Month: March 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Vertigo3d)

VPN operator TorGuard has agreed to block BitTorrent traffic on its US-based servers to settle a piracy lawsuit filed by a variety of companies that own movie copyrights.

“Pursuant to a confidential settlement agreement, Plaintiffs have requested, and Defendant has agreed to use commercially reasonable efforts to block BitTorrent traffic on its servers in the United States using firewall technology,” according to a joint stipulation filed on March 3 by plaintiffs and defendant VPNetworks, which does business under the name TorGuard. The plaintiffs’ claims against TorGuard “are hereby dismissed with prejudice, each party to bear its own costs and attorneys’ fees,” said the filing in US District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

TorGuard says it operates VPN servers in 50 countries, so its users can presumably still use BitTorrent by connecting to a non-US server. Though torrenting is widely used for piracy, the peer-to-peer technology is also used for legal distribution of files such as Linux ISOs and many types of content on the Internet Archive.

Enlarge / A Ford Explorer sports utility vehicle (SUV) sits for a final inspection at the Ford Motor Co. Chicago Assembly Plant in Chicago on Monday, June 24, 2019. (credit: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg)

Ford’s new Explorer has had a rocky few years. Its rushed initial launch was marred by production problems that resulted in several recalls. When the chip shortage hit, Ford idled the Chicago Assembly Plant for four weeks last July and for another week in February.

Now, the chip shortage has struck the Explorer again, this time in the back seat. Ford has said that it will be shipping Explorers without rear-seat heating and air conditioning controls because the company doesn’t have semiconductors on hand, according to a report in Automotive News.

The rear HVAC can still be controlled by the driver or front-seat passenger, but those being chauffeured around will have to voice their requests rather than tap them in. (Parents may see this as a feature or a bug, depending on their children.)

(credit: Electronic Arts)

Warren Spector’s OtherSide Entertainment stopped work on the highly anticipated System Shock 3 in 2019, Spector confirmed in a recent interview with GamesBeat. The announcement definitively ends hopes that Spector’s studio might still be working with new publisher Tencent on the follow-up to the 1994 PC gaming classic and its 1999 sequel.

The System Shock 3 project was first announced way back in 2015. Spector—known for producing the original System Shock as well as his work on Deus Ex, Thief, and Epic Mickey—made a splash in 2016 when he left academia to return to game development and joined the team at OtherSide Entertainment to work on the planned sequel.

But the project started to show signs of trouble in early 2019, when OtherSide had to buy back the publishing rights to the game from Starbreeze Studios. Though OtherSide was able to show a public demo of System Shock 3 later that year, by early 2020, the entire development team was reportedly “no longer employed” by OtherSide.

Enlarge / Illustration of a swarm of smaller black holes in a gas disk rotating around a giant black hole. (credit: J. Samsing/Neils Bohr Institute)

In 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration picked up a gravitational wave signal from a black hole merger that proved to be one for the record books. Dubbed “GW190521,” it was the most massive and most distant yet detected, and it produced the most energetic signal detected thus far, showing up in the data as more of a “bang” than the usual “chirp.”

Furthermore, the new black hole resulting from the merger was about 150 times as heavy as our Sun, making GW190521 the first direct observation of an intermediate-mass black hole. Even weirder, the two black holes that merged were locked in an elliptical (rather than circular) orbit, and their axes of spin were tipped far more than usual compared to those orbits.

Physicists love nothing more than to be presented with an intriguing puzzle that doesn’t immediately seem to fit established theory, and GW190521 gave them just that. New theoretical simulations suggest that all those bizarre aspects can be explained by the presence of a third single black hole horning in on the binary system’s final dance to produce a “chaotic tango,” according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.