Month: August 2021

Enlarge (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Dominion Voting Systems filed another round of lawsuits today, alleging that the company was defamed by conservative news channels Newsmax and One America News Network when they aired segments that claimed the 202 US election was rigged. Dominion also filed a defamation suit against Patrick Byrne, the founder and former CEO of Overstock.com, who has peddled election-fraud conspiracy theories.

In each lawsuit, Dominion is seeking more than $1.7 billion in damages for lost profits and expenses incurred by the election-rigging claims. The new lawsuits come on top of several more filed earlier this year against other parties, including Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell, who are all defending themselves.

Dominion’s lawyers didn't pull any punches in today's filing.

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  TCL's new 5-Series 4K QLED TV with Google TV. [credit: Jeff Dunn ]

TCL on Tuesday announced updated versions of its popular 5-Series and 6-Series 4K TVs.

The biggest update is that the new models run Google TV, Google’s big-screen operating system. Google TV is found most prominently on the search giant’s Chromecast streaming dongle, but it has also popped up on a handful of recent 4K TVs from Sony.

TCL first confirmed it would launch new Google TVs during CES this past January.

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  Parallels Desktop 17 running Windows on a Mac. [credit: Parallels ]

Parallels Desktop 17 has arrived with support for macOS Monterey and Windows 11. Further, the popular virtualization software for Macs is now a universal binary, making deployment a little less complicated for many IT professionals.

Note that you can only run ARM versions of Windows (10 or 11) on Macs with Apple Silicon chips like the M1. Both Windows 10 and 11 for ARM are available as Insider Preview builds. On the other hand, Parallels can run versions of Windows going back as far as XP if you're running it on an Intel Mac. A number of Linux distros are also supported, though Intel Macs gain access to more of those than M1 Macs do.

If you have access to those Insider Preview builds, you can run most Windows applications on your M1 Mac, Parallels' developers say, because Windows on ARM can run both 32-bit and, more recently, 64-bit x86 applications. That said, even on machines it's designed to run on, Windows on ARM can be occasionally fussy about x64 apps. So your mileage will likely vary depending on what you're trying to do.

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  Zombie-killing with friends: You've done this before, but Back 4 Blood makes a strong case for its version feeling surprisingly fresh. [credit: Turtle Rock / WB Games ]

A number of players taking part in the recent beta test for co-op zombie shooter Back 4 Blood were shocked to hear the undead hordes screaming what seemed to be a racial slur as they shambled forward. Now, publisher WB Games says it's working to fix an audio phenomenon it says was an "unintended" result of two separate sound files mixing during gameplay.

Twitter user HomBKE was among the first to publicize video of Back 4 Blood's undead "Ridden" groaning what sounds a lot like the n-word shortly after the game's closed beta launch on Friday ("What did you call me?" he responds incredulously in the clip). User Dotodoya responded with a similar clip. Kotaku's Zack Zweizen also reported hearing the audio over the weekend, a situation he described as "100% likely unintentional but also 100% unfortunate."

These zombies a different breed pic.twitter.com/1GMXlsSYse

— Da Homma (@HomBKE) August 6, 2021

Since then, WB Games has confirmed that supposition in a statement provided to media outlets:

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Jorge Villalba)

Amazon today announced a new policy in which it will pay customers up to nearly $1,000 when a third-party product causes property damage or personal injury. Payments of any amount less than $1,000 will be made at no cost to sellers who hold valid insurance, but Amazon said it will also pay customers more than that when a seller refuses a valid claim.

When "a defective product sold through Amazon.com causes property damage or personal injury, Amazon will directly pay customers for claims under $1,000—which account for more than 80 percent of cases—at no cost to sellers, and may step in to pay claims for higher amounts if the seller is unresponsive or rejects a claim we believe to be valid," Amazon's announcement said.

Today's announcement came less than a month after the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) filed a complaint against Amazon over the sale of hundreds of thousands of hazardous products, including carbon monoxide detectors that fail to detect carbon monoxide, hair dryers without required protection from shock and electrocution, and flammable sleepwear meant for children. The CPSC wants Amazon to take more responsibility for dangerous products offered by third parties under the Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) program, in which Amazon stores products in its warehouses and ships them to customers while taking a cut of the proceeds. As the CPSC noted, people "who purchase FBA consumer products on amazon.com may reasonably believe they are purchasing the products from Amazon."

Enlarge (credit: Felix Wong/South China Morning Post)

Apple employees want to know whether they’re being paid equitably. So some of them have been sending surveys to their colleagues to collect compensation information. The surveys are all opt-in, and several hundred people have participated so far.

The surveys stem in part from the fact that, in 2016, Tim Cook told investors that Apple had largely tackled pay inequality at the company. Women at Apple made 99.6 cents for every dollar men made, and underrepresented minorities made 99.7 cents for every dollar white workers made. That probably sounded too good to be true to some people, and questionnaires started popping up in recent months.

At least two surveys were pulled by their authors, The Verge reported, after Apple’s “people team”—what some companies call human resources—claimed various infractions. Apple HR said the first survey’s questions about race, gender, ethnicity, and disability constituted personally identifying information. They nixed the second because it was hosted on the corporate Box account. When reached for comment, an Apple spokesperson would not confirm why the first two surveys were halted.

Enlarge / Asus (and others) are tweaking their motherboards to ensure Windows 11 compatibility. (credit: Asus)

If you're using a pre-built desktop or laptop PC made within the last three or four years, Windows 11's sometimes-confusing, sometimes contentious security-oriented new system requirements won't be a problem for you—all of the security features Microsoft is requiring for the new operating system should be turned on by default. It's a bigger problem for people who build their own computers (or who have had computers built for them), since features like the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) are often disabled by default.

Most motherboard manufacturers have already posted lists of boards that they expect to meet Windows 11's requirements, and some of them are going a step further—releasing new BIOS updates for their motherboards' firmware that enable the integrated TPMs in Intel and AMD processors by default. While it usually isn't too difficult to switch the TPM on manually, each motherboard manufacturer keeps this setting in a different place, and the way the setting is labeled differs depending on whether you're using an Intel or AMD chip or what motherboard you're configuring.

Asus is currently taking the most comprehensive approach, with BIOS updates either available or "under testing" for the vast majority of Intel and AMD motherboards made within the last three or four years (300-, 400-, and 500-series chipsets from both Intel and AMD are broadly supported, which covers most 8th-generation and newer Intel CPUs and all of AMD's Ryzen processors). But ASRock has released TPM-enabling BIOS updates for a handful of its newer motherboards as well, and we'd expect other motherboard-makers to follow suit in the next few months. We've contacted ASRock, Gigabyte, and MSI to see if they have any information to share and will update if they do.