Month: November 2020

Enlarge / Charging a MY2021 Taycan at an Electrify America station (not pictured) will be as easy as plugging it in. (credit: Porsche)

Fast charging your electric vehicle at an Electrify America station just got a lot more seamless—at least for some electric vehicles. That's because the company has now implemented Plug&Charge, the user-friendly name for the ISO 15118 standard that enables an electric car to talk to the charger and handle authentication and billing.

If you ask any analyst, they'll tell you that Tesla's Supercharger network is one of the company's most valuable assets. For one thing, they're everywhere in the United States, enabling the kinds of road trips that always come up as an excuse as to why electric cars can't work. But it's not just the coverage—a Supercharger is effortless to use. You turn up and plug your car in, and it does the rest. Your Tesla tells the Supercharger who you are and whether you have to pay, and it deals with any billing. The whole arrangement really is delightfully easy.

Fast charging a non-Tesla EV is invariably a less seamless experience. You can carry a dongle on your keys, or use an app or your phone to authenticate with the charger. But in my experience, sometimes neither of those work, and you end up having to call the phone number on the side of the big humming box and ask them to turn it on for you from their side. Even when it does work smoothly, there's still some faffing about, poking a touchscreen that may not be the world's most responsive.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Last Thursday afternoon, Mac users everywhere began complaining of a crippling slowdown when opening apps. The cause: online certificate checks Apple performs each time a user opens an app not downloaded from the App Store. The mass upgrade to Big Sur, it seems, caused the Apple servers responsible for these checks to slow to a crawl.

Apple quickly fixed the slowdown, but concerns about paralyzed Macs were soon replaced by an even bigger worry—the vast amount of personal data Apple, and possibly others, can glean from Macs performing certificate checks each time a user opens an app that didn’t come from the App Store.

For people who understood what was happening behind the scenes, there was little reason to view the certificate checks as a privacy grab. Just to be sure, though, Apple on Monday published a support article that should quell any lingering worries. More about that later—first, let’s back up and provide some background.

Enlarge / Geneva: WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced on March 11, 2020, that the new coronavirus outbreak can now be characterized as a pandemic. (credit: Getty | FABRICE COFFRINI)

There’s more good news on the COVID-19 vaccine front today: biotechnology company Moderna reported in a press release this morning that its mRNA vaccine appeared 94.5 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 in an interim analysis of a large, Phase III trial. The news comes exactly one week after similar results came out via press release for another mRNA vaccine developed by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech.

But while health experts are “cautiously optimistic” for this and many other vaccines in the coming months, they warn that such a timeline will not be fast enough to spare lives and health care systems from the current spike in disease.

“Right now, we are extremely concerned by the surge in cases we’re seeing in some countries,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, said in a press conference Monday. “Particularly in Europe and the Americas, health workers and health systems are being pushed to the breaking point.”

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  A quick tour of some of the Bethesda gaming franchises Microsoft now owns begins with The Elder Scrolls series. [credit: Bethesda ]

Following Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition of Bethesda in September, gamers and industry watchers were left to speculate over whether you'd need a Microsoft platform (i.e., an Xbox, a Windows PC, or xCloud streaming) to play future games in franchises like Doom, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Dishonored, and The Evil Within.

Now, Microsoft Xbox CFO Tim Stuart has given the clearest indication yet that future Bethesda Softworks games likely won't be exclusive to Microsoft platforms. Instead, Stuart says he suspects Microsoft will shift to "a first or better or best approach on our platforms" for these kinds of games.

Speaking at the Jeffries Interactive Entertainment Virtual Conference last Friday (as transcribed by Seeking Alpha), Stuart said directly that "in the long run... we don't have intentions of just pulling all of Bethesda content out of Sony or Nintendo or otherwise. But what we want is we want that content, in the long run, to be either first or better or best or pick your differentiated experience, on our platforms."

Enlarge / Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer about to speak at an event in Southfield, Michigan, on October 16, 2020. (credit: Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images)

One of the Trump administration's top coronavirus advisers called for Michigan residents to "rise up" against their state government to resist temporary coronavirus mitigation measures—barely one month after several men were arrested for conspiring to kidnap and assassinate the state's governor.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's administration on Sunday issued a new emergency order putting a "pause" on several nonessential businesses and activities for the next three weeks. The order closes casinos and movie theaters, halts in-person dining in bars and restaurants, and requires colleges and high schools to return to all-virtual education, among other limitations. Childcare and schools up through eighth grade can remain open, as can gyms and pools, retail locations, and personal care services such as hair salons. Gatherings of up to 25 people are also permitted outdoors.

"Right now, there are thousands of cases a day, and hundreds of deaths a week in Michigan, and the number is growing," Whitmer said when announcing the order. "If we don't act now, thousands more will die, and our hospitals will continue to be overwhelmed. We can get through this together by listening to health experts once again and taking action right now to slow the spread of this deadly virus."

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  Opening up the iPhone 12 mini. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

iFixit has posted its teardown of the iPhone 12 mini, and it found inside what seems clear from the outside: a smaller version of the iPhone 12, with no missing features or components. However, some of those components—most notably the battery—are a bit smaller than they are in this phone's 6.1-inch big brother.

iFixit found that the battery measures in at 8.57Wh. For comparison, the iPhone SE—which actually has a larger body—has a smaller 6.96Wh battery, whereas the much larger iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro both have 10.78Wh batteries. This maps pretty closely to what battery tests have found: the iPhone 12 mini offers better battery life than an iPhone SE or iPhone 8, but it can’t beat its larger siblings.

Other shrunk-down components found by iFixit include a smaller Taptic Engine and loudspeaker. Also, some display-related components have been moved around, and there are only two display cables (compared to the iPhone 12's three).