Month: February 2020

Enlarge / YOKOHAMA, JAPAN - FEBRUARY 19, 2020: A bus carrying passengers who will take the flight chartered by the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China drives past the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship docked the Daikoku Pier. (credit: Getty | Tomohiro Ohsumi)

On Wednesday, the initial 14-day quarantine aboard a coronavirus-stricken cruise ship docked in Yokohama, Japan, officially ended. But the grueling saga seems far from for over for the ship’s 3,711 passengers and crew.

As the quarantine time ran out, Japanese officials were still reporting dozens of new cases of COVID-19 aboard. As of Wednesday, the number of coronavirus infections linked to the ship total 621—by far the largest cluster of COVID-19 infections anywhere outside of China. The next-largest cluster outside of China is in Singapore, which has 84 confirmed cases.

Japanese health officials are facing international criticism for their handling of the quarantine on the ship, the Diamond Princess. The quarantine was intended to curb the spread of disease by keeping people aboard, isolated from each other and from the public on land. But as cases mounted over the two weeks, it became clear that the control efforts only enabled the new coronavirus to spread. In fact, the 621 cases include at least three Japanese health officials, who were there to support the quarantine efforts but ended up becoming infected themselves.

Enlarge / The seemingly simple act of charing is getting increasingly complex. (credit: Argonne National Lab)

Batteries tend to involve lots of trade-offs. You can have high capacity, but it means more weight and a slower charge. Or you can charge quickly and see the lifetime of your battery drop with each cycle. There are ways to optimize performance—figuring out the fastest charging you can do without cutting into the battery life—but that varies from product to product and requires extensive testing to identify.

But perhaps that testing is not so extensive, thanks to a new system described in the journal Nature. The system uses a combination of machine learning and Bayesian inference to rapidly zero in on the optimal charging pattern for any battery, cutting the amount of testing needed down considerably.

Not so fast

Fast charging is obviously useful for everything from phones to cars. But when a battery is subjected to fast charging, it doesn't store its ions quite as efficiently. The overall capacity will go down, and there's the potential for permanent damage, as some of the lithium ends up precipitating out and becoming unavailable for future use.

Enlarge / Nvidia recently announced a limited edition, sweepstakes-only version of its most expensive consumer-grade GPU. One day later, the company announced a way that PC gamers can enjoy its RTX perks without even buying a new GPU. (credit: Nvidia)

Thanks to Cyberpunk 2077's delay to September 2020, gamers have even longer to decide how they'll play this highly anticipated game. Existing consoles? The upcoming PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X? Various PC configurations?

We're still waiting for more details on the game's launch strategy (particularly on newer consoles), but one other option just got more interesting: playing this stylish, Keanu-tinged adventure over the cloud. We already knew Google Stadia would have the game in September, but now, Nvidia has confirmed it's coming on launch day to its own GeForce Now service as well.

On the surface, this availability seems similar to Google Stadia's offer. If you want to play the (presumably) demanding Cyberpunk 2077 at its "highest quality" settings when it launches and don't want to pony up for a newer console or PC, you can stream the game as rendered by a server farm and contend with a hit to latency—which we've found in our tests ranges from annoying to tolerable to downright unnoticeable. Even with a smidgen of button-tap lag and a hit to bandwidth caps, the results could be easier to stomach than the sticker price of a new piece of hardware.

Enlarge / LONDON, ENGLAND - FEBRUARY 19, 2020: A demonstrator wearing a Julian Assange mask attends a demonstration ahead of the preliminary hearing. Assange's lawyer claims President Donald Trump's administration had offered a pardon in exchange for covering up Russian involvement in the leaks of Democratic Party emails during the 2016 election. (credit: Ilyas Tayfun Salci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

In August of 2017, then-Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) visited Julian Assange at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. Rohrabacher told The Wall Street Journal that he was trying to broker a deal between Assange and the White House that would allow Wikileaks' Julian Assange to leave the embassy and be granted a pardon or similar clemency by the Trump administration—in exchange for information proving that the Russian government had not been the source of Democratic Party emails published by WikiLeaks.

But in court today, an attorney for Assange put a different spin on his dealings with Rohrabacher: the congressman promised a pardon in exchange for covering up Russia's role in the leaking of Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails. Assange's lawyer for his extradition hearings (Edward Fitzgerald) offered into evidence a statement from another Assange lawyer (Jennifer Robinson) which showed, Fitzgerald said, “Mr. Rohrabacher going to see Mr Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks."

The US government is seeking Assange's extradition to face 18 charges (including conspiracy to commit computer intrusion) connected to the leak of Defense Department and State Department documents to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who is presiding over the hearing at Westminster Magistrate's Court, ruled the statements by Robinson as admissible evidence.

Enlarge / Guess what won't be on display at one of the biggest US gaming gatherings? (credit: Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Update, February 20: One day after Sony's PAX East cancellation, the company's PlayStation arm has now announced plans to skip a second major gaming expo, the Game Developers Conference, by citing the impact of coronavirus on its worldwide operations. Its exit from the March expo has company: Oculus, the virtual reality arm of Facebook, will also no longer attend GDC.

GamesIndustry.biz reported the pair of cancellations on Thursday with statements from both companies. Both statements revolve around concern for the health and safety of employees worldwide, while Oculus insists it will proceed as planned by posting GDC-timed announcements online and "host[ing] GDC partner meetings remotely" in the near future.

GDC's organizers posted a statement on Thursday assuring attendees that they're moving forward with the expo as planned, based on guidance from state and city health advisers. "We believe that, based on the strict US quarantine around coronavirus and a large number of enhanced on-site measures, we are able to execute a safe and successful event for our community," the statement said.

Enlarge (credit: Sarah Shuda / Flickr)

Here's a clue for would-be Internet financial scammers: do not target librarians. They will catch on fast, and you will have wasted your time.

Yesterday, the former outgoing chair of the Young Adult Library Services Association's Alex Awards Committee (and my wife) Paula Gallagher got a very odd email that purported to be from a colleague within her library system who is a member of YALSA's board. The email asked, "Are you available to complete an assignment on behalf of the Board, And get reimbursed? Kindly advise."

There were a few things off about the email. First of all, while the first half of the email address that the message came from matched the email address of her colleague, the domain name was very phishy: Reagan.com, a site that offers "secure private email" to users who want to "keep President Ronald Reagan's legacy alive." The purported sender of the message was, to put it mildly, not a big fan of President Reagan's legacy. (Ars attempted to reach the operators of the Reagan.com site for comment, but they are very privacy-minded.)

Enlarge

It's a bit earlier than the usual March release, but today Google is launching the first Android 11 Developer Preview. This first OS preview is coming to the Pixel 2, 3, 3a, and 4, along with generic system images for Project Treble devices. It also has a new name. Typically these releases have been denoted by a letter—Android 10 was the "Android Q Preview"—and while Android 11 is still called "Android R" internally, publicly this is the "Android 11 Developer Preview" to all us non-Googlers. True to form, Google has already started with the Spinal Tap references and starts the blog post with a dial that goes to 11.

For now we're just working off a giant blog post with lots of bullet points, and nearly zero screenshots, so we're not sure what the scope of this release is really like. We'll have a hands-on later, but for now, here are some highlights.

One of the most-used features of Android 11 will probably be a new "one-time permission" option for apps that want to access location, microphone, and camera data. In Android 10, Google added the ability to grant a permission to an app only when it was running in the foreground, and now users will be able to grant access to a permission a single time. This is already in iOS, and it makes a lot of sense for certain apps.