when it ends. (Which will happen tonight in most U.S. states at 2:00 a.m.)

And now USA Today points out that hospital software "still can't handle daylight saving time: Epic Systems, one of the most popular electronic health records software systems used by hospitals, can delete records or require cumbersome workarounds when clocks are set back for an hour -- prompting many hospitals to opt for paper records for part of the night shift. And it happens every year... Dr. Steven Stack, a past president of the American Medical Association, called the glitches "perplexing" and "unacceptable," considering that hospitals spend millions of dollars on these systems, and Apple and Google seem to have dealt with seasonal time changes long ago...

Carol Hawthorne-Johnson, an intensive care unit nurse in California, said her hospital doesn't shut down the Epic system during the fall time change. But she's come to expect that the vital signs she enters into the system from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday will be deleted when the clock falls back to 1 a.m. One hour's worth of electronic record-keeping "is gone," she said. Hospital staff have learned to deal with it by taking extra chart notes by hand... Many hospitals use Cerner, another major electronic medical records company. Those hospitals plan for Cerner to be down during the time change, too.

Facebook announced today in a blog post that it has removed 8.7 million posts last quarter that violated its rules against child exploitation. The company said it used new AI and machine learning technology to remove 99 percent of those posts before anyone reported them. TechCrunch reports: The new technology examines posts for child nudity and other exploitative content when they are uploaded and, if necessary, photos and accounts are reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Facebook had already been using photo-matching technology to compare newly uploaded photos with known images of child exploitation and revenge porn, but the new tools are meant to prevent previously unidentified content from being disseminated through its platform. The technology isn't perfect, with many parents complaining that innocuous photos of their kids have been removed. Davis addressed this in her post, writing that in order to "avoid even the potential for abuse, we take action on nonsexual content as well, like seemingly benign photos of children in the bath" and that this "comprehensive approach" is one reason Facebook removed as much content as it did last quarter. The tech isn't always right though. In 2016, it was criticized for removing content like the iconic 1972 photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, known as the "Napalm Girl," fleeing naked after suffering third-degree burns in a South Vietnamese napalm attack on her village. COO Sheryl Sandberg apologized for it at the time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: Proof-of-concept code for a new zero-day vulnerability in Windows has been released by a security researcher before Microsoft was able to release a fix. The code exploits a vulnerability that allows deleting without permission any files on a machine, including system data, and it has the potential to lead to privilege escalation. The vulnerability could be used to delete application DLLs, thus forcing the programs to look for the missing libraries in other places. If the search reaches a location that grants write permission to the local user, the attacker could take advantage by providing a malicious DLL.

The problem is with Microsoft Data Sharing Service, present in Windows 10, Server 2016 and 2019 operating systems, which provides data brokering between applications. Will Dormann, a vulnerability analyst at CERT/CC, tested the exploit code successfully on a Windows 10 operating system running the latest security updates. Behind the discovery is a researcher using the online alias SandboxEscaper, also responsible for publicly sharing in late August another security bug in Windows Task Scheduler component. Microsoft hasn't addressed the issue, but there is a temporary fix available through the oPatch platform. "A micropatch candidate was ready seven hours after the zero-day vulnerability announcement, and it blocked the exploit successfully," reports Bleeping Computer. "oPatch now delivers the stable version of the micropatch for fully updated Windows 10 1803.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Elon Musk took to Twitter on Thursday evening to inform his followers of a new addition to the Model 3 lineup. This is not the long-awaited $35,000 version, however; the mid-range Model 3 starts at $45,000. Musk also revealed that the Model 3 ordering process has been simplified and now has fewer options. One that's missing -- from all new Tesla orders, not just the Model 3 -- is the controversial "full self-driving" option. The reason? It was "causing too much confusion," Musk tweeted. The mid-range Model 3s will be rear-wheel drive only, prompting some to wonder if the company was using software to limit battery capacity on existing RWD inventory in order to get it out of the door. But Tesla says it's able to build these slightly cheaper cars by using the same battery pack as the more expensive, longer-range cars but with fewer cells inside (so no future software upgrades can increase their range at a later date). While Tesla is promoting the car as costing as little as $30,700 by factoring in "gas savings" and all federal and local tax incentives, it did also announce last week that any new Tesla delivered after October 15th might not ship before the beginning of next year. As Ars Technica notes, "Any new Tesla delivered after January 1st 2019 (but before July 1st 2019) is only eligible for a $3,750 IRS credit."

Apple has not documented some high-severity bugs it patched that were reported to it by Google's Project Zero researchers. From a report: While it's good news that Apple beat Project Zero's 90-day deadline for patching or disclosing the bugs it finds, the group's Ivan Fratric recently argued that the practice endangered users by not fully informing them why an update should be installed. This time the criticism comes from Project Zero's Ian Beer, who's been credited by Apple with finding dozens of serious security flaws in iOS and macOS over the years. Beer posted a blog about several vulnerabilities in iOS 7 he found in 2014 that share commonalities with several bugs he has found in iOS 11.4.1, some of which he's now released exploits for.

Beer notes that none of the latest issues is mentioned in the iOS 12 security bulletin even though Apple did fix them. The absence of information about them is a "disincentive" for iOS users to patch, Beer argues. "Apple are still yet to assign CVEs for these issues or publicly acknowledge that they were fixed in iOS 12," wrote Beer. "In my opinion a security bulletin should mention the security bugs that were fixed. Not doing so provides a disincentive for people to update their devices since it appears that there were fewer security fixes than there really were."

Essential Products, a startup founded in 2015 by Android creator Andy Rubin, was started to create a smartphone with high-end design features that wasn't associated with a particular operating-system maker. Unfortunately, reaching that goal has been harder than anticipated as the company has laid off about 30 percent of its staff. Fortune reports: Cuts were particularly deep in hardware and marketing. The company's website indicates it has about 120 employees. A company spokesperson didn't confirm the extent of layoffs, but said that the decision was difficult for the firm to make and, "We are confident that our sharpened product focus will help us deliver a truly game changing consumer product." The firm was Rubin's first startup after leaving Google in 2014, which had acquired his co-founded firm, Android, in 2005.

Essential's first phone came out in August 2017, a few weeks later than initially promised. It received mixed reviews, with most critics citing its lower quality and missing features relative to competing smartphones, such as a lack of waterproofing and poor resiliency to damage. The company dropped the price from an initial $699 within weeks to $499, and offered it on Black Monday in November 2017 for $399.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), the study found, and the forest's insect-eating animals have gone missing, too. The latest report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that this startling loss of insect abundance extends to the Americas. The study's authors implicate climate change in the loss of tropical invertebrates.

Bradford Lister, a biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, has been studying rain forest insects in Puerto Rico since the 1970s. "We went down in '76, '77 expressly to measure the resources: the insects and the insectivores in the rain forest, the birds, the frogs, the lizards," Lister said. He came back nearly 40 years later, with his colleague Andrés García, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. What the scientists did not see on their return troubled them. "Boy, it was immediately obvious when we went into that forest," Lister said. Fewer birds flitted overhead. The butterflies, once abundant, had all but vanished. García and Lister once again measured the forest's insects and other invertebrates, a group called arthropods that includes spiders and centipedes. The researchers trapped arthropods on the ground in plates covered in a sticky glue, and raised several more plates about three feet into the canopy. The researchers also swept nets over the brush hundreds of times, collecting the critters that crawled through the vegetation. Each technique revealed the biomass (the dry weight of all the captured invertebrates) had significantly decreased from 1976 to the present day. The sweep sample biomass decreased to a fourth or an eighth of what it had been. Between January 1977 and January 2013, the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold. The study also found a 30-percent drop in anole lizards, which eat arthropods. Some anole species have disappeared entirely from the interior forest. Another research team captured insect-eating frogs and birds in 1990 and 2005, and found a 50 percent decrease in the number of captures. The authors attribute this decline to the changing climate.

Reader merbs shares a report about Magic Leap, a US-based startup valued at north of $6 billion and which counts Google, Alibaba, Warner Bros, AT&T, and several top Silicon Valley venture capital firms as its investors. The company, which held its first developer conference this week, announced that it is making its $2,295 AR headset available in more states in the United States. Journalist Brian Merchant attended the conference and shares the other part of the story. From a story: After spending two days at LEAPcon, I feel it is my duty -- in the name of instilling a modicum of sanity into an age where a company that has never actually sold a product to a consumer can be worth a billion dollars more than the entire GDP of Fiji -- to inform you that it is not. Magic Leap clearly wants its public launch to appear huge -- who wouldn't? In decidedly Magic Leapian fashion, the company covered an entire side of LA Mart, the 12-story building in downtown Los Angeles where the conference was to be held, with a psychedelic image of an astronaut and the tagline 'Free Your Mind'. In similarly Leapian fashion, the actual demos and keynote took place in the basement, where a wrong turn could land you in shipping and receiving and cell reception was nil.

[...] You know that weird sensation when it feels like everyone around you is participating in some mild mass hallucination, and you missed the dosing? The old 'what am I possibly missing here' phenomenon? That's how I felt at LEAP a lot of the time, amidst crowds of people dropping buzzwords and acronym soup at light speed, and then again while I was reading reviews of the device afterwards -- somehow, despite years of failing to deliver anything of substance, lots of the press is still in Leap's thrall. Demo after demo, I felt like, sure, that was kind of neat. The games were charming, if often glitchy and simplistic, and yes, it might be helpful for architects to be able to blow up and walk around their designs. I liked the developers, who were smart and funny. Some of the graphics and interactions were very nicely rendered. But there wasn't anything -- besides a single demo, which I'll get to in a second -- that I'd feel compelled to ever do again. It felt genuinely crazy to me that people could get too excited about this, especially after years of decent VR and the Hololens, without having a distinct monetary incentive to do so.

As many have noted, the hardware is still extremely limiting. The technology underpinning these experiences seems genuinely advanced, and if it were not for a multi-year blitzkrieg marketing campaign insisting a reality where pixels blend seamlessly with IRL physics was imminent, it might have felt truly impressive. (Whether or not it's advanced enough to eventually give rise to Leap's prior promises is an entirely open question at this point.) For now, the field of vision is fairly small and unwieldy, so images are constantly vanishing from view as you look around. If you get too close to them, objects will get chopped up or move awkwardly. And if you do get a good view, some objects appear low res and transparent; some looked like cheap holograms from an old sci-fi film. Text was bleary and often doubled up in layers that made it hard to read, and white screens looked harsh -- I loaded Google on the Helio browser and immediately had to shut my eyes. Further reading: Magic Leap is Pushing To Land a Contract With US Army To Build AR Devices For Soldiers To Use On Combat Missions, Documents Reveal.

"Dire as it is, the latest IPCC report is actually too optimistic," writes Slashdot reader Dan Drollette. "It ignores the risk of self-reinforcing climate feedbacks pushing the planet into chaos beyond human control. So says a team of climate experts, including the winner of the 1995 Nobel for his work on depletion of the ozone layer." From their article: These cascading feedbacks include the loss of the Arctic's sea ice, which could disappear entirely in summer in the next 15 years. The ice serves as a shield, reflecting heat back into the atmosphere, but is increasingly being melted into water that absorbs heat instead. Losing the ice would tremendously increase the Arctic's warming, which is already at least twice the global average rate. This, in turn, would accelerate the collapse of permafrost, releasing its ancient stores of methane, a super climate pollutant 30 times more potent in causing warming than carbon dioxide.

By largely ignoring such feedbacks, the IPCC report fails to adequately warn leaders about the cluster of six similar climate tipping points that could be crossed between today's temperature and an increase to 1.5 degrees -- let alone nearly another dozen tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees. These wildcards could very likely push the climate system beyond human ability to control. As the UN Secretary General reminded world leaders last month, "We face an existential threat. Climate change is moving faster than we are.⦠If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences."
In related news, a court in The Hague "has upheld a historic legal order on the Dutch government to accelerate carbon emissions cuts, a day after the world's climate scientists warned that time was running out to avoid dangerous warming. Appeal court judges ruled that the severity and scope of the climate crisis demanded greenhouse gas reductions of at least 25% by 2020 -- measured against 1990 levels -- higher than the 17% drop planned by Mark Rutte's liberal administration. The ruling -- which was greeted with whoops and cheers in the courtroom -- will put wind in the sails of a raft of similar cases being planned around the world, from Norway to New Zealand and from the UK to Uganda."

Meanwhile, a new article in GQ cites estimates that more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies, complaining that "there is no 'free market' incentive to prevent disaster."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Over the past six months a small, publicly available genealogy database has become the go-to source for solving cold case crimes. The free online tool, called GEDmatch, is an ancestry service that allows people to submit their DNA data and search for relatives -- an open access version of AncestryDNA or 23andMe. Since April, investigators have used GEDmatch to identify victims, killers, and missing persons all over the U.S. in at least 19 cases, many of them decades old, according to authors of a report published today in Science. The authors predict that in the near future, as genetic genealogy reports gain in popularity, such tools could be used to find nearly any individual in the U.S. of European descent.

GEDmatch holds the genetic data of only about a million people. But cold case investigators have been exploiting the database using a genomic analysis technique called long-range familial search. The technique allows researchers to match an individual's DNA to distant relatives, such as third cousins. Chances are, one of those relatives will have used a genetic genealogy service. More than 17 million people have participated in these services -- a number that has grown rapidly over the last two years. AncestryDNA and 23andMe hold most of those customers. A genetic match to a distant relative can fairly quickly lead investigators to the person of interest. In a highly publicized case, GEDmatch was used earlier this year to identify the "Golden State Killer," a serial rapist and murderer who terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s, but was never caught. In April, investigators were able to use a genealogy database to narrow down DNA data from crime scenes and identify the "Golden State Killer," a serial rapist and murderer who terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s.

The U.S. Air Force on Wednesday awarded funds to three rocket companies to help them complete development of their boosters. The three winners include:

United Launch Services: $967,000,000 for the development of the Vulcan Centaur launch system.
Northrop Grumman: $791,601,015 for development of the Omega launch system
Blue Origin: $500,000,000 for the development of the New Glenn launch system

The obvious company missing from the list is SpaceX, which did not win an award. Aerojet Rocketdyne also failed to win an award since it "does not appear to have a customer for its AR1 rocket engine, which the military initially supported," Ars Technica reports. From the report: These are hugely consequential awards for the rocket companies. Essentially the U.S. Air Force, which launches more complex, heavy payloads than any other entity in the world, believes these boosters will have a significant role to play in those missions during the next decade. And when the military has confidence in your vehicle, commercial satellite contracts are more likely to follow as well. After speaking with a couple of aerospace sources, Ars has a few theories as to why SpaceX didn't win an award: For one, SpaceX has already built and flown a rocket that can reach all of the Air Force's reference orbits -- the Falcon Heavy. Moreover, the Falcon Heavy is already certified for the Air Force and has won contracts. Air Force officials may also feel that, through NASA contracts for commercial cargo and crew, the government already facilitated development of the Falcon Heavy -- which uses three Falcon 9 rocket cores. It also depends upon what SpaceX bid for. The government would have been more inclined to fund development of an advanced upper stage for the Falcon Heavy or vertical integration facilities. But it seems like the military would not have been as interested in the Big Falcon Rocket, which is more booster than it deems necessary at this time. So if SpaceX bid the BFR, that is one possible explanation for no award.

Security researcher Brian Krebs highlights several clever methods scammers are using to obtain your personal information. In one example, someone used a fully-automated voice to try and scam "a cybersecurity professional with more than 30 years of experience" by greeting him with a four-note AT&T jingle, "followed by a recorded voice saying AT&T was calling to prevent his phone service from being suspended for non-payment."

"It then prompted me to enter my security PIN to be connected to a billing department representative," Jon said. "My number was originally an AT&T number (it reports as Cingular Wireless) but I have been on T-Mobile for several years, so clearly a scam if I had any doubt. However, I suspect that the average Joe would fall for it." Krebs reports of another, more sophisticated scam attempted on Matt Haughey, the creator of the community Weblog MetaFilter and a writer at Slack: Haughey banks at a small Portland credit union, and last week he got a call on his mobile phone from an 800-number that matched the number his credit union uses. Actually, he got three calls from the same number in rapid succession. He ignored the first two, letting them both go to voicemail. But he picked up on the third call, thinking it must be something urgent and important. After all, his credit union had rarely ever called him. Haughey said he was greeted by a female voice who explained that the credit union had blocked two phony-looking charges in Ohio made to his debit/ATM card. She proceeded to then read him the last four digits of the card that was currently in his wallet. It checked out. Haughey told the lady that he would need a replacement card immediately because he was about to travel out of state to California. Without missing a beat, the caller said he could keep his card and that the credit union would simply block any future charges that weren't made in either Oregon or California.

This struck Haughey as a bit off. Why would the bank say they were freezing his card but then say they could keep it open for his upcoming trip? [...] The caller then read his entire home address to double check it was the correct destination to send a new card at the conclusion of his trip. Then the caller said she needed to verify his mother's maiden name. The voice in his head spoke out in protest again, but then banks had asked for this in the past. He provided it. Next she asked him to verify the three digit security code printed on the back of his card. Once more, the voice of caution in his brain was silenced: He'd given this code out previously in the few times he'd used his card to pay for something over the phone. Then she asked him for his current card PIN, just so she could apply that same PIN to the new card being mailed out, she assured him. Ding, ding, ding went the alarm bells in his head. Haughey hesitated, then asked the lady to repeat the question. When she did, he gave her the PIN, and she assured him she'd make sure his existing PIN also served as the PIN for his new card. Haughey said after hanging up he felt fairly certain the entire transaction was legitimate, although the part about her requesting the PIN kept nagging at him. Long story short, two fradulent charges were made on his account totaling $3,400. "People I've talked to about this say there's no way they'd fall for that, but when someone from a trustworthy number calls, says they're from your small town bank, and sounds incredibly professional, you'd fall for it, too," Haughey said.

Amid reports of users facing a number of issues after updating their computers to Windows 10 October 2018 Update, Microsoft said Saturday it was pausing the rollout of the latest version of its Windows 10 desktop operating system. ZDNet: In a support document updated today, October 6, the Redmond-based OS maker said it took this decision after users complained that v1809 had deleted files after the update. We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating. Microsoft employs a gradual rollout scheme, and not all Windows 10 users have received its latest bi-annual OS update. The October 2018 Update is no longer available for download, and Microsoft urges users who manually downloaded a Windows 10 installation package to wait until new installation media is available. "We will provide an update when we resume rolling out the Windows 10 October 2018 Update to customers," Microsoft said.

After pulling its recommendation in August, Consumer Reports announced that it is once again recommending Microsoft's Surface laptops. "Microsoft's reliability is now on-par with most other laptop brands," says Martin Lachter, a senior research associate at Consumer Reports. The Verge reports: Consumer Reports originally revoked its recommendations after a survey of 90,000 laptop and tablet owners found that 25 percent of Surface users reported having problems by the end of their second year owning the device. Its latest survey concluded that that's no longer the case (although the recommendation site didn't disclose the exact numbers for this year's polling). The newly re-gained recommendation applies to most of Microsoft's Surface lineup, including the Surface Pro, Surface Laptop, and Surface Book 2. Notably missing is the recently released 10-inch Surface Go, although that isn't getting the recommendation badge due to poor performance in Consumer Reports' lab testing, not reliability concerns.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: [A] software remedy can't solve Subaru's issue with 293 of its 2019 Ascent SUVs. All 293 of the SUVs that were built in July will be scrapped because they are missing critical spot welds. According to Subaru's recall notice [PDF] filed with the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the welding robots at the Subaru Indiana Automotive plant in Lafayette, Ind., were improperly coded, which meant the robots omitted the spot welds required on the Ascents' B-pillar. Consumer Reports states that the B-pillar holds the second-row door hinges. As a result, the strength of the affected Ascents' bodies may be reduced, increasing the possibility of passenger injuries in a crash. Subaru indicated in the recall that "there is no physical remedy available; therefore, any vehicles found with missing welds will be destroyed." Luckily, only nine Ascents had been sold, and those customers are going to receive new vehicles. The rest were on dealer lots or in transit.

Speaking at a private event in San Francisco this week, Eric Schmidt said he believes within the next decade there will be two distinct internets: one led by the U.S. and the other by China. At the event, economist Tyler Cowen asked, "What are the chances that the internet fragments over the years?" To which former Google CEO said: I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America. If you look at China, and I was just there, the scale of the companies that are being built, the services being built, the wealth that is being created is phenomenal. Chinese Internet is a greater percentage of the GDP of China, which is a big number, than the same percentage of the US, which is also a big number. If you think of China as like 'Oh yeah, they're good with the Internet,' you're missing the point.

Globalization means that they get to play too. I think you're going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There's a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc. Look at the way BRI works -- their Belt and Road Initiative, which involves 60-ish countries -- it's perfectly possible those countries will begin to take on the infrastructure that China has with some loss of freedom.