Month: August 2021

Enlarge / American actor Charlton Heston as stranded astronaut George Taylor in the 1968 film Planet of the Apes. (credit: Getty | Silver Screen Collection)

Facebook has removed a network of over 308 Russian accounts on Facebook and Instagram after the group ran an unsuccessful campaign described as a "disinformation laundromat" to smear COVID-19 vaccines in India, Latin America, and, to a lesser extent, the United States.

Facebook described the campaign's methods as "sloppy" and "crude and spammy" in a report published Tuesday. The social media giant noted that "the vast majority of this campaign fell flat," with most of the networks' posts receiving little to no attention.

The campaign had two distinct waves, which were linked to regulatory evaluations of vaccines in the targeted areas. The first wave in November and December of 2020 aimed to spread lies about AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine. The thrust of the campaign was to scare people into thinking that the vaccine could turn people into chimpanzees. Spoiler: it does not.

Enlarge / The Galaxy Watch 4 (credit: Samsung)

Samsung just wrapped its 2021 Unpacked event, and in addition to releasing a few high-end foldable phones, the company announced new Galaxy Watches. The watches' designs have been updated moderately, as have their innards, and they will be the first smartwatches running Google and Samsung's new Wear OS.

For the first time—and perhaps as a result of the Google/Samsung collaboration—the newest Galaxy Watches will not be able to pair with iOS devices. Samsung told us that it currently has no plans to stop legacy support for previous Galaxy Watches that were compatible with iOS devices.

Google's revamped Wear OS platform was first announced at Google I/O earlier this year as a collaboration between Samsung and Google. The new Galaxy Watches give us our first glimpse at the software since the announcement. For now, it seems that slightly wider app compatibility is the main feature on the software front. Hardware may be the biggest advantage, though, as Samsung's chips, like the new Exynos W920 in the Galaxy Watch 4, will be available to all future Google wearables, which desperately need hardware upgrades.

Enlarge / Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos announces the company’s partnership with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper to develop a Human Landing System in 2019. (credit: Blue Origin)

On Wednesday, the US Government Accountability Office released its full-but-redacted decision that ruled in favor of NASA's selection of a Human Landing System contractor. The document (see PDF) makes clear that SpaceX offered NASA the most technically ready, well-managed, lowest-cost option.

Furthermore, the decision document says NASA was entirely justified in selecting a single winner for the lunar lander bid because Congress appropriated only about one-quarter of the funds sought by the space agency. NASA, the document states, "expressly put all offerors on notice that the number of awards was subject to available funding, and the agency could make multiple contract awards, a single award, or no award at all."

As it has already done several times since NASA's original decision to select SpaceX in April, Blue Origin greeted the GAO's full decision with a testy response. "We stand by our assessment that SpaceX received preferential treatment," the statement says, in part.

Enlarge / An AT&T technician working on a fiber project. (credit: AT&T)

AT&T says that supply-chain shortages will delay fiber construction to about 500,000 homes that it originally planned to wire up this year and warned that shortages are likely to impact other companies that purchase fiber even more.

"Up through the second quarter, we hadn't really experienced any impact from the supply-chain disruptions that are happening across the industry. But since the start of the third quarter, we are seeing dislocation across the board including in fiber supply," AT&T Senior Executive VP and CFO Pascal Desroches said yesterday at a virtual conference hosted by Oppenheimer.

AT&T previously told investors to expect "3 million homes passed [with fiber] this year," Desroches said. "We're probably going to come in a little bit light, probably around 2.5 [million]."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images (Tom Williams / Drew Angerer))

Two lawmakers have received temporary account suspensions from YouTube and Twitter over their repeated posting of COVID-19 disinformation, yet videos from both espousing similar disinformation remain on Facebook.

On Tuesday, YouTube removed a video posted by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in which he falsely claimed that masks were not effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19. Also yesterday, Twitter suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for one week after she falsely claimed that neither vaccines nor masks reduce the spread of COVID. Both masks and vaccines do work, in fact, and there’s ample evidence that wearing masks slows the spread of the disease.

Paul and Greene are suspended from YouTube and Twitter, respectively, for one week. Paul’s suspension was handed down because YouTube had to remove another one of his videos last week. As this is his second offense, his account will be unable to publish for seven days. Greene is now on her fourth strike on Twitter, meaning that another violation could result in her being banned from the platform permanently.

Enlarge (credit: Picture Alliance / Getty Images)

The world seems to be simultaneously on fire and flooding, and the latest expert report indicates that we've just about run out of time to avoid even more severe climate change. All of that should leave us in a place where we are looking for ways to cut carbon emissions as quickly and economically as possible.

Some good news in that regard came via the recent release of a paper that looks at how much each individual power plant contributes to global emissions. The study finds that many countries have a significant number of power plants that emit carbon dioxide at rates well above either the national or global average. Shutting down the worst 5 percent of this list would immediately wipe out about 75 percent of the carbon emissions produced by electricity generation.

CARMA revisited

It's easy to think of power generation in simple terms, like "renewables good, coal bad." To an extent, that's accurate. But it also compresses all power generation, from "somewhat bad" to "truly atrocious," into a single category. And it's clear from a variety of research that this isn't entirely accurate. Depending on their vintage, many plants convert fossil fuels to power at different degrees of efficiency. And some of the least efficient plants are only brought online during periods of very high demand; the rest of the time, they're idle and produce no emissions at all.

Enlarge / Coming soon in full 4K. (credit: Criterion)

The Criterion Collection, one of the most renowned distributors of home films on various formats, has long been dogged for not releasing movies on the latest high-resolution disc format, 4K UHD Blu-ray. That situation finally changes this week with the announcement of Criterion films coming to 4K discs later this year.

As it turns out, Criterion waited to secure the rights to a megaton film before making its 4K bow: Citizen Kane. This film choice, coming to 4K Blu-ray in "November 2021," is remarkable for a few reasons. But, beyond its inclusion in typical best-films-ever lists, Criterion hasn't been able to release a version of Citizen Kane since the company's very first laserdisc release of a film in 1984.

That same month, five other films from Criterion will join Citizen Kane in 4K UHD Blu-ray format:

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  The Galaxy Z Fold 3, now with S-Pen support. [credit: Samsung ]

Today is Samsung Unpacked, which has turned out to be a big foldables show. The company has made the widely leaked Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 official.

First up is the Z Fold 3, Samsung's flagship foldable. The Z Fold 3 is a phone that opens up into a tablet, featuring a 7.6-inch, 2208×1768 flexible OLED display on the inside and a 6.2-inch, 2260×832 OLED display on the outside. The Fold is getting a few big changes this year. First, both screens are 120 Hz. The Fold 2 was 120 Hz on the inside and 60 Hz outside, so the update provides a nice bit of consistency.

The device sports Samsung's foldable "Ultra-thin glass" as a display cover, and there's a layer of protective plastic over top of that. On previous models, the top plastic display surface was subject to scratches and wasn't as friction-free as a real glass smartphone, but the internal layer of ultra-thin glass provides some much-needed rigidity to the plastic display surface. Samsung says it has improved the plastic display cover, which is "80% more durable" than previous plastic covers.