Month: July 2020

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg speaks via videoconference during a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing in Washington. (credit: Graeme Jennings/Washington Examiner/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In a 2012 email six weeks before acquiring Instagram, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that one of his motivations for the acquisition was to "neutralize a potential competitor." The emails were revealed during today's hearing before the House antitrust committee featuring four technology moguls: Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Zuckerberg. The emails were first reported by the Verge.

Facebook was one of the Internet's biggest social networks in 2012, but its dominant position was not as secure then as it is today. There were a lot of rival social networks, and Zuckerberg worried his company would get caught flat-footed by the shift to smartphones.

Neutralizing a potential competitor?

On the evening of February 27, 2012, Zuckerberg emailed Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman about the possibility of acquiring "mobile app companies like Instagram and Path that are building networks that are competitive with our own." He worried that "if they grow to a large scale they could be very disruptive to us."

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum van in West Lake Hills, Texas in April 2019. (credit: Tony Webster )

Nonprofits and local politicians are lining up to support a Charter Communications petition that would let the ISP impose data caps on broadband users and seek interconnection payments from large online-video providers.

Charter filed the petition with the Federal Communications Commission last month, asking the FCC to eliminate merger conditions applied to its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable two years early. If Charter's petition is granted, the company would be able to impose data caps on its Spectrum broadband service and charge network-interconnection fees to video providers after May 18, 2021, instead of in May 2023 as scheduled.

With the FCC seeking public comment, the docket is overwhelmingly filled with consumers urging the commission to oppose Charter's request for permission to limit consumers' data usage and charge data-overage fees. "In this age of Internet communication, data caps are an unscrupulous way to gouge money from clients, many of whom do not have alternative Internet sources. This is unacceptable," one person wrote in a sentiment echoed by hundreds of other Internet users who wrote to the FCC in the past few weeks.

Enlarge / The central Adoration of the Mystic Lamb panel. The groupings of figures are, from top left anti-clockwise: the male martyrs, the pagan writers and Jewish prophets, the male saints, and the female martyrs. (credit: Public domain/Wikimedia Commons)

Over the last eight years, conservationists have been meticulously restoring the famed Ghent altarpiece housed in Belgium's St Bavo's Cathedral. With the help of several advanced imaging techniques, they've been able to identify where overpainting from earlier restorations obscured the original work. Researchers at the University of Antwerp and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, have published a new paper in the journal Science Advances demonstrating how combining different techniques greatly improved their analysis, revealing previously unknown revisions to the Lamb of God figure in the inner central panel.

The Ghent Altarpiece—aka the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb—is a 15th-century polyptych attributed to brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck. Originally consisting of 12 panels, the altarpiece features two "wings" of four panels each, painted on both sides. Those wings were opened on church feast days so congregants could view the interior four central panels. The inner upper register features Christ the King, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist, flanked by the outer panels depicting angels and the figures of Adam and Eve. The inner lower register depicts John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist. The Adoration of the Lamb comprises the center panel, featuring the Lamb of God standing on an altar in a meadow surrounded by angels, with groups of martyrs, saints, and prophets congregating around the altar.

The first significant restoration was done in 1550 to repair damage from an earlier cleaning. It was cleaned again in 1662 by the Flemish painter Antoon van den Heuvel. After the altarpiece was damaged while being stored in Austrian mines during World War II, another restoration was done in the 1950s, making use of X-ray radiography (XRR) to aid in those efforts. Specifically, the researchers imaged tiny paint samples from the cross section of the altarpiece, yielding useful information about areas that had been over-painted during the earlier restoration, obscuring the original Eyckian work—including the Lamb's head.

Enlarge / All Snake is saying is "give peace a chance." (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Nearly five years have passed since Konami started Metal Gear Solid V's nuclear-disarmament metagame, tasking the game's community with removing every single nuclear weapon created by players on the game's servers. This week, players on the PS3 version of MGSV seemed to reach that long-sought goal, unlocking a cut scene congratulating them on a day that character Master Miller says he "thought... would never come."

Now, the excited players behind the disarmament are waiting to see if Konami will officially acknowledge their achievement and perhaps unlock some long-hinted-at new content for the five-year-old game.

The long push for peace

Organized MGSV nuclear-disarmament efforts have been going in fits and starts for years, first via the now-defunct Metal Gear Philanthropy subreddit and more recently in the MetalGearAntiNuclear subreddit. There, players would join together to discuss raiding the Forward Operating Bases of nuclear-armed opponents on MGSV's online servers in order to steal and then disarm those weapons to lower the total worldwide count.

Enlarge / Could we vaccinate these guys to save us from disease? (credit: CDC.gov)

Viruses like Ebola and the original SARS have highlighted the risks that emerging diseases pose to our modern, highly connected society. While the standard approach of isolating the infected and limiting the spread of the disease worked in those cases, it works slowly enough to make many people nervous. But the global spread of Zika and SARS-CoV-2 shows that these approaches have their limits, leaving us at risk.

Is there anything else we could do? A perspective by Scott Nuismer and James Bull of the University of Idaho suggests we now have the tools to go on the offensive against viruses before they transfer to humans. The proposal: treat animal hosts of threatening viruses with virus-based vaccines that can spread through wild populations. While there's a lot of details to work out here, the article lays out how we might determine if this is a viable approach.

Threats and their hosts

There are a huge number of hosts that share virus with our species. These range from familiar threats, like the mammals that carry the rabies virus, to our agricultural species that have spanned flu pandemics, and newly emerging dangers, such as hantaviruses and coronaviruses, carried by mice and a variety of species, respectively. While there's no real pattern to the species that transfer viruses to humans, there have been successful efforts to identify the hosts from which viruses originated. Nuismer and Bull highlight the PREDICT program, run by the US Agency for International Development, which identified nearly 1,000 previously uncharacterized viruses before the Trump administration terminated it in March.

Enlarge / This slide is a year old, but AMD CEO Lisa Su says it's still accurate—Zen 3, Big Navi, and next-gen console CPUs will all arrive on schedule later this year. (credit: AMD)

During AMD's second-quarter earnings call, CEO Lisa Su said that all of the company's upcoming 2020 product launches are still on schedule—meaning Zen 3 desktop CPUs, RDNA 2 "Big Navi" GPUs, and console hardware for the PS5 and Xbox Series X.

This is great news for consumers but bad news for Intel, which reorganized its engineering department this week shortly after admitting that we won't be seeing its 7nm desktop CPUs until late 2022 or perhaps even 2023.

This isn't quite as bad as it sounds—there's a discrepancy between the way the two companies measure process size, and transistor density for Intel's 7nm process should be roughly equivalent to AMD fab partner TSMC's 5nm process. Unfortunately, the delay means TSMC should be debuting its 3nm parts around the same time that Intel now expects to be launch its own 7nm.