Month: March 2021

Enlarge / All those lights take energy. (credit: DEA)

Back in the pre-legalization days, cannabis production meant finding a rarely visited patch of land and growing outside, or it meant taking cultivation indoors—typically to a basement where your product wouldn't be visible from the outside world. But the power use involved in lighting a basement growing space was legendary.

With legalization, it's really only the scale that has changed. Most legal marijuana is grown indoors, with some pretty hefty electrical use to match. Now, researchers have attempted to quantify the greenhouse gasses emitted, and they came up with some impressive figures. Based on their calculations, cannabis production results in over 2,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted for every kilogram of product (defined as dried flowers), and its legalization has had a measurable effect on Colorado's greenhouse gas output.

Why indoors?

In many locations that have legalized cannabis production, a lot of factors make indoor growth a reasonable option, including simplifying security, enabling year-round production, and simply the experience that comes from now-professional growers having years of practice as amateurs. But Colorado—one of the first states to legalize the wacky tabacky—added what is presumably an accidental inducement by requiring that the majority of the cannabis put up for sale has to be grown on the site where it is sold. You can either use good agricultural land to grow it, or you can sell it near the urban centers and campuses where demand i higher—but not both.

Enlarge / Microsoft's x86_64 Surface Laptop (right) looks to be in for an AMD-flavored refresh, alongside the usual Intel varieties. (credit: Microsoft)

According to a report by German news site WinFuture, Microsoft's new Surface 4 Laptop—set to debut this April—will offer AMD and Intel processor options side by side.

With 2020's Surface Laptop 3, only the larger 15-inch model got an AMD option—the smaller 13.5-inch version was Intel-only. But this year with Surface Laptop 4, WinFuture says that Ryzen 5 4680U and Ryzen 7 4980U "Surface Edition" CPUs—lightly modified for Microsoft's tight vertical integration—will be available in the smaller 13.5-inch Surface laptops as well.

Both Ryzen processors include Vega integrated graphics, and the Surface models are expected to include RAM up to 16GiB and SSD up to 512GB—though no word yet on whether the latter two will be socketed or soldered. These Ryzen models will be competing with Intel i5-1145G7 and i7-1185G7 Tiger Lake CPUs with Iris Plus 950 graphics; the Tiger Lake models are expected to offer up to 32GiB RAM and 1TB SSD.

Enlarge / YouTuber Brandon M captured this drone footage of his Tesla steering toward a parked car using the FSD beta software. "Oh Jeeeesus," he said as he grabbed the steering wheel. (credit: Brandon M / YouTube)

The transparency site PlainSite recently published a pair of letters Tesla wrote to the California Department of Motor Vehicles in late 2020. The letters cast doubt on Elon Musk's optimistic timeline for the development of fully driverless technology.

For years, Elon Musk has been predicting that fully driverless technology is right around the corner. At an April 2019 event, Musk predicted that Teslas would be capable of fully driverless operation—known in industry jargon as "level 5"—by the end of 2020.

"There's three steps to self-driving," Musk told Tesla investors at the event. "There's being feature complete. Then there's being feature complete to the degree where we think the person in the car does not need to pay attention. And then there's being at a reliability level where we also convince regulators that that is true."

Enlarge (credit: Drew Angerer | Getty Images)

Microsoft has patched a critical zero-day vulnerability that North Korean hackers were using to target security researchers with malware.

The in-the-wild attacks came to light in January in posts from Google and Microsoft. Hackers backed by the North Korean government, both posts said, spent weeks developing working relationships with security researchers. To win the researchers' trust, the hackers created a research blog and Twitter personas who contacted researchers to ask if they wanted to collaborate on a project.

Eventually, the fake Twitter profiles asked the researchers to use Internet Explorer to open a webpage. Those who took the bait would find that their fully patched Windows 10 machine installed a malicious service and an in-memory backdoor that contacted a hacker-controlled server.

Enlarge / The logo of Deutsche Telekom, owner of T-Mobile, seen at Mobile World Congress in February 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

T-Mobile next month will start a new program that gives customers' web browsing and device usage data to advertisers unless customers opt out of the data sharing.

"[S]tarting April 26, 2021, T‑Mobile will begin a new program that uses some data we have about you, including information we learn from your web and device usage data (like the apps installed on your device) and interactions with our products and services for our own and 3rd party advertising, unless you tell us not to," T-Mobile said in a privacy notice. "When we share this information with third parties, it is not tied to your name or information that directly identifies you."

For directions on how to opt out of the expanded data sharing, see the first section of the T-Mobile privacy notice.

Enlarge / The fastest storage you'll never see: NVMe drives generally get hidden beneath an aluminum heat sink. In our test rig, that heat sink is also underneath its RTX 2070 Super GPU. (credit: Jim Salter)

Samsung's newest generation of midgrade consumer NVMe storage is out today—the new drive is simply dubbed the "Samsung 980," without any suffix. The reviewer guide Samsung provided us compares the new drive to last generation's 970 EVO—we didn't have a 970 EVO on hand, but we did have a 970 EVO Plus and a 970 Pro, so those are the prior-generation drives we'll compare the new 980 to today.

A TLC drive by any other name

If you're not 100% up on your NAND storage terms, the first thing we need to talk about is cell levels. The fastest and most durable NAND storage is SLC—the Single Level Cell. An SLC NAND cell has only two values—0 and 1, or if you prefer, on and off. An SLC NAND cell can thus store a single bit of data. From there, we have MLC that can store two bits, TLC that can store three, and QLC that can store four data bits per cell.

Designation	bits per cell	Discrete voltage levels
SLC	1 bit	2
MLC	2 bits	4
TLC	3 bits	8
QLC	4 bits	16

Samsung calls the 980 a "three bit MLC" SSD, which is a lot like referring to a red car as "pink." To justify this, the company leans on the fact that "M" stands for "Multi"—so in plain English, "three bit MLC" could make sense, despite being utter nonsense in the established terminology of SSDs. From here on out, we're going to call it what it is: TLC.

Enlarge / The 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro running macOS. (credit: Samuel Axon)

According to MacRumors, Apple will completely change how the serial numbers for Macs are generated. The numbers will soon be fully randomized, meaning that users, IT managers, repair-shop technicians, and others will not be able to glean the same information from them that the current serial number system provides.

Serial numbers on Macs shipping today reflect the time and place where the Mac was assembled, as well as some configuration details like storage capacity. Moving forward, serial numbers will be fully random, with no code or consistency that can be used to learn information about the product. The new numbers will be between eight and 14 characters long.

MacRumors claims it learned of the change when it gained access to an internal AppleCare email. This change does not apply to Mac models that are shipping today, but it will go into effect for future Macs the company will introduce. That includes the rumored MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac refreshes expected later this year, as well as new Mac Pro models that appear to be planned for a later date.