Month: January 2021

Enlarge / Giving a little joy. (credit: xJasonRogersx / Flickr)

One month ago, we asked readers to donate to a couple of good causes in our 2020 Charity Drive sweepstakes. And boy did you readers deliver. With the drive now complete and the giving all tallied, we can report that Ars Technica readers donated an incredible $58,758.11 to Child's Play and the EFF in the last month. That easily surpasses the previous $38,738 record set in 2016 and brings total Ars Charity Drive giving to nearly $400,000 since 2008. Well done, Arsians!

Thanks to everyone who gave whatever they could. We're still early in the process of selecting and notifying winners of our swag giveaway, so don't fret if you haven't heard if you're a winner yet. In the meantime, enjoy these quick stats from the 2020 drive.

• 2019 Fundraising total: $58,758.11
  • Total given to Child's Play: $29,953.27
  • Total given to the EFF: $28,642.00
• Number of individual donations: 836
  • Child's Play donations: 465
  • EFF donations: 369
• Average donation: $70.28
  • Child's Play average donation: $64.42
  • EFF average donation: $77.62
• Median donation: $49.99
  • Median Child's Play donation: $33.42
  • Median EFF donation: $65.00
• Top single donation: $2,000 (to EFF)
• Donations of $1,000 or more: 3
• Donations of $100 or more: 225 (!)
• $5 or less donations: 23 (every little bit helps!)
• Total charity donations from Ars Technica drives since 2007 (approximate): $394,865.12
  • 2020: $58,758.11
  • 2019: $20,210.66
  • 2018: $36,012.37
  • 2017: $38,738.11
  • 2016: $38,861.06
  • 2015: $25,094.31
  • 2014: $23,570.13
  • 2013: $28,713.52
  • 2012: ~$26,000
  • 2011: ~$24,000
  • 2010: ~$17,000
  • 2009: ~$12,000
  • 2008: ~$10,000

Enlarge / Amazon is committing some cash to making sure people who don't make six figures can afford to live anywhere near its new Crystal City (Arlington, Virginia) second headquarters. (credit: Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Amazon is planning to spend $2 billion over the next five years to invest in affordable housing in the three cities where its major offices have helped jack up housing prices, the company said today.

The company will be using loans, lines of credit, and grants to "preserve and create" 20,000 committed affordable units for low- to moderate-income families in the general areas around Seattle, Nashville, and Arlington, Virginia, where it has a large corporate presence, Amazon said in a press release this morning.

"Affordable housing" is generally defined as priced to be within reach of families making 80 percent or less of the area median income. Amazon specifically is targeting households coming in between 30 and 80 percent of the area AMI. The AMI for the Washington, DC, metro area, including Arlington, is $126,000, and so basically any household making between $37,000 and $100,800 falls within that range. In Seattle, the AMI is $119,400, and so that window would include households making between approximately $35,800 and $95,500.

Enlarge / Social media applications are seen on an iPhone in this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland, on December 17, 2020. Facebook has disabled several features on its Messenger app to comply with new data usage rules currently being put in place in the EU as part of the ePrivacy Directive. (Photo illustration by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

App developers are exploring surreptitious new forms of user tracking to evade Apple’s new privacy rules, which threaten to upend the mobile advertising industry in the coming months.

Early in 2021, an iPhone update will prevent apps from using advertising identifiers known as IDFA without obtaining each user’s explicit consent for targeting. Developers expect more than two-thirds of users will block tracking when they see a popup appear within their apps.

Some app makers say they plan to use invasive tracking techniques such as “device fingerprinting” to work around the new restrictions—even though doing so risks getting them thrown off the App Store if they are caught.

Enlarge / Social media applications are seen on an iPhone in this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland, on December 17, 2020. Facebook has disabled several features on its Messenger app to comply with new data usage rules currently being put in place in the EU as part of the ePrivacy Directive. (Photo illustration by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

App developers are exploring surreptitious new forms of user tracking to evade Apple’s new privacy rules, which threaten to upend the mobile advertising industry in the coming months.

Early in 2021, an iPhone update will prevent apps from using advertising identifiers known as IDFA without obtaining each user’s explicit consent for targeting. Developers expect more than two-thirds of users will block tracking when they see a popup appear within their apps.

Some app makers say they plan to use invasive tracking techniques such as “device fingerprinting” to work around the new restrictions—even though doing so risks getting them thrown off the App Store if they are caught.

Enlarge (credit: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sea-surface-temperature.html )

Someday, humans will get it together and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But—not to fact check your daydreams too strictly here—how exactly will global temperatures respond to that day? This is a question climate science has long worked to answer, although devils in the details have led to some confusion.

A new study led by Nanjing University’s Chen Zhou tracks down another devil and puts it on display. Research has increasingly shown that it’s not just the planet’s average surface temperature that matters for tracking warming, but the spatial pattern of those temperatures. That can be important for calculating things like the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases, but it hasn’t been accounted for in some methods of estimating how emissions cuts affect warming.

Seeing a pattern

This “pattern effect” of warming in different areas of the globe influences the way the planet sheds heat back to space. For example, if warming is a little stronger in the western equatorial Pacific Ocean—which it has been—that region is better at producing sunlight-reflecting cloud cover and releasing heat upward. If you assume the warming is occurring evenly around the world, you will miss that slightly offsetting behavior.

Enlarge / COVID-vaccine-maker Moderna (right), has been placed in the ranks of Martin Shkreli (left). (credit: Drew Angerer / Florian Gaertner / Getty Images)

One of the leading developers of COVID-19 vaccines has now been placed in the ranks of people like Martin Shkreli—the disgraced pharmaceutical executive infamous for jacking up the price of an old, life-saving drug by more than 5,000 percent. He is now serving an 84-month prison sentence from a 2017 conviction on fraud counts unrelated to the drug pricing.

Moderna, maker of one of only two vaccines granted emergency authorizations to prevent COVID-19 in the US, has been shamed with a 2020 “Shkreli Award” by the Lown Institute, a healthcare think tank. The awards, announced annually for four years now, go to “perpetrators of the ten most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care.”

Award judges cited Moderna’s pricing of its COVID-19 vaccine, which was developed with $1 billion in federal funding. Still, despite the tax-payer backing, Moderna set the estimated prices for its vaccine significantly higher than other vaccine developers.