Month: April 2021

Enlarge / By 2030, Polestar wants to build truly carbon-neutral cars. (credit: Polestar)

The Swedish electric vehicle startup Polestar says it wants to build truly carbon-neutral vehicles within the next decade. Announced on Wednesday as part of the company's first sustainability report, the ambitious goal will require new car-building methods because, in the words of Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, "offsetting is a cop-out."

"By pushing ourselves to create a completely climate-neutral car, we are forced to reach beyond what is possible today. We will have to question everything, innovate, and look to exponential technologies as we design toward zero," Ingenlath said.

Specifically, Polestar says the target will only involve the carbon emissions it can directly control, which means everything from emissions from its supply chain and from raw materials, to completed cars leaving its factory.

Enlarge / Look how much smoother those lines get! (credit: Nvidia)

Last year, Nvidia released RTX Voice, a pretty good GPU-driven noise-cancellation technology that could be hacked to run on non-RTX graphics cards. Since then, it turns out that Nvidia has quietly and officially unlocked this noise-cancelling capability on lower-powered GTX-level graphics cards as well.

A quick hat tip to Tom's Hardware, which recently noticed an extant version of Nvidia's RTX Voice Setup Guide. It currently notes that "to use RTX Voice, you must be using an NVIDIA GTX or RTX graphics card, update to Driver 410.18 or newer, and be on Windows 10 [emphasis added]."

The addition of GTX cards to the "requirements" section of the guide was made around the end of October 2020, according to a quick perusal of the Internet Archive. About a month before that, Nvidia added an update to the page noting that "RTX Voice is now enabled for any NVIDIA GeForce, Quadro or TITAN GPU [emphasis added]."

Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems has filed a complaint against Google in France alleging that the US tech giant is illegally tracking users on Android phones without their consent.

Android phones generate unique advertising codes, similar to Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), that allow Google and third parties to track users’ browsing behavior in order to better target them with advertising.

In a complaint filed on Wednesday, Schrems’ campaign group Noyb argued that in creating and storing these codes without first obtaining explicit permission from users, Google was engaging in “illegal operations” that violate EU privacy laws.