Month: March 2020

• 

  Samsung's C32T55 curved monitor. [credit: Samsung ]

Samsung has revealed a lineup of productivity, home, and office-targeted monitors with 1000R curvature. Labeled the T55 series, these new monitors take a concept Samsung already applied to gaming monitors earlier this year at CES and makes the case that there's value in an ultra-curved form for more than just gamers, who have more often been adopters of curved displays.

Carrying the monikers C24T55, C27T55, and C32T55 at 24, 27, and 32 inches respectively, each monitor has a 75Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync support. Gamers sometimes seek monitors with higher 120 or 144Hz refresh rates, but in this case, the goal is just to make scrolling through documents that much smoother—no more, no less.

Other shared specs include 4ms response times, 250 nits of maximum brightness, 3,000:1 typical contrast ratios, 1,920 by 1,080-pixel resolutions, and VA panels.

Enlarge / Google's Dublin, Ireland, headquarters, currently sitting mostly empty as the 8,000 workers based there have all been told to work remotely. (credit: Hollie Adams | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

The spread of the novel coronavirus is doing for tech firms what no other argument for remote work apparently could, as Google, Facebook, and others are asking employees to stay home while they do their jobs.

Those policies are looking ever more like sensible precautions, as this week Amazon has confirmed that an employee based in Seattle tested positive for the virus. The employee apparently went home feeling sick on February 25 and has not returned to the office since. Two Amazon employees based in Italy also are confirmed to have contracted the virus.

Washington state's King County—home to Seattle and its tech-heavy suburbs Kirkland, Redmond, and Bellevue—is the site of the biggest US outbreak of COVID-19 so far. Microsoft, which is also based in the Seattle area, is now allowing employees based in its Seattle or San Francisco offices to work remotely through at least March 9.

Enlarge / Android teaches a young iPhone all about privilege escalation. (credit: Stblr / Reddit)

We all have our differences in the tech world—PC versus Mac, Android versus iOS, Emacs versus Vim. Occasionally, though, we can reach out to our friends across the aisle and realize that, at the end of the day, we're not all that different. Today's uplifting message of unity comes from the two main smartphone factions sharing in the joys of privilege escalation: it's now possible for a rooted Android phone to jailbreak iOS.

As first spotted by XDA Developers, Reddit user Stblr put the jailbreak puzzle pieces together when iOS jailbreaking exploit "Checkra1n" gained Linux support, which means it can also run on Android. If you have a rooted phone, you can plug your Android phone into your iPhone, run a few terminal commands, and break out of the Apple sandbox.

Checkra1n is the first jailbreak compatible with iOS 13, and it works on the iPhone 5 to iPhone X, running iOS 12.3 and up. It's only a temporary jailbreak, though, and will get wiped out once the phone reboots. This makes an ultra-portable device that can kick your iPhone back over into jailbreak mode pretty handy, and—for now at least—Android phones are still a bit smaller than laptops.