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The company filed suit in the US Court of Federal Claims on Friday and received a protective order to seal the documents on Monday. The lawsuit follows a decision in late July by the US Government Accountability Office that rejected a protest by Blue Origin and Dynetics over NASA’s $2.9 billion award to SpaceX to further development of its Starship program.

The new lawsuit escalates Blue Origin’s feud with NASA. As recently as last week, senior leaders at NASA and Blue Origin were in talks to forestall such a lawsuit. NASA would still like to include Blue Origin in its Artemis Program, a source familiar with those talks said. However, the space agency does not appear to have come to an agreement with the company .

Enlarge / A T-Mobile logo at a store in New York on April 30, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

T-Mobile apparently lied to government regulators about its 3G shutdown plans in order to win approval of its merger with Sprint, according to a ruling in a proceeding in front of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). The ruling issued Friday ordered T-Mobile “to show cause why it should not be sanctioned by the commission for violating” a CPUC rule with “false, misleading, or omitted statements.”

T-Mobile won approval for its 2020 acquisition of Sprint in part by agreeing to sell Sprint’s Boost Mobile prepaid business and other assets to Dish, which is building its own 5G network and reselling capacity from other networks. T-Mobile agreed to make its 4G LTE and 3G CDMA networks available to Dish customers during a three-year transition period from 2020 to 2023, the CPUC ruling said. But T-Mobile now plans to stop providing CDMA network services nationwide on January 1, 2022, and Dish has urged government regulators to force T-Mobile to live up to its commitments.

T-Mobile’s false and misleading statements under oath indicated, among other things, that T-Mobile would make its CDMA network “available to Boost customers until they were migrated to Dish Network Corporation’s LTE or 5G services” and that Dish would have up to three years to complete the migration, the ruling said.

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The facilities are owned by Memorial Health System, a nonprofit network of services that represents 64 clinics, including hospitals Marietta Memorial, Selby, and Sistersville General in the Marietta, West Virginia, metropolitan area. Early on Sunday, the chain experienced a ransomware attack that hampered the three hospitals’ ability to operate normally.

Beginning at midnight on Sunday, the three hospitals started diverting emergency patients to Camden Clark Medical Center. The facility is an hour’s drive from Selby, which has 25 beds. Camden Clark is about a 25-minute drive from the other two Memorial Health System hospitals hit by the breach. Another affected facility providing critical care includes a freestanding emergency room at Belpre Medical Campus in Belpre, Ohio.

Enlarge / Sonos says the Google Home stole its technology. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

In January 2020, Sonos brought a patent infringement case against Google targeting Google’s smart speakers, the Google Home, and later the Nest Audio line. Sonos is the originator of Internet-connected speakers that easily hook up to streaming services, while Google speakers combine a similar feature set with voice-activated Google Assistant commands. To hear Sonos tell the story, Google got a behind-the-scenes look at Sonos’ hardware in 2013, when Google agreed to build Google Play Music support for Sonos speakers. Sonos claims Google used that access to “blatantly and knowingly” copy Sonos’ audio features for the Google Home speaker, which launched in 2016.

However you want to measure it, Sonos is a tiny company compared to the tech giants it regularly battles. The 19-year-old company only has products in the connected speaker market, and it has a $5 billion market cap. Its competitors—Google, Amazon, and Apple—are some of the world’s biggest companies, each with a market cap above $1.5 trillion. To make matters more complicated for Sonos, the company relies on both Google and Amazon to do business in search, advertising, and retail sales, and it worried about retaliation from the two giants. Plus, once Amazon and Google entered the market, Sonos was forced to adopt support for both voice assistants in order to compete. Back in 2020, Sonos said Amazon also seemed to be using its technology, but it would focus its legal efforts on Google.

Enlarge / What’s the cheapest used electric car you’d take a punt on? Let us know in the comments. (credit: Sakkawokkie/Getty Images)

As luck would have it, I noticed that Kelley Blue Book—which does keep track of things like long-term reliability and depreciation—just published a list of its best affordable used hybrids and EVs for 2021, with top-10 lists for cars that cost less than $15,000 as well as those under $20,000.

As you might expect at those price points, the lists are dominated by parallel hybrids like the Toyota Prius. No Teslas, I’m afraid—the cheapest used Model 3 that shows up in a brief search this morning still costs $28,000, and the rest all had prices that started with a three. But some battery EVs do make the KBB’s top-10 list.

Enlarge / A 2014 Tesla Model S driving on Autopilot rear-ended a Culver City fire truck that was parked in the high-occupancy vehicle lane on Interstate 405. (credit: Culver City Firefighters Local 1927 / Facebook)

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration announced the investigation today, and it encompasses 765,000 Teslas sold in the US, a significant fraction of all of the company’s sales in the country. The agency says the probe will cover 11 crashes since 2018; the crashes caused 17 injuries and one death. 

The NHTSA is looking at Tesla’s entire lineup, including Models S, X, 3, and Y from model years 2014–2021. It’s investigating both Autopilot and Traffic Aware Cruise Control, a subset of Autopilot that does not steer the vehicle but allows it to match traffic speeds. 

Enlarge / Arc will be the brand name for the Intel GPU formerly known as “DG2.” (credit: Intel)

Intel has been working for years to enter the high-end graphics card market to compete with Nvidia and AMD, and today those efforts get a name: Intel Arc (not to be confused with Intel Ark, the site you go to when you need help with Intel’s indecipherable processor model numbers). The earliest Arc products will be released in “the first quarter of 2022” and will be based on a GPU codenamed “Alchemist,” a new, more memorable codename for a GPU previously known as “DG2.”

The first Arc cards will be a follow-up of sorts to DG1—a card released only to system builders—which performs a lot like the GDDR5 version of Nvidia’s aging, low-end GeForce GTX 1030. We don’t have spec sheets for any of the Alchemist-based Arc cards yet, but the trailer Intel showed confirmed support for modern GPU features like real-time ray tracing and “AI Accelerated Super Sampling” that will compete with Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX upscaling technologies. The trailer also showed Arc silicon running real (if somewhat older) games like Forza Horizon 4 and Metro Exodus.

To demonstrate its commitment to the discrete GPU market, Intel announced several more GPU codenames that will succeed Alchemist in the coming years, including “Battlemage,” “Celestial,” and “Druid” (note both the alphabetical order and the high-fantasy theme).

When the early-’80s home video game business began dwindling in the US, Atari looked to a Laserdisc arcade cabinet to boost its fortunes. That’s according to Richard Taylor, who served as the film director for Atari Playland, an unreleased arcade cabinet from classic Atari’s waning days.

Laserdisc games were already a hot commodity by 1983, as seen in the Don Bluth-directed Dragon’s Lair, which used hand-drawn animation instead of an arcade’s usual pixelated sprites. But unlike the single-game Dragon’s Lair cabinet, “the idea [or Atari Playland] was to make a freestanding arcade structure that, using Laserdisc, would have 10 games in it,” Taylor told Ars in a recent interview. Also, unlike Dragon’s Lair, everything in Playland would be filmed with a real camera floating above elaborate miniatures on sizable sets.

Atari Playland featured multiple miniaturized sets; there were plans for an intro inside a killer clown’s dressing room, a shot outside the park’s entrance, and a fully filmed ride-selection screen. The construction of those sets was “not cheap,” according to Taylor, and required a lot of specifically filmed transitions.

Enlarge / Today, in robots-and-fireworks news. (credit: Getty Images)

However, new research sheds some light on how automated workers can restore confidence. Largely, the study suggests that humans have an easier time trusting a robot that makes a mistake if it appears somewhat human and if the machine offers some kind of explanation, according to Lionel Robert, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information.

When robots mess up

Even though robots are made of metal and plastic, Robert said we need to start considering our interactions with them in social terms, particularly if we want to have humans trust and rely on their automated co-workers. “Humans mess up and are able to keep working together,” he told Ars.

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In the game of fitness wearables, it’s hard to give everyone what they want. That’s why Garmin offers a seemingly endless array of watches, Apple currently sells no less than three Apple Watches, and Fitbit has an array of wearables from kid-centric trackers to a smartwatch the company hopes can one day detect early symptoms of COVID-19.

The Fitbit Luxe, which retails for $150, is the latter’s latest style-focused fitness tracker. It attempts to provide some smartwatch luxuries in a device that looks like a piece of jewelry. The Luxe is a cute tracker, but it has some questionable choices and oversights to be aware of—most of which are endemic to Fitbit devices.

If you’re looking for an ultracasual fitness tracker and a stylish smart device for your wrist, the Fitbit Luxe could be one of your best options. If you’re looking to get active and stay active, though, you may want to look elsewhere.