Month: November 2016

(credit: Illustration by Aurich Lawson)

Google—as expected—has dismissed the European Commission's charge that the ad giant abused Android’s dominance to block its competitors in the market.

The company is accused of using Android’s position as the dominant smartphone operating system in Europe, to force manufacturers to pre-install Google services while locking out competitors.

Competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager sent a so-called Statement of Objections to Google in April.

(credit: Neon Tommy)

Yahoo admitted to the world—on a news day dominated by a guy called Trump—that some of its employees were aware that it had suffered a breach shortly after a "state-sponsored actor" hacked into the ailing Web firm's systems in 2014.

In a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, Yahoo said that a panel of independent experts was looking at how much knowledge employees at the company had of the incident shortly after the massive breach had occurred.

Yahoo has previously stated that it only became aware of the hack attack following a "recent investigation." As Ars reported previously, Yahoo confirmed in September that at least half a billion of its user accounts had been breached.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The European Commission's ruling that Apple should pay Ireland €13 billion (£11.1 billion) in back taxes is set to be formally disputed by the Irish government.

Finance minister Michael Noonan said on Tuesday that Dublin would challenge the judgment on Wednesday.

In August, competition officials in Brussels concluded that the so-called sweetheart tax deals Apple received from Ireland constituted illegal state aid. The commission's antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said at the time: "Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies—this is illegal under EU state aid rules."

Enlarge (credit: Peter Bright)

Most of the PC OEMs have refreshed their Skylake systems to include Intel's new Kaby Lake chips. Kaby Lake parts are for the most part drop-in replacements for Skylake parts—same chipsets, same power envelopes and cooling requirements—and some manufacturers have taken advantage of this fact. Dell's new XPS 13 is in most regards identical to the old XPS 13, for example, except for the processor swap. Some manufacturers have been a little more ambitious; HP's updated Spectre x360 adds Thunderbolt 3 and Windows Hello support as well as slashing the size and weight.

Microsoft, however, has gone for none of these routes. The Surface Pro 4 with its Skylake processor remains the current iteration of the company's productivity-oriented tablet and hasn't changed since its introduction. The Surface Book, the laptop that can do double duty as a tablet, also remains a Skylake system. But Microsoft has made an upgrade of sorts to the Surface Book range in the form of an even more expensive version that sits at the very top of the range: the Surface Book with Performance Base.

The Surface Book's big party trick is that the screen portion is the part that contains the computer; it has batteries, a processor, RAM, storage, and everything else. The keyboard base, the part that in a regular laptop houses the computer parts, contains only the keyboard, touchpad, and battery. On higher-end models the keyboard base also contains a discrete Nvidia GPU. This GPU is non-standard; it doesn't neatly line up with any of Nvidia's usual mobile parts, and while it's faster than the Intel integrated graphics, it's not as quick as the more mainstream numbered parts.

Enlarge / Surface Pro 3. (credit: Peter Bright)

The Surface Pro 3 has had a series of issues around its battery life. There are two brands of battery used inside Microsoft's tablets: Simplo and LG. A bug meant that Simplo-equipped systems were seeing their battery life reduced to a handful of minutes, and this was fixed with a firmware update in August. But that fix appeared to be causing problems for systems with the LG batteries, rendering the devices unable to charge.

A new firmware update has been released (first spotted by Neowin) that purports to remedy this problem. Fingers crossed, it won't cause any further issues for Simplo systems.

Microsoft's release notes suggest that in both cases, the problems appear to be with the way the battery management reports the available battery life to the system. Batteries were being reported as full, even when they were empty. This prevented the system from being able to fully charge the batteries. With each successive charge, the "full" indication would be sent more and more prematurely, making the battery life fall further and further.