Month: January 2021

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers a speech on privacy at a virtual conference. (credit: CPDP)

Today, Apple announced plans to finally roll out its previously delayed change in policy on apps' use of IDFA (ID for Advertisers) to track users for targeted advertising. The feature will be in the next beta release of iOS 14 (the company just rolled out the public release of iOS 14.4 this week) and will reach all iOS devices supported by iOS 14 "in early spring."

Apple made the announcement with a white paper and Q&A targeted at its users. To illustrate the benefits Apple claims the change will offer to users, the document describes in detail a typical scenario where a father and daughter would have data about them tracked and updated while doing normal, everyday things in the current digital ecosystem.

Apple's document goes on to explain Apple's stated philosophy on user data protection and privacy, and it announces the release window for this upcoming change. The document explains the change this way:

Enlarge / U.S. President Joe Biden signs an executive order in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images)

Yesterday, US President Joe Biden signed three executive orders. The order with the widest scope was focused on climate policy, and it received the most attention. But the other two, while more narrowly focused, may also have a profound impact, because they seek to reorient the entire federal government's approach to science itself. That includes both protecting scientists from political interference and ensuring that government decisions are based on the evidence produced by science as often as possible.

PCAST is back

One of the two executive orders officially starts off the Biden administration's President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST. The organization is typically set up by an executive order and runs for two years before being renewed by a second. It dates back to the George H.W. Bush administration and has a broad remit to identify the current consensus in relevant fields of science and technology as well as to advise the entire executive branch regarding them.

The importance of PCAST isn't just limited to science agencies; for example, an Obama-era council issued a report on forensic science that was relevant to everything from research-funding bodies to federal law enforcement agents.

Enlarge / Ctrl IQ provided us with this diagram of its proposed technology stack. (Thankfully, spelling correction is not one of the core services Ctrl IQ offers.) (credit: Ctrl IQ)

Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of the now-defunct CentOS Linux distribution, has founded a new startup company called Ctrl IQ, which will serve in part as a sponsoring company for the upcoming Rocky Linux distribution.

Rocky Linux is to be a beneficiary of Ctrl IQ's revenue, not its source—the company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing."

About Rocky Linux

If you've been hiding under a Linux rock for the last few months, CentOS Linux was the most widely known and used clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Kurtzer co-founded CentOS Linux in 2004 with mentor Rocky McGaugh, and it operated independently for 10 years until being acquired by Red Hat in 2014. When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to recreate CentOS with a new distribution named after his deceased mentor.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Around the world, governments are starting to discuss, or even schedule, banning the sale of new vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Here in the United States, as is often the case, we may have to wait for private industry to move first, thanks to the sclerotic nature of US politics, particularly when it comes to climate change. This week, such a move happened, and it came from an unlikely source.

On Thursday, General Motors Chairwoman and CEO Mary Barra announced a new climate pledge. The nation's largest automaker says it will become carbon neutral across its global operations by 2040, which it will achieve through "science-based targets." GM has also now signed a pledge by businesses to try to keep global warming to 1.5˚C. That's a remarkable change for an automaker that, until very recently, supported the previous administration's plan to make US market cars less fuel efficient.

Making this happen will require GM to transition its vehicle portfolio to battery electric vehicles, as well as other hydrogen fuel cell EVs. In fact, the company says it has "an aspiration to eliminate tailpipe emissions from new light-duty vehicles by 2035."

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  This Asus-branded version of the DG1 is passively cooled—which should give you a hint where the DG1 sits in terms of raw GPU performance. [credit: Intel ]

Here at Ars, we've been talking about Intel's eventual run at the desktop graphics market for a while now. This week, Intel announced sales of Intel DG1 graphics cards to OEMs and system integrators, for inclusion in prebuilt systems. So far, two variants of the DG1 have been at least partially announced—an Asus-branded, passively cooled card, and an actively cooled version from an unannounced vendor.

If you're hoping to score a gray-market DG1 and include it in a home-built system of your own, you're out of luck. Intel told LegitReviews that DG1 cards will work only on very specific systems, with custom UEFI (BIOS) that supports the card:

The Iris Xe discrete add-in card will be paired with 9th gen (Coffee Lake-S) and 10th gen (Comet Lake-S) Intel® Core desktop processors and Intel(R) B460, H410, B365, and H310C chipset-based motherboards and sold as part of pre-built systems. These motherboards require a special BIOS that supports Intel Iris Xe, so the cards won’t be compatible with other systems.

While this is disappointing news for reviewers like yours truly, it's probably not anything to get upset about if you're an enthusiast looking for the next hot gaming GPU. If we assume that May 2020's leaked DG1 Fire Strike benchmarks are still accurate, it won't get close to breaking any records yet.

Enlarge / National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry answer questions during a press briefing at the White House. (credit: Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

Yesterday, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order entitled Putting the Climate Crisis at the Center of United States Foreign Policy and National Security. The document is sweeping, laying out a climate-focused agenda for the new administration and redirecting nearly every area of government to rethink its operations to bring them in line with that agenda. Targeted areas of government include everything from US diplomacy to the buildings that the government owns.

It's difficult to overstate how large a difference this represents not only from the Trump administration, which treated climate change as if it didn't exist, but even the Obama administration, which didn't even attempt to tackle the climate until partway through its second term. Biden referred to the climate as a crisis during his campaign, and this document indicates his planned policies will actually reflect that language.

Foreign and domestic

Executive orders are limited in what they can do, in that they are limited by what's allowed under existing laws; they can't simply create new powers that don't exist. There's a considerable flexibility, however, in how existing laws are interpreted or which aspects of administration are emphasized. And this is perhaps truest in the area of diplomacy, where, outside of treaties and sanctions, the government has extensive flexibility in terms of how it manages its relationships with other nations.