Month: April 2021

Enlarge / We're still a long way away from a smooth, quick boot with a fancy Asahi logo centered on the screen and (presumably) a soothing startup noise. (credit: Asahi Linux)

Asahi Linux—founded by Hector "marcan" Martin—has merged initial support for Apple M1 hardware into the Linux system-on-chip (SOC) tree, where it will hopefully make it into the Linux 5.13 kernel (which we can expect roughly in July).

What's an Asahi?

Asahi is the Japanese name for what we know as the McIntosh Apple—the specific fruit cultivar that gave the Mac its name. Asahi Linux is a fledgling distribution founded with the specific goal of creating a workable daily-driver Linux experience on Apple M1 silicon.

This is a daunting task. Apple does not offer any community documentation for Apple Silicon, so Martin and cohorts must reverse-engineer the hardware as well as write drivers for it. And this is especially difficult considering the M1 GPU—without first-class graphics support, Asahi cannot possibly offer a first-class Linux experience on M1 hardware such as the 2020 M1 Mac Mini, Macbook Air, and Macbook Pro.

Enlarge / Former Slovak Prime Minister Igor Matovic wears a face mask as he gives a press statement at the International Airport in Kosice, Slovakia, on March 1, 2021, after an aircraft of the Slovak Army arrived from Moscow, carrying doses of the Sputnik V vaccine against Covid-19. (credit: Getty | Peter Lazar)

Russia has asked Slovakia to return 200,000 doses of Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine after Slovak testing indicated serious quality control issues.

The Slovak regulatory agency, the State Institute for Drug Control, reported that the batches it received did not “have the same characteristics and properties” as the Sputnik vaccine that was peer-reviewed in the Lancet and found to be 91.6 percent effective.

In light of Slovakia’s doubts about the quality of the vaccine doses, Russia went on the attack on Twitter. Russia’s official “Sputnik V” Twitter account claimed in a thread that the Slovak regulator has “launched a disinformation campaign against #SputnikV and plans additional provocations.” The account labeled the agency’s testing results as “fake news.”

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  The Pixel 5a render from Steve Hemmerstoffer AKA Onleaks. It looks exactly like all the other recent Pixels. [credit: Steve Hemmerstoffer ]

It's been a wild Friday afternoon in the Android rumor mill. YouTuber Jon Prosser claimed the Pixel 5a was canceled due to the well-known chip shortage that is affecting most major tech sectors. Android Central backed up that report saying "the Google Pixel 5a is dead" (the site has since re-written the report) citing two different sources of their own. Google quickly responded by shooting those reports down, telling 9to5Google, "Pixel 5a 5G is not canceled. It will be available later this year in the US and Japan and announced in line with when last year’s a-series phone was introduced." Alright then!

While that's official confirmation that the Pixel 5a "5G" is coming out sometime this year, it doesn't seem like reports of limited chip supply were totally off-base. Coming out only in the US and Japan would be a dramatic reduction of the Pixel line's already very small list of supported countries. When it comes to worldwide distribution, the Pixel line is one of the worst in the industry, typically launching in only 9-12 countries. Competitors like Apple and Samsung launch in anywhere from 70-100+ countries, and it sounds like we're now down to two countries for Pixel phones.

Of course, the Pixel 5a comes out in the US because Google is based in the US, but seeing Japan as the second country was a bit of a surprise. It turns out that's actually the second-biggest market Google supports with the Pixel line. Compared to the top-10 biggest smartphone markets, Google's "device availability page" lists the Pixel for sale in #3 USA, #7 Japan, and #9 Germany. That's it. Google previously dabbled in India (and I definitely would have guessed the US and India would be the last two countries standing), but India is no longer listed on the Pixel device availability page and obviously isn't in the cards for the Pixel 5a.

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On Thursday, one of Elon Musk's companies, Neuralink, posted a video showing a monkey playing Pong using nothing but a brain implant connected wirelessly with the computer hosting the game. While it's a fantastic display of the technology, most of the individual pieces of this feat have been done before—in some cases, over a decade before. But Neuralink has managed to take two important steps: miniaturizing the device and getting it to communicate wirelessly.

What has been done

Neuralink's goal is to develop easy-to-implant, compact, wireless brain implants. Initially, these devices will be used for obvious goals, like re-establishing some degree of independence in paralyzed individuals. But Musk has made it very clear he sees the longer term goal as making the implants commonplace and able to do far more mundane things, like providing direct, brain-driven control of electronic devices.

For now, however, the early goals are dominating progress. About a year and a half ago, Neuralink showed off hardware implanted in pigs, with the implants providing real-term data about the goings-on within the pigs' brains' sensory regions as the animals explored their surroundings. At the time, Musk suggested that the team was nearly ready for human testing.

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  What's so special about a fully fledged TimeSplitters 2 menu? In this case, it's the fact that this fully unlocked game has been hiding inside of another game for five years. [credit: THQ Nordic ]

2021 has been a bountiful year for a select group of retro console gamers—specifically, fans of Goldeneye 007. Earlier this year, we found and confirmed a leak of the N64 classic as secretly remade for Xbox 360 consoles (it's even playable on both real hardware and emulators). Today, the same thing applies to a different game from some of Goldeneye 007's original creators: TimeSplitters 2.

The story began with an offhand comment on Twitter this weekend from British programmer Matt Phillips, who had worked on the 2016 video game Homefront: The Revolution. As a nod to the Easter holiday, Phillips piled onto a Twitter thread about long-lost Easter eggs inside of video games, and his was a doozy: He had put a "fully playable, native 4K port of TimeSplitters 2" into a five-year-old game without anybody realizing it.

If you've played H:TR, you may have seen a TS2-branded arcade cabinet toward the end of the game. Walk up to it and activate it, and that 2002 game will boot up, albeit in bite-sized form. Only its first two levels are playable, and only in single-player mode. But as it turns out, Phillips put most of the older game's native content into that cabinet, all locked away with some debug codes.

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Q Link Wireless, a provider of low-cost mobile phone and data services to 2 million US-based customers, has been making sensitive account data available to anyone who knows a valid phone number on the carrier’s network, an analysis of the company’s account management app shows.

Dania, Florida-based Q Link Wireless is what’s known as a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, meaning it doesn’t operate its own wireless network but rather buys services in bulk from other carriers and resells them. It provides government-subsidized phones and service to low-income consumers through the FCC’s Lifeline Program. It also offers a range of low-cost service plans through its Hello Mobile brand. In 2019, Q Link Wireless said it had 2 million customers.

The carrier offers an app called My Mobile Account (for both iOS and Android) that customers can use to monitor text and minutes histories, data and minute usage, or to buy additional minutes or data. The app also displays the customer’s:

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  A Samsung Micro LED TV in suitably swanky digs. [credit: Samsung ]

Samsung, the world's biggest TV manufacturer, may be on the precipice of significantly shifting its strategy to focus on OLED technology. Samsung has not produced OLED TVs in recent years, focusing instead on variants of LED LCD technology.

The news comes from a report by Korean broadcaster MTN (among other South Korean news outlets), which says Samsung and LG have reached a conditional deal wherein Samsung would buy as many as 1 million OLED panels from LG this year and 4 million in 2022. MTN clarifies the deal is not yet final but says that only a few details are left to be worked out.

LG produces most of the world's large-format OLED panels such as those used for TVs; its panels are not just used in LG TVs but also in TVs sold by Sony, Panasonic, and others. Samsung produces OLED panels also, but not at TV sizes. Samsung makes OLED panels for smartphones, and those panels use a different technology than what is seen in LG's OLED TVs.