Month: June 2021

Enlarge / People line up outside Bridge Park Community Leisure Center to receive the COVID-19 vaccines in Brent, northwest London, June 19, 2021. A new wave of coronavirus infections is "definitely under way" in England due to the Delta variant first identified in India, a British government advisory scientist said Saturday. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency)

Two dreaded coronavirus variants are swiftly overthrowing the previously most-dreaded variant in the US. Their ascendance is making experts worry that the country could see continued outbreaks and resurgences of COVID-19 unless the current sluggish pace of vaccination quickens.

Alpha—the variant formerly known as B.1.1.7 and first identified in the UK—swept the country at the start of the year. It’s estimated to be around 50 percent more transmissible than the version of the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that mushroomed out of Wuhan, China, in 2020. Alpha’s rise in the UK last fall was linked to a surge in cases as the virus variant quickly accounted for more than 90 percent of cases there. Likewise, in the US, Alpha became the predominant strain in a matter of months this year and accounted for around 70 percent of the circulating strains by the end of April.

But according to fresh data, two other variants now threaten Alpha’s reign in the US: Delta (aka B.1.617.2, first detected in India) and Gamma (aka P.1, first detected in Brazil and Japan). Delta is considered the most concerning variant seen yet. Though vaccines are still effective against Delta, the variant is estimated to be 50 percent to 60 percent more contagious than Alpha, and evidence suggests that it may cause more severe disease. When Delta first appeared in the UK at the start of April, it rapidly overcame Alpha and now accounts for around 90 percent of cases. Gamma, on the other hand, is not such a rapid spreader, but it does slightly knock back the effectiveness of vaccines.

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  It's Jia Courtney's smiling Aussie face, introducing the latest trailer for The Suicide Squad, in which he reprises his role as Captain Boomerang. [credit: YouTube/Warner Bros. ]

Australian actor Jai Courtney introduces a new "early access" trailer from Warner Bros. for director James Gunn's forthcoming The Suicide Squad, in which Courtney reprises his role as Captain Boomerang from 2016's Suicide Squad. It's got quite bit of new footage and some small additional details (such as why Idris Elba's Bloodsport is in prison in the first place). Each of the three trailers released so far has been better than the last, so we have high hopes for this film.

As I've written previously, The Suicide Squad is not a direct sequel to the 2016 film; Gunn has said he wanted to take the franchise in a new direction and introduce new characters. He drew inspiration from writer John Ostrander's original 1980s Suicide Squad comics. (Ostrander has a small role in the final film.) Gunn has described his R-rated film as a superhero version of the classic 1967 film The Dirty Dozen, selecting characters he described as "loser, B-grade supervillains."

Joel Kinnaman and Viola Davis reprise their 2016 roles as Col. Rick Flag and Intelligence Officer Amanda Waller, respectively, with Steve Agee playing John Economos, prison warden and aide to Waller. The squad this time around includes Elba's Bloodsport, Peacemaker (John Cena), Courtney's Captain Boomerang, Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), Savant (Michael Rooker), King Shark (voiced by Rooker's Cliffhanger co-star Sylvester Stallone), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), Javelin (Flula Borg), and everyone's favorite psycho, Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie).

Enlarge / SiFive's "Essential" family is stripped down to the minimal configurations and performance necessary for standard microcontroller duty. "Intelligence" adds AI/ML acceleration, and the new "Performance" family offers just what it says on the tin. (credit: SiFive)

Today, RISC-V CPU design company SiFive launched a new processor family with two core designs: P270 (a Linux-capable CPU with full support for RISC-V's vector extension 1.0 release candidate) and P550 (the highest-performing RISC-V CPU to date).

A quick RISC-V overview

For those not immediately familiar with RISC-V, it is a relatively new CPU architecture which takes advantage of Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) principles. RISC-V is an open standard specifically designed to be forward-looking and evade as much legacy cruft as possible. One example of this design is RISC-V's dynamic width vector instruction set, which allows developers to execute vector instructions on data of arbitrary size with maximum efficiency.

In traditional processor designs, a vector instruction has a fixed width tied to the hardware register size of the processor—for example, SSE and SSE2 allow use of a Pentium III's 128-bit registers, while making full use of an i7-4770's 256-bit registers requires a completely separate instruction set (AVX2) for the same mathematical operations. Moving up to an i7-1065G7's 512-bit registers requires yet another instruction set, AVX-512—again, for the same underlying mathematical operations.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A week after Ukrainian police arrested criminals affiliated with the notorious Cl0p ransomware gang, Cl0p has published a fresh batch of what’s purported to be confidential data stolen in a hack of a previously unknown victim. Ars won’t be identifying the possibly victimized company until there is confirmation that the data and the hack are genuine.

If genuine, the dump shows that Cl0p remains intact and able to carry out its nefarious actions despite the arrests. That suggests that the suspects don’t include the core leaders but rather affiliates or others who play a lesser role in the operations.

The data purports to be employee records, including verification of employment for loan applications and documents pertaining to workers whose wages have been garnished. I was unable to confirm that the information is genuine and that it was, in fact, taken during a hack on the company, although web searches showed that names listed in the documents matched names of people who work for the company.

Enlarge / The OnePlus 8. (credit: OnePlus)

Believe it or not, one of Prime Day’s best deals this year is a flagship phone. The OnePlus 8 was part of the phone-maker's 2020 lineup. Though the OnePlus 8 Pro was bigger in size and spec, the high-level specs on this standard model still make it a decent flagship phone in 2021.

OnePlus phones have generally appealed to us by offering flagship-level specs and performance for less than the ever-ballooning price of most high-end smartphones. This year’s Prime Day sale takes the $500-600 OnePlus 8 down to $349, a much more competitive price that again gives more expensive (and less expensive) phones a run for their money.

Just looking at the spec sheet, you can see that—with 5G support (on GSM networks like AT&T and T-Mobile), a 6.55-inch 402 pixels-per-inch OLED display with a 90 Hz refresh rate, 8GB RAM (albeit of the slower LPDDR4X variety), 128GB of UFS 3.0 storage, and Qualcomm’s 2020 flagship Snapdragon 865 processor—the OnePlus 8 is a phone that remains competitive. Unfortunately, there’s no removable storage, though that's not out of the ordinary in 2021.

Enlarge / Artist's interpretation of today's unfortunate update to the Marvel's Avengers video game. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Square Enix)

On Tuesday, the latest patch for the Marvel's Avengers video game, developed by Crystal Dynamics, rolled out with a mix of feature updates, bug fixes, and gameplay and balance tweaks. But while today's patch notes detailed most of these changes, one unexpected error popped up for some players: a new on-screen display, which can't be disabled, that shows each player's home IP address.

The news emerged primarily as Twitch game streamers began jumping into the game and hosting their sessions to fans, only to notice the line of text—which also includes the player's console username (à la Xbox's "Gamertag") and other apparent numerical indicators—not only appeared on-screen but began bouncing around the top and bottom of the screen in a way that would prevent a streamer from easily cropping the details for privacy's sake. In a rush to showcase the game's new content to their Twitch audience, many streamers inadvertently revealed that information to their audiences.

The game's social media account acknowledged the issue shortly after players began complaining about it, though they did so somewhat disingenuously by describing the IP address leak as merely "a floating string of text." An hour later, the same social media account asked players to "refrain from streaming" the game for the time being while an internal investigation was being done. Shortly after, the developer owned up to the issue while saying that it was isolated to PlayStation 5 consoles.