Month: February 2021

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Congressional Quarterly)

With concerning coronavirus variants erupting around the world, the US Food and Drug Administration is ironing out how to rapidly review vaccine tweaks that better protect against the mutants—and the regulatory agency is turning to its experience with annual flu shots to do so.

In a statement late Thursday, the regulatory agency said it is actively hashing out what kind of “streamlined” clinical data makers of authorized COVID-19 vaccines could submit. The agency expects to have a draft of its guidance in the next few weeks.

The announcement suggests that makers of authorized vaccines will not be required to submit reams of data from large, months-long clinical trials, as they did for their initial authorizations. Still, data on any altered vaccine—however pared down—would still have to be enough to convince FDA scientists that a next-generation shot is safe and effective against variants. Vaccine alterations may include changes to the initial vaccine design or additions of new vaccine components, the FDA said.

Enlarge / Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing on Jan. 21, 2021. (credit: Stefani Reynolds - pool | Getty Images)

With a new session of Congress underway and a new administration in the White House, Big Tech is once again in lawmakers' crosshairs. Not only are major firms such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google under investigation for allegedly breaking existing antitrust law, but a newly proposed bill in the Senate would make it harder for these and other firms to become so troublingly large in the first place.

The bill (PDF), called the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act (CALERA for short, which is still awkward) would become the largest overhaul to US antitrust regulation in at least 45 years if it became law.

"While the United States once had some of the most effective antitrust laws in the world, our economy today faces a massive competition problem," said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) when she introduced the bill on Thursday. "We can no longer sweep this issue under the rug and hope our existing laws are adequate," Klobuchar added, calling the bill "the first step to overhauling and modernizing our laws" to protect competition in the current era.

Enlarge / Users can install Homebrew via the Terminal in macOS. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Popular Mac tool Homebrew has long been used by developers and others for package management on macOS, but as we lamented in our first M1 Mac review, it didn't support Apple Silicon when Apple's new Macs first launched late last year. Now, with the release of Homebrew 3.0.0, that's no longer the case: Homebrew now supports Apple Silicon natively, albeit not with every package.

The volunteer Homebrew team made the announcement on the Homebrew blog alongside today's release. While the native support is not yet comprehensive, it bridges the gap significantly, and users can still run Terminal via Rosetta 2 to do what they can't yet while running natively on Apple Silicon. The Homebrew blog post says "we welcome your help" in providing bottles for all packages moving forward.

Here's the full bullet point on Apple Silicon in the Homebrew 3.0.0 release notes:

(credit: Chrome)

Users of Google’s Chrome browser have faced three security concerns over the past 24 hours in the form of a malicious extension with more than 2 million users, a just-fixed zero-day, and new information about how malware can abuse Chrome's sync feature to bypass firewalls. Let’s discuss them one by one.

First up, the Great Suspender, an extension with more than 2 million downloads from the Chrome Web Store, has been pulled from Google servers and deleted from users’ computers. The extension has been an almost essential tool for users with small amounts of RAM on their devices. Since Chrome tabs are known to consume large amounts of memory, the Great Suspender temporarily suspends tabs that haven’t been opened recently. That allows Chrome to run smoothly on systems with modest resources.

Characteristically terse

Google's official reason for the removal is characteristically terse. Messages displayed on devices that had the extension installed say only, “This extension contains malware” along with an indication that it has been removed. A Google spokesman declined to elaborate.

Enlarge / A stack of 60 Starlink satellites launched in 2019. (credit: SpaceX)

A new SpaceX filing outlines plans for Starlink to offer phone service, emergency backup for voice calls, and cheaper plans for people with low incomes through the government's Lifeline program.

The details are in Starlink's petition to the Federal Communications Commission for designation as an Eligible Telecommunications Carrier (ETC) under the Communications Act. SpaceX said it needs that legal designation in some of the states where it won government funding to deploy broadband in unserved areas. The ETC designation is also needed to get reimbursement from the FCC's Lifeline program for offering discounts on telecom service to people with low incomes.

Starlink is in beta and costs $99 per month, plus a one-time fee of $499 for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router. As we noted yesterday, the SpaceX filing also says Starlink now has over 10,000 users in the US and abroad. SpaceX should have capacity for several million customers in the US—the company has permission to deploy up to 1 million user terminals (i.e. satellite dishes) and is seeking FCC permission to raise the maximum-deployment level to 5 million user terminals.

Classic-gaming archaeology doesn't always revolve around digging up rare and unreleased games. Sometimes, it's about taking well-known relics and reconstructing them from newly unearthed and higher-fidelity original component parts. As a result of this work, one of the biggest games of all time now sounds completely different.

Remastering the Super Mario World soundtrack in this way means diving deep into the world of compressed video game audio samples. These were most common in the late cartridge era; the samples were nestled between the literal bleeps and bloops of the earliest video game sound chips and the CD-quality audio of the optical disc. Games in this era would frequently chain together brief snippets of recorded audio and replay them over and over with different effects, as if they'd been loaded into an electronic keyboard.

The game cartridges couldn't store much data, of course, so the original synthesizer samples usually took a heavy hit in fidelity during the transition to game soundtracks. "The composer [often felt] obligated to sacrifice sound quality to get their music running without any lag and to fit into the cartridge," said Michael, a video game music source investigator from El Salvador (who didn't share his last name). "Especially if all the audio work is made by the CPU (like on the Nintendo 64), this limitation can distort how the music sounds. In some ways, this isn't the best take of the game's music."