Month: September 2021

(credit: Samsung)

Samsung's latest super-sized camera sensor is the "Isocell HP1." It has a whopping 200 MP sensor, making it the highest-resolution smartphone camera sensor ever made. If you saved an image from it at full resolution, you'd end up with something like a 16,384 × 12,288 image.

Megapixels don't matter—what matters way more for image quality is the size of each pixel, as bigger pixels (and bigger sensors) capture more light. Samsung is trying to cover both bases with pixel binning, though, which merges several pixels into a bigger pixel for low-light situations. The HP1 has an "all-new" variable pixel-binning technology called "ChameleonCell," which lets the sensor bin at 2×2 or 4×4, depending on the amount of light.

At 4×4, you're ratcheting the 200 MP sensor all the way down to 12.5 MP by merging sets of 16 pixels. This will turn the full-resolution 0.64 μm pixels into a respectable 2.56 μm pixel, which Samsung says "is capable of more light absorption and sensitivity, producing brighter and clearer photos in in-doors or in the evening."

Enlarge / The Raspberry Pi 4. (credit: Raspberry Pi)

Installing the ARM versions of Windows 10 or Windows 11 to a cheap Raspberry Pi board has been possible for a long time but has always required more time and patience than it's worth. But if you're curious, a new script called "WoR-flasher" (that's Windows on Raspberry) simplifies the process. WoR-flasher has a simple UI that can create ARM Windows install media, which can then be booted up on a Raspberry Pi for installation in the same way a USB stick created with Microsoft's tools can install Windows on an x86 PC.

The script's creator argues that it violates no laws or Windows licensing agreements since it downloads all its code directly from Microsoft's servers and installs Windows in an unlicensed, deactivated state, just as it would install on a regular x86 PC without a product key. Microsoft only sells licenses of the ARM versions of Windows to OEMs. WoR-flasher has officially been tested using the 32-bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS (and that's what I used to create some install media, too), but it should run without issue on any Debian-based Linux distributions.

• 

  You run two terminal commands to download and run the WoR-flasher script (which also installs a few dependencies). The simple UI takes you the rest of the way. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

The only Pi models you should even consider installing Windows on are the higher-end versions of the Pi 4 with 4GB or 8GB of RAM (with a quick workaround to allow Windows to see more than 3GB of RAM). And with those boards, even with a fast microSD card and a processor overclock, Windows 11 isn't going to feel fast enough to use as your day-to-day OS. But this tool does give developers and enthusiasts an affordable way to test ARM Windows apps. Windows 11 is introducing a new ABI called "ARM64EC" that's designed to simplify the process of porting x86 Windows apps to ARM by allowing developers to ship apps that use a mix of ARM and x86_64 code. Windows will use its built-in x86_64 emulation for any x86_64 code (with the attendant performance penalty), while the ARM code can run natively at full speed.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | stockcam)

Reddit yesterday banned r/NoNewNormal, a hub of anti-mask and anti-vaccine posts, after a protest against the platform's refusal to take more aggressive action against COVID misinformation. In a post titled "COVID denialism and policy clarifications," Reddit said it also quarantined "54 additional COVID-denial subreddits." While NoNewNormal was taken off Reddit entirely, quarantining a subreddit imposes restrictions that "prevent its content from being accidentally viewed by those who do not wish to do so."

NoNewNormal was banned not for spreading misinformation but for breaking Reddit's rule against "brigading," which refers to members of one subreddit conducting "targeted interference" in other subreddits. Reddit said:

While we want to be a place where people can explore unpopular views, it is never acceptable to interfere with other communities. Claims of "brigading" are common and often hard to quantify. However, in this case, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (largely directed at communities with more mainstream views on COVID or location-based communities that have been discussing COVID restrictions). This behavior continued even after a warning was issued from our team to the Mods. r/NoNewNormal is the only subreddit in our list of high-signal subs where we have identified this behavior and it is one of the largest sources of community interference we surfaced as part of this work (we will be investigating a few other unrelated subreddits as well).

Although not mentioned in Reddit's announcement, a subreddit called CoronavirusConspiracy was also banned yesterday "due to being unmoderated." That community was already quarantined last year because it "may contain misinformation or hoax content."

Enlarge (credit: Stan Honda / Getty Images)

WhatsApp has been fined €225 million for breaking the EU’s data privacy law by not telling its users how it was sharing their data with its parent company Facebook.

In one of the biggest fines relating to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Irish data regulator applied a penalty more than four times the level it had initially proposed for the messaging service after coming under pressure from other European countries.

The WhatsApp ruling came after Luxembourg fined Amazon a record €746 million in July for breaching GDPR and Ireland fined Twitter €450 million in December for not informing regulators about a data leak within 72 hours.