Month: June 2020

Enlarge / The login screen for Hey on an iPhone XS. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson launched a firestorm of public criticism of Apple after Apple rejected an update to Basecamp's new email app. Hansson's tweet thread and the ensuing controversy surfaced days before Apple's annual developer conference, and amidst news that the European Commission has opened an antitrust probe of Apple and the App Store.

The app in question is Hey, an email tool that eschews tradition to offer a better experience for a certain type of user. It requires users to pay a $99 annual subscription fee to access its features and services but offers a free trial period.

Hey's 1.0 version was approved for launch on the App Store just this week, but it came under scrutiny at Apple when Basecamp attempted to deliver a 1.0.1 update with bug fixes. As events unfolded, a call and email came from Apple that indicated Hey would have to take steps toward making its subscription available through Apple's own billing system and in-app-payments platform. Otherwise, the app would be delisted from the store.

A young woman wakes up in a morgue and finds she now carries an embedded divine object in her back in Warrior Nun, a forthcoming fantasy drama from Netflix, based on the comic series by Ben Dunn. Not only has the divine brought her back from the dead, but she now has superpowers and a new mission to fight hell on Earth.

The first issue in the manga-style comic book series, "Warrior Nun Areala," debuted in 1994. The series features Sister Shannon Masters, a modern-day crusader for the Catholic Church's (fictional) Order of the Cruciform Sword. In the series mythology, the Order dates back to 1066, when a young Valkyrie woman named Auria converted to Christianity. Renamed Areala, she selects a new avatar every generation to carry on her mission of battling the agents of hell. Sister Shannon is the Chosen One. It's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer got religion.

Dunn has said he was inspired to create the series after learning, via a New York Times article, about the Fraternity of Our Lady, which established a chapter in Harlem in 1991 to run a soup kitchen. One of the nuns, Sister Marie Chantel, trained in the martial arts (judo and tae kwon do), and many of her fellow nuns also practiced self-defense, albeit mostly for sport. Dunn envisioned a world with nuns as superheroes, where heaven and hell are real dimensions. It's a fun series, because it's not Catholic proselytizing, despite the Christian themes and the nuns' sincere faith—unlike those infamous Jack Chick tracts and comic books. (I grew up reading the Crusader series, which honestly explains a lot about my rather warped psyche.)

Enlarge / Pills of Hydroxychloroquine sit on a tray at Rock Canyon Pharmacy in Provo, Utah, on May 20, 2020. (credit: Getty | George Frey)

The World Health Organization on Wednesday announced that it is abandoning use of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine in the Solidarity trial—the organization’s massive, global clinical trial of potential COVID-19 treatments.

The WHO cited early data from the trial and others showing that hydroxychloroquine does not lower the risk of death or provide any other clinical benefit in hospitalized patients.

“Investigators will not randomize further patients to hydroxychloroquine in the Solidarity trial,” the WHO said in a statement. “Patients who have already started hydroxychloroquine but who have not yet finished their course in the trial may complete their course or stop at the discretion of the supervising physician.”

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

The Department of Justice today released a set of proposals calling for sweeping reform to the law that grants immunity to apps and websites for the content users post or share to them, following months of political rhetoric about the supposed suppression of conservative speech online.

The proposal outlines recommended changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. "The time is ripe to realign the scope of Section 230 with the realities of the modern internet," the DOJ wrote. "We must ensure that the internet is both an open and safe space for our society."

The report (PDF) stems from a nearly year-long investigation into Big Tech that began in the department's Antitrust Division last July. The DOJ said at the time that the probe would "consider the widespread concerns that consumers, businesses, and entrepreneurs have expressed about search, social media, and some retail services online." The agency did not name names, but Amazon, Facebook, and Google were widely considered to be on the list.

Enlarge / "Thermal solution must be purchased separately" for both the Ryzen 9 3900XT, and Ryzen 7 3800XT. (Ryzen 5 customers still get the freebie.) (credit: AMD)

On Tuesday, AMD announced three new additions to its desktop Ryzen CPU line: Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and Ryzen 5 3600XT. The new processor designs are expected to become generally available on July 7, the anniversary of the original launch date of 7nm Zen 2.

The new CPU designs take advantage of newly optimized 7nm process technology to offer higher performance at the same TDPs as Ryzen 3000 designs. The new 3000XT CPUs are drop-in replacements on AM4 motherboards that supported Ryzen 3000 CPUs and offer small (up to 4 percent) single-threaded performance improvements over their Ryzen 3000 counterparts.

Although the single-threaded performance improvements are small, the margins between CPUs in that stat tend to be razor-thin, and AMD says they're enough to take the coveted single-thread performance crown away from Intel. A 4 percent improvement to the Ryzen 9 3900X score shown on the CGDirector leaderboard would come out to 531—a few points higher than CGDirector's posted score for the i9-10900K, although a few points lower than our own Cinebench R20 result for that processor, using an NZXT Kraken fluid-cooler and Primochill Praxis open-air bench.

• 

  Meet Spot, the robodog. [credit: Boston Dynamics ]

Boston Dynamics, easily the world's leading robotics company, is selling a robot to the public for the first time in its 28-year history. The company's robotic quadruped, "Spot," is now for sale on shop.bostondynamics.com, where you can take home your very own robotic dog for a cool $74,500.

If you can't tell from the price, Spot is an industrial robot for industrial applications. Boston Dynamics' site calls Spot "a stable, dynamically balanced quadruped robot that can navigate through unstructured, unknown, or antagonistic terrain with ease." Spot is a platform, Boston Dynamics handles the locomotion, and it's your job to develop programs and attach extra equipment to make Spot useful. Out of the box, the robot is basically a highly mobile camera that can go up steps, tromp through the mud, and generally handle terrain better than nearly any other robot on Earth.

We covered Spot's development back when it was first unveiled in 2015. Back then, Spot—which has since been renamed to "Spot Classic"—was a 160-pound robodog with a pipe chassis and exposed internals. The big advancement at the time over previous Boston Dynamics quadrupeds was a design around an electric engine to drive the hydraulics system, which made it amenable to indoor use. Previous four-legged BD bots like the 330-pound Wildcat ran on a two-stroke gas engine that sounded like a chainsaw and constantly belched CO2. The Spot bots got a lot smaller with the "SpotMini" in 2016, a 55-pound robot that dumped the hydraulics system of the original Spot and went with an all-electric locomotion system. The SpotMini has since been renamed to plain old "Spot" and looks the closest to today's commercial bot—it even has an option for plastic cladding. This latest version, with a yellow shell, has been hanging around on the YouTube channel since 2017.