Month: July 2021

Enlarge / Setting Windows 11 to one of its dark themes also darkens the background of the Settings app—but not the background of most traditional apps, like Resource Monitor. (credit: Jim Salter)

Microsoft made early Windows 11 builds available via its Windows Insider program the week after its first major announcement, and we've spent quite a few hours kicking the tires. When Windows 11 publicly releases, it's likely to be a fine operating system—but right now, it's an unpolished, unfinished mess.

Of course, this isn't a surprise—Windows 11 is still only available in the Dev channel of the Insider program. The three Insider channels are Release Preview, Beta, and Dev; Dev roughly corresponds to a software alpha, and Microsoft itself describes it as "the newest code," with "rough edges and some instability."

Windows 11 is upgrade only (for now)

• 

  You can't perform a nice, clean Windows 11 installation yet, sadly—you'll need to use Windows Update to mangle an existing Windows 10 installation instead. [credit: Jim Salter ]

The first disappointment we encountered with Windows 11 is a puzzling one—it can't (yet) be cleanly installed as a new operating system. To install Windows 11 Build 22000.51, you must begin with a fully patched and up-to-date Windows 10 installation, then flight it into the Dev channel, then upgrade it to Windows 11 via Windows Update. (If you're not already on Windows 10 20H2 or newer, you'll need to get through that upgrade first.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Morgan Stanley suffered a data breach that exposed sensitive customer data, and it became the latest known casualty of hackers exploiting a series of now-patched vulnerabilities in Accellion FTA, a widely used third-party file-transfer service.

The data obtained included names, addresses dates of birth, social security numbers, and affiliated corporate company names, Morgan Stanley said in a letter first reported by Bleeping Computer. A third-party service called Guidehouse, which provides account maintenance services to the financial services company, was in possession of the data at the time. Unknown hackers obtained the data by exploiting a series of hacks that came to light in December and January.

What took so long?

Morgan Stanley stated:

Enlarge / Branding is displayed on a fence surrounding the Olympic Stadium on July 8, 2021, in Tokyo, Japan. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has announced a fourth state of emergency for Tokyo which will run throughout the Olympic Games and remain in place until August 22. (credit: Getty | Carl Court)

Both foreign and local sports fans are now barred from attending Tokyo-area Olympic events as COVID-19 cases tick up in the city and the highly transmissible delta variant continues to spread.

Olympic officials agreed to the domestic spectator ban during a meeting Thursday with Japanese officials, who also declared a state of emergency in the world's most populous city due the rise in infections. The state of emergency is set to take effect July 12 and run through August 22. That covers the entirety of the Olympic games, which are scheduled to run from July 23 to August 8. The Paralympics begin August 24.

"Many people were looking forward to watching the games at the venues, but I would like everyone to fully enjoy watching the games on TV at home," Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike said after Thursday's meeting, according to the Associated Press. "It's gut-wrenching because many people looked forward to watching at the venues."

• 

  Jeffrey Wright voices Uatu the Watcher. [credit: YouTube/Marvel Studios ]

All our favorite MCU characters are back in animated form—plus a few more obscure players—in the first trailer for What If...?, a forthcoming series on Disney+ in which key events in the main timeline play out differently, "creating a multiverse of infinite possibilities." It's part of the MCU's Phase Four, in which this multiverse will clearly play a pivotal role.

(Some spoilers for prior MCU films below.)

This new series is based on the What If...? comic book anthology series that debuted in 1977, narrated by a character called Uatu the Watcher, an entity from a computer world who travels throughout the cosmos observing the rise of fall of various civilizations. Each story in the comics centered on an event in the mainstream Marvel Universe, but then there would be a point of divergence, and the rest of the story explored the consequences of that change to the timeline. Marvel Studios first explored the What If...? concept in S4 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., when the team members found themselves trapped in a virtual creation called the Framework, each living out a drastically different life.

Enlarge / The Republican Party elephant symbol at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, on Friday, Feb. 28, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Congressional Republicans released an antitrust plan for Big Tech yesterday with an announcement that made it clear their focus is not on boosting competition or reducing harms to online consumers but on alleged "censorship" of conservatives.

"Big Tech is out to get conservatives" is the first sentence in the "House Judiciary Republican Agenda for Taking on Big Tech." The "conservative response" to tech-industry problems "will speed up and strengthen antitrust enforcement, hold Big Tech accountable for its censorship, and increase transparency around Big Tech's decisions," the opening paragraph continues. The word "competition" never appears in the two-page plan. A separate plan previously released by House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) does mention competition, but McCarthy's plan also focuses mostly on supposed bias against conservatives.

The House Judiciary Republicans' plan was released as former President Donald Trump sued Twitter, Facebook, and Google subsidiary YouTube for banning him, claiming that all three companies are guilty of "impermissible censorship" that violates "the First Amendment right to free speech." Trump's lawsuit has been widely mocked by legal experts and is almost certain to be defeated because the First Amendment does not require private companies to host speech and because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives online platforms immunity from lawsuits over how they moderate user-submitted content.

Enlarge / Like this, but even cooler. (credit: Ars Technica)

Rising temperatures around the world run the risk of creating a dangerous cycle where more people get air conditioning, which causes energy demand to surge and leads to higher carbon emissions, which makes temperatures rise even more. Renewable power is one option for breaking that cycle, but people have also been studying materials that enable what's called passive cooling. Without using energy, these materials take heat from whatever they're covering and radiate it out to space.

Most of these efforts have focused on building materials, with the goal of creating roofs that can keep buildings a few degrees cooler than the surrounding air. But now a team based in China has taken the same principles and applied them to fabric, creating a vest that keeps its users about 3º C cooler than they would be otherwise.

Built to chill

Whenever something's out in the sunlight, it's going to absorb some of those photons, which will get converted into heat. That heat can then be radiated back out in infrared wavelengths. The problem is that this doesn't actually cool things down much. Lots of the gasses in the atmosphere immediately absorb the infrared light, trapping the energy as heat in the immediate vicinity of the object. If the object is a person, there's the added issue of heat generated by their metabolism, which is also getting radiated away in the infrared at the same time.