Month: April 2022

Enlarge / In-game ships and structures like these have real value to EVE Online players even without NFTs.

Nearly 19 years after its launch, EVE Online still has one of gaming’s most robust virtual economies, as the game’s detailed monthly economic reports attest. So when developer CCP says it has “no plans to add blockchain technology into EVE Online… for the foreseeable future,” it should probably cause proponents of crypto gaming to wonder why.

In a Monday blog post, CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson wrote that the company is always “exploring new technologies and new possibilities” to help fulfill its mission to have “the EVE Universe outlive us all: EVE Forever.” But while he said that blockchain tech has “a lot of untapped potential,” he noted that there is “a lot of work needed before [blockchain is] ready for EVE-scale games.”

Pétursson leaves CCP a bit of wiggle room, though, by clarifying that non-fungible tokens will be absent from Tranquility, the main server cluster that serves as the home for the game’s global player base. So CCP may still experiment with blockchain technologies on the Chinese Serenity servers or mobile spinoff Eve Echoes, which have their own completely separate economies and player bases [Note: This portion initially misstated the nature of some alternative EVE Online servers. Ars regrets the error].

Enlarge / Two headset hooks stick out of the Porsche Design | AOC Agon Pro PD32M. (credit: Porsche Design)

Porsche Design’s new $1,800 PC monitor is certainly more expensive than the typical 4K, 32-inch display, but the luxurious panel is actually relatively inexpensive for the technology it uses.

As spotted by DisplaySpecifications this week, Porsche Design has listed its latest monitor, and like its previous product, it’s a collaboration with AOC, which makes many types of monitors, including high-resolution productivity panels, gaming monitors, and portable options, as well as other PC peripherals like keyboards and headsets.

Porsche Design, a sub-brand of the German company known for fancy sports cars, was founded in 1974. Its electronics lineup currently includes only a $99 Bluetooth mouse made with Acer, but the company also makes a variety of luxury-focused everyday items, from $225 lighters to $1,800 sunglasses.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The US looks set to use so-called “E15” gasoline throughout the summer. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden will announce that the US Environmental Protection Agency will issue a national emergency waiver allowing the use of the ethanol-gasoline blend between June 1 and September 15 as Americans complain about high fuel prices. Currently, the use of that fuel is illegal because of smog regulations.

Ethanol-gasoline blends became popular during the 2000s as a potential panacea for solving US energy dependence on the Middle East as well as a way to clean up the climate. It also always played well in the Iowa caucuses, as it gives us something to do with our immense corn surplus.

E85 fuel—a mix of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline—rapidly fell out of favor. But 98 percent of US gas stations offer E10, a blend of 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. At this concentration, the ethanol oxygenates the fuel and increases its octane rating; it also stretches the country’s supply of gasoline by diluting it.

Enlarge / DuckDuckGo’s browser for macOS. (credit: DuckDuckGo)

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine with the weird name, already offers web browsers for iOS and Android and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. But on Tuesday, the company announced that it is getting into desktop browsers, too. DuckDuckGo for Mac is available starting today as an invite-only beta that “is designed to be used as an everyday browser that truly protects your privacy.”

Among other features, DuckDuckGo says that its browser will automatically manage cookie consent pop-ups “on many sites,” that it will use encrypted HTTPS connections whenever they’re available, and that the browser will block trackers and allow you to clear stored website data on a site-by-site basis. The browser also includes its own password manager that can import data “from other browsers and browser extensions like 1Password or LastPass.” Private syncing of passwords and bookmarks between browsers is a planned feature but isn’t available in this initial version.

Most alternative browsers are based on Google’s Chromium browser and Blink browsing engine so they can benefit from Chrome’s majority position in the browser market. Most webpages are tested with Chrome in mind, and Chrome has a large and well-supported library of browser extensions that third-party browsers can usually tap into without making any changes. The DuckDuckGo browser instead uses Apple’s WebKit rendering engine via the WKWebView API.