Month: September 2021

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  Take your favorite shout of "yeeeee-haw!" and then miniaturize it. Welcome to Hot Wheels Unleashed. [credit: Milestone S.r.l / Mattel ]

This week's Hot Wheels Unleashed is one of the best video games ever made using licensed toy cars. To be fair, that specific concept isn't necessarily common in gaming, but Codemasters' legendary Micro Machines series holds a lot of water for a certain type of arcade-racing fan. That's decent company to land in.

Yet while handsomely modeled toy cars and cute environments might look like a basis for newbie-friendly racing, it's not the case here. In my week of testing the game ahead of its launch this week, I found that Hot Wheels Unleashed feels like a Micro Machines skin on top of the modern, hardcore-leaning Trackmania series. That's not a bad thing—and I had a good-enough time with Unleashed to write about it at Ars, as I think some people will really enjoy what's going on here.

But you'll have a better time with HWU going into it fully aware of its weird and tricky design decisions—along with quibbles about its in-game economy of cars and tracks.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | RobertAx)

In a new milestone for the US government's anti-robocall efforts, phone companies are now prohibited from accepting calls from providers that did not comply with a Federal Communications Commission deadline that passed this week. "Beginning today, if a voice service provider's certification and other required information does not appear in the FCC's Robocall Mitigation Database, intermediate providers and voice service providers will be prohibited from directly accepting that provider's traffic," the FCC said yesterday.

Specifically, phone companies must block traffic from other "voice service providers that have neither certified to implementation of STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication standards nor filed a detailed robocall mitigation plan with the FCC." As we've written, the STIR (Secure Telephone Identity Revisited) and SHAKEN (Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs) protocols verify the accuracy of Caller ID by using digital certificates based on public-key cryptography.

STIR/SHAKEN is now widely deployed on IP networks because large phone companies were required to implement it by June 30 this year, but it isn't a cure-all. Because of technology limitations, there was no requirement to implement STIR/SHAKEN on older TDM-based networks used with copper landlines, for instance. The FCC has said that "providers using older forms of network technology [must] either upgrade their networks to IP or actively work to develop a caller ID authentication solution that is operational on non-IP networks."

Enlarge / A technician performs rapid tests for malaria in Thailand. (credit: Thierry Falise / Getty Images)

The pandemic has introduced a lot of people to the idea of rapid antigen tests, which can quickly and conveniently reveal the presence of an infection. But in many parts of the world, rapid tests are a central feature of health care. If you don't have easy access to a testing lab infrastructure—and many in the developing world don't—rapid tests can provide a quick way of screening for common problems. In a number of countries, rapid test results are what determine whether people are given anti-malaria treatments or not.

But that may be causing problems of their own. A new paper suggests that the malarial parasite may be evolving so that it can't be recognized by the most commonly used rapid tests.

Make it quick

Most rapid tests detect the presence of one or more proteins on the surface of a pathogen. We can mass-produce antibodies that recognize this protein and couple them to a molecule that is colored. When a pathogen isn't present, the antibodies remain diffuse, and the color is imperceptible. When the pathogen is around, its protein and the antibodies aggregate, bringing enough of the colored molecule together that we can see it. The result is something like a red bar appearing at a specific location on the test hardware.

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  Turning on the new "Wildfire" layer. [credit: Google ]

Google Maps is getting a few new features to help people better understand our burning planet. The first is a new "fire" layer in the main map view, which will let you view the exact boundaries of a wildfire just as easily as you can look up the current traffic patterns. Google has done fire information before as part of the "crisis response" website, but with climate change making "Fire Season" a yearly occurrence in dry areas like Australia and the Western US, wildfires will now be a top-level Maps feature.

Google says the new fire level will bring "all of Google’s wildfire information together" in an easy interface. In the US, it will also pull in data from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), and the company says it wants to expand fire detail with other government agencies, starting with Australia in "the coming months." Wildfire boundaries should be updated on an hourly basis, and Google says you'll be able to tap on a fire to see information from local governments, like "emergency websites, phone numbers for help and information, and evacuation details. When available, you can also see important details about the fire, such as its containment, how many acres have burned, and when all this information was last reported."

The fire layout is rolling out to Android this week, with iOS and desktop coming in October.

Enlarge / The Microsoft Store in Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

When Microsoft introduced Windows 11 over the summer, it also detailed a major shift in strategy for its app store. In an effort to woo more developers and their apps after years of indifference, Microsoft said it would allow all kinds of apps developed and packaged with all kinds of tools into the Microsoft Store, including everything from traditional Win32 apps to Electron apps to progressive web apps (PWAs).

Now we're seeing some of the fruits of that change—Microsoft has announced that major third-party apps like Zoom, Discord, Adobe Reader, the VLC media player, and even the LibreOffice suite are all now available in the Microsoft Store for people using the Windows 11 Insider Preview builds. Web apps like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Tumblr are also available. These PWAs look and work just like the regular websites but can easily be pinned to Start or the Taskbar and can display notification badges and a few other benefits that make them feel a bit more like desktop apps.

Microsoft also says it will allow other app stores into the Microsoft Store, starting with Amazon and the Epic Games Store. These will be available "over the next few months." (When support for Amazon's Android apps are added to Windows 11 sometime after the official launch, those apps will still be searchable from within the Microsoft Store itself.) If you don't want to (or can't) install Windows 11 on your PC, Microsoft says that the new Microsoft Store and the new apps in it will also be coming to Windows 10 "in the coming months." Windows 11's rollout officially begins on October 5.

Enlarge / The 2020 Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, which had a 4K OLED display. (credit: Samsung)

A global deceleration of laptop sales is being linked in a new report from market research firm Trendforce to increasing vaccination rates and a corresponding decrease in remote work and remote learning. According to the findings, demand for Chromebooks slid by over 50 percent during one month since July. And notebook shipments for the remainder of the year are expected to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the shifting demand from businesses.

Trendforce said that interest for ChromeOS-powered laptops within the last year had primarily been driven by remote learning. The analyst pointed to rising vaccination rates in North America, Europe, and Japan throughout the second half of 2021 as recently slowing demand for Chromebooks.

After being a “primary driver” of overall laptop shipments in the first half of 2021, Chromebook shipments dropped by over 50 percent during one month in the second half of the year. And because Chromebooks represent a “relatively high share” of HP's and Samsung’s overall laptop shipments, the OEMs’ shipments are predicted to fall by 10 to 20 percent from the first half of the year to the second half.