Month: May 2021

Enlarge / The Surface Neo failed to launch in 2020—this year, it looks like its operating system will share that fate. (credit: Microsoft)

At its fall 2019 Surface event, Microsoft announced that Windows 10X—a new consumer Windows distribution—would power a line of dual-screened tablet devices in 2020. But the Surface Neo never arrived, and in May 2020, Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay retargeted Windows 10X to "single screen experiences."

What was Windows 10X?

Microsoft's original plan for the Windows variant was to "enable unique experiences on multi-posture dual-screen PCs." This meant powering an entirely new class of devices—a hinged pair of touchscreens, which seemed to be trying to bridge the divide between tablet and notebook. In addition to Microsoft's own Surface Neo, the company's hardware partners—including Dell, Lenovo, and HP—were supposed to manufacture devices to the new specification.

But Microsoft nixed the Neo last year, and the talk of partner-manufactured 10X devices died along with it. The company's new chief product officer, Panos Panay, declared that Microsoft "need[s] to focus on meeting customers where they are now"—which meant focusing on single-screen devices and interfaces again.

Enlarge / Elon Musk in 2020. (credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / Getty)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on Wednesday that Tesla would stop taking bitcoin as payment for the company’s electric vehicles. The change comes less than two months after the automaker began accepting the cryptocurrency. Why the about-face? Musk now says he has concerns over bitcoin’s carbon footprint.

Tesla’s purchase policy wasn’t the company’s only bitcoin-related announcement that has made waves. In February, the electric automaker disclosed that it had taken a $1.5 billion stake in the currency. Cryptocurrency promoters rejoiced at the string of announcements—Tesla’s moves had bolstered the currency’s legitimacy, and bitcoin’s price against the dollar surged over 15 percent in the wake of the disclosure. 

But environmentalists despaired—the carbon footprint of purchasing a Tesla with bitcoin was so large that it swamped any emissions savings from driving it. Today, Musk appears to share that assessment. “We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” Musk wrote in a tweet.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Photographer is my life)

President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday in an attempt to bolster US cybersecurity defenses after a number of devastating hacks, including the Colonial pipeline attack, revealed vulnerabilities across business and government.

“Recent cybersecurity incidents... are a sobering reminder that US public and private sector entities increasingly face sophisticated malicious cyber activity from both nation-state actors and cyber criminals,” the White House said.

Under the order, federal agencies will be required to introduce multi-factor authentication to their systems and encrypt all data within six months in a bid to make it harder for hackers to penetrate their IT infrastructure.

Enlarge / Committee Chair Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., listens to former US Sen. Bill Nelson, President Biden’s nominee to be the next administrator of NASA, on April 21, 2021. (credit: NASA)

On Wednesday, a US senator added an amendment to unrelated science legislation that would impose significant restrictions on NASA and its plans to return to the Moon.

The amendment (see document) was spurred by NASA's decision in April to select SpaceX as its sole provider of a human landing system for the Artemis Program. Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from the state of Washington, where Blue Origin is based, authored the legislation. Owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin led a lunar lander bid that was rejected by NASA.

The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation passed the amendment without any debate, adding the NASA changes to the Endless Frontier Act, a bill to keep US scientific and technology innovation competitive with China and other countries.