Month: May 2021

Enlarge / BANGKA BELITUNG ISLANDS, INDONESIA - DECEMBER 21, 2020: Health workers carry out a rapid antigen test on a passenger at Deapti Amir Airport, Pangkal Pinang City. (credit: Getty | Roni Bayu)

Since last December, more than 9,000 airline passengers who took a coronavirus rapid test as they flew out of Kualanamu International Airport in Medan, Indonesia, may have been tested by having previously used cotton swabs jammed into their noses.

Medan police arrested four workers and a local manager of the major pharmaceutical company Kimia Farma, which was working in conjunction with the airport to help perform the tests. The Medan-based Kimia Farma employees were allegedly washing and repacking cotton swabs for the tests while pocketing up to 1.8 billion rupiah (~$125,000), local police said.

Airline passengers in Indonesia are required to present a negative COVID-19 test result before boarding, and many opt for the convenience of being tested at the airport. Since the alleged swab scam began in December, Kimia Farma workers were testing between 100 and 200 passengers a day at the airport, some with fresh tests and others with tests that apparently involved reused swabs.

Enlarge / Actor Mark Wahlberg confers with director Antoine Fuqua on the set of Infinite. (credit: Mark Wahlberg)

On the heels announcing that it has reached just shy of 36 million subscribers, streaming service Paramount+ has announced that it will stream at least one original movie each week, including the long-delayed Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor sci-fi film Infinite.

In March, the streaming service CBS All Access was rebranded Paramount+, and it got a huge injection of new content directly resulting from the merger between parent company CBS and Viacom. ViacomCBS, the resulting new conglomerate, owns a vast swath of Hollywood brands and studios including CBS, Showtime, MTV, BET, Comedy Central, Paramount Pictures, and others. The desire to show all of that content under one streaming platform's roof was reportedly a key driver of the merger.

Given that CBS All Access was one of traditional Hollywood's first forays into a streaming service to compete with previous platforms from tech companies like Netflix and Amazon, it was a big shift. Since then, we've been wondering whether the rebranding has propped up the streaming service, which before the merger became best known for its various Star Trek reboot series.

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  Off to Tempest Keep we go, starting June 1. [credit: Blizzard Entertainment ]

After World of Warcraft successfully relaunched its original "vanilla" client in 2019, fans began wondering whether the WoW Classic universe would eventually march toward expansion packs—like the unofficial WoW Vanilla community had already done. That question was answered earlier this year with news that the official WoW Classic line would indeed adopt 2007's Burning Crusade expansion sometime in 2021.

Blizzard firmed up this plan's timeline on Thursday, confirming that WoW Classic's Burning Crusade transition will kick off on June 1. Just like with 2019's launch of WoW Classic, anyone who pays for an ongoing WoW subscription will get full access to WoW Burning Crusade at no additional cost.

Today's news also clarifies the game's march toward "Classic but newer"—it understands that some players may not want to stomp toward new zones like the Outland or new character species like the Blood Elf and Draenei. If you've already been playing WoW Classic since its 2019 launch, you'll be prompted starting on May 18 to peruse a new "cloning" feature, designed to let you do something with your current characters. The default is to pack that character up and move it to a newer Burning Crusade server, thus deleting its pre-expansion state. You can also lock an existing character so that it is not moved forward to a Burning Crusade server, or you can split the difference and have two versions of a beloved character: one on an older server, trapped forever in a pre-expansion bubble, and one on a newer server, ready to march alongside the ever-moving tides of darkness.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster includes a nifty $50 discount on the new 11-inch Apple iPad Pro at Walmart, with the 128GB and 256GB versions of the premium tablet marked down to $749 and $849, respectively. Walmart says orders will ship on May 24.

While our review of the new slates is still forthcoming, the latest iPad Pro comes with the M1 chip that has impressed us in other recent Apple devices. It also has a more future-proof Thunderbolt port and an ostensibly improved front-facing camera. The 11-inch model here does not come with the upgraded Mini LED display of the 12.9-inch version, however. In any case, this will likely continue to be a more niche device for power users, while the iPad Air should remain an appealing compromise for consumers looking to pay a bit less. But if you're dead set on upgrading to Apple's top-end option, any savings might be worthwhile.

If you're not interested in shelling out that much for an iPad, our deals roundup also has discounts on various Amazon devices, including a much cheaper tablet in the Amazon Fire HD 8, as well as deals on Sony noise-canceling headphones, Roku streamers, a wide variety of video games, and much more. You can take a look at the full roundup below.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on December 14, 2017, in Washington, DC, the day of the FCC's vote to repeal net neutrality rules. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong )

The largest Internet providers in the US funded a campaign that generated "8.5 million fake comments" to the Federal Communications Commission as part of the ISPs' fight against net neutrality rules during the Trump administration, according to a report issued today by New York State Attorney General Letitia James.

Nearly 18 million out of 22 million comments were fabricated, including both pro- and anti-net neutrality submissions, the report said. One 19-year-old submitted 7.7 million pro-net neutrality comments under fake, randomly generated names. But the astroturfing effort funded by the broadband industry stood out because it used real people's names without their consent, with third-party firms hired by the industry faking consent records, the report said.

The NY AG's office began its investigation in 2017 and said it faced stonewalling from then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who refused requests for evidence. But after a years-long process of obtaining and analyzing "tens of thousands of internal emails, planning documents, bank records, invoices, and data comprising hundreds of millions of records," the NY AG said it "found that millions of fake comments were submitted through a secret campaign, funded by the country's largest broadband companies, to manufacture support for the repeal of existing net neutrality rules using lead generators."

Enlarge (credit: Donald Slater)

A few years ago, an ice-sheet model grabbed attention when it projected much faster losses of Antarctic ice and, subsequently, faster sea level rise. Understanding how quickly Antarctica dumps ice into the ocean is the biggest issue in sea level science—the current range of possibilities is huge and includes remarkable rates of sea level rise that continue for centuries once started. And those sorts of possibilities have huge implications for societies around the globe.

The ice-sheet model that produced disturbing projections included new physical processes in its equations—they were obviously impactful, but their significance in the real world remains uncertain. Later research cast doubt on its most extreme scenarios, but the Antarctic crystal ball hasn’t gotten a lot clearer.

A pair of new studies published in Nature this week mark a new state of the art in ice modeling. Big questions about what we can expect are still there, and so planning for future sea level rise is still very much a matter of weighing risk under uncertainty.

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  Receiving a Google Assistant Broadcast on a phone. On the left is a notification. On the right is an individual message. [credit: Google ]

The Google Assistant's "Broadcast" feature has long existed as a way to blast a message to every Google smart speaker in the house. Instead of hunting down every individual family member at dinner time, put those smart speakers to work by saying, "Hey Google, broadcast 'It's dinner time!'"

In a new blog post, Google called Broadcast "one of our most popular Assistant features" and announced that the feature is expanding to show messages on phones, too, even when they're outside the home Wi-Fi network. That means Broadcast is basically turning into a new Google messaging service.

Broadcast will now be able to send and receive messages on the Google Home and Nest smart speakers, the Google Home Hub and Nest Hub smart displays, any Android phone, and iPhones running the Google Assistant app. Phones will get a notification when new messages arrive, and group chat members include both individual people (presumably with personal devices like a phone) and more public home devices. Just like any other messaging service, opening the notification will show a scrolling list of broadcast messages. The one big limitation is that the messaging only happens within a Google Family Group. If you want to include an outsider, you'll have to awkwardly switch group messaging services.