The SEC says Elon Musk is in ‘blatant violation’ of securities fraud settlement

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says Elon Musk hasn’t made a “good faith” effort to comply with the settlement the two sides reached last year over fraud charges related to his attempt to take Tesla private, according to a new court filing. The SECreiterated its request Monday to have Musk held in contempt of court over a February 19th tweet that the commission says is a “blatant violation” of the settlement.

Last week, Musk called the SEC’s contempt request an “unconstitutional power grab” and said that the tweet in question didn’t contain information that affected Tesla’s stock price. The two sides and the court have until March 26th to decide whether to hold a hearing to air out their differences. The SEC said Monday that it believes no such hearing is necessary because the facts of the case are not in dispute.

At the heart of the SEC’s argument is that Musk was supposed to have his public communications about Tesla — tweets included — pre-approved by a designated in-house lawyer as part of the settlement agreement signed last September.

The SEC asked the court on February 25th to hold Musk in contempt for the February 19th tweet where he said Tesla will make “around 500,000” cars in 2019. The commission says this was “demonstrably material and inaccurate” because it went against Tesla’s ownpredictions for 2019, which were issued in late January. But the commission also learned from Tesla that Musk’s tweet had not been pre-approved by the in-house counsel in charge of reviewing his public communications, which it argues violates the terms of the settlement.

Nvidia is bringing ray tracing to old GPUs that can’t ray trace worth a damn

How do you convince gamers that they’re getting their money’s worth from a $500+ graphics card? Nvidia’s latest technique is pretty smart — it’s taking real-time ray tracing, an eye-popping if barely adopted feature previously exclusive to its pricey new RTX-series graphics cards, and bringing it to a whole bunch of older Nvidia GTX-series GPUs that can’t ray trace to save their lives.

I’m partly joking. It’s pretty cool that I’ll soon be able to try out some “basic” DirectX Raytracing with my nearly three-year-old Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPU! Here are the other graphics cards and chips that should be able to take advantage with a driver update this April:

But seriously: Nvidia’s blog post seems explicitly designed to show that only the most expensive RTX-series GPUs can remotely approach 60fps framerates in modern games with ray tracing enabled.

Just look at the company’s comparisons charts for a few popular games with ray tracing enabled — and note that the “best case scenario” on the right requires DLSS, another feature that’s still exclusive to the pricier RTX series GPUs.

The GTX 1080 Ti is among the most powerful of the last-gen cards — and it’s struggling even with a Core i9 processor to help it shoulder the load.

Nvidia chalks up the differences not to exclusive features, mind you, but the actual design of these chips. The RTX-series GPUs simply have cores that the GTX ones don’t, including RT cores designed for ray tracing and Tensor cores for machine learning that help enable DLSS.

But I don’t think that’ll keep Nvidia rival AMD from making fun of this move, though. AMD said last November that it wouldn’t implement DirectX Raytracing (the version that Nvidia is now enabling here) until it could make ray tracing a standard feature across its product line. Those words felt defensive then, but they make a lot more sense now.

Honestly, we’re pretty bullish on ray tracing long-term… but with some of the first promised games just barely getting support months after the graphics cards debuted, it’s very early days for the technology.

New Zealand ISPs are blocking sites that do not remove Christchurch shooting video

Following the Christchurch shooting last week, internet service providers in New Zealand are blocking access to websites that do not respond or refuse to comply to requests to remove reuploads of the shooter’s original live stream.

According to Bleeping Computer, sites like 4chan, 8chan, LiveLeak, and the file-sharing site Mega have all been pulled by ISPs like Vodafone, Spark, and Vocus. The ISPs appear to be blocking access at the DNS level to sites that do not respond to the takedown requests, but it’s unclear how effective the blocks will be. Like most web-level blocks, the restrictions are easy to circumvent through the use of a VPN or alternative DNS settings.

Meera Kaushik, external communications adviser for Vodaphone in New Zealand, toldBleeping Computer, “Where material is identified, the site is temporarily blocked and the site is notified, requesting they remove the material.”

Websites like Facebook and YouTube don’t appear to have been taken down by the ISPs, but reuploads of the shooter’s video are still circulating on those platforms. Over the weekend, Facebook said that it had removed over 1.5 million videos of the attack. YouTube said it had removed an “unprecedented volume” of videos of the shooting.

America’s first exascale supercomputer to be built by 2021

Details of America’s next-generation supercomputer were revealed at a ceremony attended by Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and Senator Dick Durbin at Argonne National Laboratory today. The Department of Energy’s new supercomputer will be built by Intel at Argonne, and it will be the first of its kind in the United States.

“We will use exascale computing and AI to accelerate discovery, spur ingenuity, drive innovation, and above all, we will impact all of those areas in ways that just a few years ago we couldn’t have realized that we were going to have the ability to do,” Perry said.

The supercomputer, dubbed Aurora — which Perry joked was named after his three-legged black lab Aurora Pancake — is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of 2021, as the DOE attempts to keep pace with China in a supercomputing arms race. A February 2018 story in Science reported that the top two Chinese computers were more powerful than all of the DOE’s 21 current supercomputers combined. Summit, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, reclaimed the title of most powerful supercomputer from the Chinese when it went live last summer; China, however, is expected to reveal their first exascale computer in 2020, once again jumping ahead of the United States. The hope is that Aurora — with 50 times the computational and analytic power of Summit — will reclaim the title when it comes online.
Aurora was announced as a standard supercomputer in 2015, but got scaled up to exascale in 2017. Exascale supercomputers can operate at quintillion calculations per second,according to the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project. “When you talk about a billion billion [calculations] per second, for us mere mortals it kind of dawns on you where we are, what we’re doing, what we are on the cusp of being able to accomplish,” Perry said. A joint effort with the National Nuclear Security Administration, the project’s intent is to accelerate American supercomputing power to exascale by 2021, by building computers like Aurora.

WhatsApp tests in-app reverse image searches to prevent the spread of hoaxes

The WhatsApp team at Facebook is continuing to build features to help thwart fake news.WABetaInfo reports that a new beta version of WhatsApp includes an in-app web browserand the ability to reverse image search an image that’s sent in a chat so that you can try to figure out where the image really came from.

The in-app browser on its own likely won’t do much to combat fake news, although it’s at least a helpful feature that’s been missing for some time. WaBetaInfo notes that WhatsApp doesn’t allow people to screenshot or video record while using the in-app browser.

The more useful feature, especially in cases where viral photos spread through chain texts on the platform, is the ability to reverse Google image search. Users can select an image, upload it to Google, and then see where else that photo shows up. Though to fight fake news, users have to actually take the initiative to look an image up.

WhatsApp already labels forwarded messages and instituted forwarding limits after viral rumors of child abductions and child traffickers in India were linked to nearly a dozen deaths. In Brazil, some reporters speculated that misinformation about the yellow fever vaccine on the app caused the disease to resurge in unprecedented numbers.

WhatsApp has taken other steps to address fake news, including offering cash rewards for researchers studying the spread of misinformation through the app and seeking the help of local law enforcement and fact-checking organizations to fight hoaxes.

Apple brings back the iPad Air with new 10.5-inch display and Apple Pencil support

Apple is bringing back the iPad Air today with a bigger model. Alongside a new iPad mini, Apple is launching a 10.5-inch version of the iPad Air with support for the original Apple Pencil (not the modern second-generation Apple Pencil). This new model will be powered by Apple’s A12 Bionic chip, and it will slot into the iPad lineup between the larger iPad and iPad Pro models. Apple is making the iPad Air available starting at $499 for the Wi-Fi model and $629 for the Wi-Fi and cellular version.

Apple originally replaced its iPad Air 2 with a device simply called the iPad nearly two years ago, but the company has bumped the screen size from 9.7 inches to 10.5 inches for this new model. The move to support the older generation of Apple Pencil ($99) seems particularly odd, but it does mean every iPad that Apple now sells includes stylus support. Apple’s updated iPad Air will also support the company’s Smart Keyboard, which is available separately for $159.

Apple hasn’t picked its latest A12X processor for the iPad Air that it uses in the iPad Pro, but it will instead use the A12. Apple is positioning this as bringing “more of our most powerful technologies to more people than ever” by offering a bigger iPad that’s not quite at the “Pro” level but still more powerful than the smaller 9.7-inch iPad. This iPad Air also has a similar design and display bezels to the smaller iPad, rather than the narrow bezels found on Apple’s latest iPad Pro. Apple is also using its Lightning connector and Touch ID system for the iPad Air instead of the USB-C port or Face ID like the iPad Pro models have.

Apple’s new 10.5-inch iPad Air will be available to order online today from $499, and it will be in stores next week.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton