Month: February 2018

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today the Dealmaster is bringing you a choice deal on Sony's PlayStation VR headset, which remains the most accessible entry point for the VR-curious (presuming they have a PlayStation 4, of course). Sony has slashed each of its PSVR bundles by $100, bringing them down to their Black Friday prices.

Your best bet here is likely the Skyrim bundle: it's $350, but for that cash you get the second-generation PSVR headset (which supports HDR passthrough and comes with an integrated pair of headphones), the mandatory PlayStation camera, two PlayStation Move motion controllers, and a classic game that isn't perfect in VR but is still a decent way to get started with the tech. Alternatively, there's a cheaper bundle that includes Doom VFR, but we'll, uh, leave that decision up to you.

If you don't care about VR, though, fear not. The roundup also includes savings on speedy Samsung SSDs (alliteration!), iPads, TCL Roku TVs, lots of Dell PCs, Motorola's Moto G5 Plus phone, DJI drones, and much more. Take a look for yourself below.

(credit: Twitter)

A number of "alt-right," pro-Trump, and self-described conservative social media personalities awoke this morning to find that they had a lot fewer followers on Twitter than they had the night before. The apparent cause was the latest culling by Twitter of accounts that in some way violated the company's terms of service, a Twitter spokesperson told Ars, including "behaviors that indicate automated activity or violations of our policies around having multiple accounts, or abuse." The sweep has some on the right accusing Twitter of politically motivated censorship.

"Twitter's tools are apolitical, and we enforce our rules without political bias," a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement emailed to Ars. The accounts were targeted as part of "our ongoing work in safety," the spokesperson said. "We also take action on any accounts we find that violate our terms of service, including asking account owners to confirm a phone number so we can confirm a human is behind it. That's why some people may be experiencing suspensions or locks. This is part of our ongoing, comprehensive efforts to make Twitter safer and healthier for everyone."

In response to the sudden culling of accounts, starting at around 1am Eastern Time today, some aligned with "alt-right" figures such as Richard Spencer started the #TwitterLockOut and #TwitterPurge hashtags, and some resurfaced Project Veritas' accusations that Twitter employees were deliberately censoring "right-leaning" accounts. Spencer himself claimed to have lost over 1,000 followers over a few hours overnight; Janna "Deplorable" Wilkinson, who had her own account suspended in October, claimed to have lost 3,500 followers.

Enlarge / Intel Core i9 X-series Skylake X. (credit: Intel)

Intel reports that it has developed a stable microcode update to address the Spectre flaw for its Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake processors in all their various variants.

The microcode updates help address Spectre variant 2 attacks. Spectre variant 2 attacks work by persuading a processor's branch predictor to make a specific bad prediction about which code will be executed. This bad prediction can then be used to infer the value of data stored in memory, which, in turn, gives an attacker information that they shouldn't otherwise have. The microcode update is designed to give operating systems greater control over the branch predictor, enabling them to prevent one process from influencing the predictions made in another process.

Intel's first microcode update, developed late last year, was included in system firmware updates for machines with Broadwell, Haswell, Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake processors. But users subsequently discovered that the update was causing systems to crash and reboot. Initially, only Broadwell and Haswell systems were confirmed to be affected, but further examination determined that Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake systems were rebooting, too.

Enlarge / Reconstruction of a Bell Beaker burial (National Archaeological Museum of Spain). (credit: Miguel Hermoso Cuesta via Wikimedia Commons)

We can understand the prehistoric past only by interpreting the things people left behind. Finds don't come with words to explain how an object arrived at a site or why people decorated a pot a certain way. So there’s a lot of detail about prehistoric people’s lives, cultures, and interactions that these objects can only hint at. In recent years, however, the DNA of ancient people has added depth and detail to the information gleaned from artifacts. Genomic studies, it turns out, can tell us who the people using those artifacts were and where they came from.

Most of the genomic work so far has been relatively small-scale due to the massive effort involved in sampling and processing ancient DNA, but two new studies add several hundred prehistoric genomes to the existing data.

“The two studies published this week approximately double the size of the entire ancient DNA literature and are similar in their sample sizes to population genetic studies of people living today,” Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich, who coordinated the studies, told Ars. “We can pick out subtleties in ancient demographic process that were more difficult to appreciate using the small sample size studies available before.”

Enlarge / The Nest Cam IQ. The blue glow means it's recording. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google clearly has a goal of putting the Google Assistant just about everywhere. Today you can find it in smartphones, tablets, laptops, TVs, watches, smart speakers, headphones and soon, smart displays. There's one place you haven't seen the Assistant, though: a camera. Today Google is fixing that by updating the Next Cam IQ with Google Assistant support. The device is now basically a mini Google Home with a camera on top.

The Nest Cam IQ is Nest's top-of-the-line indoor camera, with a 4K sensor and an outrageously powerful (for a camera) six-core processor. All that power is put to work crunching that 4K video feed down to a more reasonable 1080p size, with the 4K sensor used to power the "12x digital zoom" feature available for its app. The Nest Cam IQ has always featured a microphone and speaker for remote communication, and now it will also be put to work to power your usual Google Assistant commands.

With the update, you'll be able to speak the usual "OK Google" commands, and the blue ring around the Nest Cam IQ will light up to show it's listening. Just like every other Google Assistant device, it supports questions, smart home commands, making shopping lists, buying stuff, controlling Chromecasts, and a score of other things.