Month: September 2021

Enlarge / Climate change is increasing the incidence of extreme rainfall, ensuring that more people are going to directly notice its effects. (credit: SYLVAIN THOMAS / Getty Images)

This year has seen a huge number of climate-related disasters, from hurricanes to drought and from fires to floods. In the middle of the chaos, the IPCC dropped the first installment of its latest climate report, mapping out how our current choices will shape the planet's future. All of this would seem to make now a great time to check in on public views of climate change.

Unfortunately, one of the best sources of such check-ins, the Pew Research Center, did its most recent polling on the topic way back in February. The survey of industrialized economies shows a strong and growing worry that climate change will affect people personally and a willingness to make changes to avoid the worst of its impacts. Still, because of the timing, it's likely that opinion has shifted even further since.

Around the world

Pew surveyed people in 17 different industrialized economies in North America, Europe, and around the Pacific Rim. Obviously left out are the developing economies, which may have the most impact on the trajectory of the future climate, as well as China. But the survey does provide some perspective on public opinion in the countries that are actively pursuing policies intended to address their carbon emissions.

Enlarge / A major new update to the PS5 firmware lets players upgrade the console's internal storage via an M.2 SSD.

Players will be able to add specific M.2 SSDs to the PS5 with a new system update rolling out tomorrow, two months after a beta that featured the option was made available to users who signed up.

As detailed in a post on the PlayStation Blog, the update gives users the option to increase the PS5's overall storage capacity by installing a PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD (ranging from 250GB to 4TB) that fits certain technical and dimensional requirements. Once the M.2 drive is installed, the new storage space can be used to copy, download, update, and play PS4 and PS5 games as well as media applications. The result will essentially add a second, fully functional internal drive to the console.

This is a big step up over the "cold-storage" solution that was added to the system in April, which allowed last-gen games to run straight from a standard platter-based external hard drive or SSD via USB—and notably kept players from doing the same for PS5 games. As a result, the feature did little more than let players free up space for PS5 games by storing PS4 games on an external drive... or just letting PS5 downloads collect dust in storage, which Sony said still allowed for faster transfers back to internal storage than just redownloading from scratch. For PS5 players, this did little to alleviate problems with the console's internal 667 GB of available space.

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  Xiaomi's Smart Glasses. That's a camera on the right of the picture and the display system on the left. That blue area in the lens is the waveguide display. [credit: Xiaomi ]

Xiaomi—the world's biggest smartphone manufacturer—would like to briefly divert your tech attention away from the iPhone 13 launch to a new pair of AR goggles called "Xiaomi Smart Glasses." The company calls this a "concept" device, but previous Xiaomi "concept" devices have turned into real, for-sale products. There's no release date or price point yet, but it looks like it's a working device. Xiaomi's feet are firmly on the ground, and there isn't much about the product that hasn't been done before by Google Glass or Snapchat Spectacles.

The Smart Glasses look like a slightly bulky pair of prescription eyeglasses, with a 5MP camera in one corner and the display system in the other. The display system is wild—a microLED display fires into a series of lenses and then into a waveguide lens for the right eye only. Cramming a microLED into a pair of glasses apparently wasn't easy—Xiaomi says the chip measures 2.4 mm x 2.02 mm, with individual pixels sized at 4 μm. The big compromise is that the microLED system is actually monochrome: the glasses can only display green, so you'll feel right at home if you ever used a computer in the 1980s.

The biggest AR glasses product on the market is Snapchat Spectacles, and those take a more advanced approach to vision, with two full-color waveguide lenses. Xiaomi is pushing the envelope with microLED, while Snapchat appears to be using tiny DLP projectors that project into the waveguides. Snapchat was so impressed with its display supplier that it decided to buy the company—called "WaveOptics"—in March for $500 million.

Enlarge / The Vinland Map purports to be a 15th-century map with a pre-Columbian depiction of the North American Coast. A new analysis has confirmed that the map is, in fact, a modern-day forgery. (credit: Yale University)

Scholars have questioned the authenticity of a purported 15th-century map housed in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library since it was first unveiled to the public in 1965. About the size of a placemat, the Vinland Map is an intriguing document because, in addition to Africa, Asia, and Europe, the map depicts a section of the North American coastline identified as "Vinlandia Insula" just southwest of Greenland. This suggested that Norsemen may have been the first Europeans to discover the Americas, well before the first voyage of Christopher Columbus.

That would have major historical significance, if proven. But evidence that the map is a hoax has been steadily accumulating, particularly over the last few years. And the latest scientific analysis has definitively put an end to the controversy once and for all: the inks used to draw the map are of modern origin.

"The Vinland Map is a fake," said Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke. "There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest."

Enlarge / Widespread EV charging stations will be critical for New York to feasibly phase-out new fossil fuel vehicles by its 2035 deadline. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

New York will ban the sale of fossil fuel vehicles starting in 2035 and require all new cars to produce zero emissions. The new law, signed by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul last week, will help slash the state’s carbon pollution by 35 percent. It would put New York well on its way to achieving its statewide carbon reduction goals of 85 percent below 1990 levels.

While the sunset date is in line with other plans from the state government, hitting the goal will still require significant planning and coordination. Though EVs aren’t uncommon in New York, the state is effectively starting from zero—around 1 percent of new vehicles sold in the Empire State are fully electric.

The new law doesn’t stop at passenger vehicles. It also requires zero emissions for off-road vehicles and equipment by 2035 and for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles by 2045. There’s some wiggle room with these mandates should batteries or fuel cells for large trucks or construction equipment lag significantly. The law says zero emissions will only be required “where feasible.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A security flaw in Travis CI potentially exposed the secrets of thousands of open source projects that rely on the hosted continuous integration service. Travis CI is a software-testing solution used by over 900,000 open source projects and 600,000 users. A vulnerability in the tool made it possible for secure environment variables—signing keys, access credentials, and API tokens of all public open source projects—to be exfiltrated.

Worse, the dev community is upset about the poor handling of the vulnerability disclosure process and the brief "security bulletin" it had to force out of Travis.

Environment variables injected into pull request builds

Travis CI is a popular software-testing tool due to its seamless integration with GitHub and Bitbucket. As the makers of the tool explain: