Month: October 2021

Enlarge / Ars' own Sam Machkovech, shown here modeling the Oculus Go's bright future.

Oculus may have officially discontinued its low-end Oculus Go headset last year, but the company has one more "official" update to help future-proof the hardware. On Thursday, Oculus released an unlocked build of the Oculus Go operating system, allowing for "full root access" on more than 2 million existing units.

Oculus CTO (and former id Software co-founder) John Carmack announced his plans for this update last month, saying it was something he had "been pushing on for years." In part, the unlocking is an attempt to guarantee that Go hardware will continue to be fully functional well into the future, allowing for "a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now [to] be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down," Carmack wrote.

Before that, though, the update will allow tinkerers to "repurpose the hardware for more things today," as Carmack puts it. Go hardware running the unlocked OS will no longer check for a Facebook signature at the kernel level, meaning developers can create new versions of low-level system software for the entire Android-based OS. That could allow for custom versions of low-level features like the app launcher and the removal of otherwise locked system apps. The update also allows for easy sideloading of apps outside of Go's store interface, though this was already possible on older OS versions.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

The Dealmaster has finished streaming Dune, so it's time for another round of the best tech deals from around the web. Today's rundown is headlined by the lowest price we've tracked for Sony's WH-1000XM4 headphones, which have fallen to $248 at various retailers this week. That matches the deal we highlighted during Amazon's Prime Day event and marks a roughly $80 drop from the noise-canceling pair's usual online going rate over the past few months.

We've recommended the XM4s on several occasions in the past, and they remain an excellent blend of high comfort, useful features, and top-tier noise-canceling strength. Battery life is decent, if not amazing. And while there are definitely better-sounding pairs, Sony's out-of-the-box sound serves up some powerful bass for those who prefer that type of experience (it's possible to customize the sound into something more neutral through Sony's handy smartphone app). USB-C charging, an effective "ambient sound" mode, and a "speak to chat" feature that automatically pauses your music when you need to speak all add to the package. Bose's new QuietComfort 45 may be lighter on the head, and Apple's $550 AirPods Max may have them both beat in terms of pure sound quality and noise-canceling power, but at this price specifically, the XM4 present a strong value.

Our roundup also has some appealing prices on several new 4K TVs from Sony, TCL, Vizio, and Samsung; the lowest price we've seen for the 512GB version of a recommended Samsung microSD card; a number of deals on SSDs, both internal and portable; a $20 price drop on Logitech's excellent MX Master 3 wireless mouse; a big gaming chair sale that includes models we've tested and recommended from AndaSeat, and much more. Have a look at our full curated list below.

Enlarge / People in Chile with Worldcoin's "Orb" iris scanner. (credit: Worldcoin)

More than 100,000 people have had their eyes scanned in return for a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, as a project to distribute digital money more widely around the world accelerates.

Worldcoin has distributed about 30 iris-scanning hardware devices, which they call “orbs,” to early users on four continents, who get rewards for signing up more people. Orbs take photos of a user’s eyeballs, creating a unique code that can be used to claim free digital tokens.

The project’s developers said on Thursday they planned to release hundreds of orbs in the coming months and eventually distribute 4,000 devices per month. The team plans to debut the cryptocurrency network early next year and begin giving away the tokens at that time. They have not said how much cryptocurrency users can expect to receive.

Enlarge (credit: AMD)

Microsoft and AMD have both released patches to fix the AMD Ryzen performance bugs present in the initial versions of Windows 11, according to an AMD knowledgebase article that was updated late yesterday.

AMD has provided a new chipset driver to fix a problem that broke the "preferred core" feature that can boost performance on high-core-count, high-TDP Ryzen processors. Even if your system isn't affected by this specific bug because you're running Windows 10 or a lower-core-count Ryzen CPU, the new driver has fixes for a handful of other Ryzen and Threadripper systems running either Windows 10 or Windows 11.

Another issue affected L3 cache latency on all Ryzen processors, lowering performance by between 3 and 5 percent for most apps and by up to 15 percent for some games. Microsoft began issuing a fix for the L3 cache issue to testers last week, and it's one of the many issues fixed in build 22000.282 of Windows 11 (you can see your build number by typing "winver" into a Run window or Windows Search).