Month: December 2021

Enlarge / The back of the iPhone 13. (credit: Samuel Axon)

According to a new report in Bloomberg, Apple has told suppliers that demand for the iPhone 13 line of smartphones may fall short of the company's original expectations, amidst supply constraints.

Apple planned to ship 90 million iPhone 13, iPhone 13 mini, iPhone 13 Pro, or iPhone 13 Pro Max devices to consumers, but the company cut its production targets by 10 million phones due to part shortages. Consumers, meanwhile, have faced wait times on their iPhone 13 orders of two, three, or even four weeks since the phones' September launch.

Apple initially told vendors it would make up that 10 million units again in early 2022, once supply improved. But according to the Bloomberg report, Apple has noticed weakening demand, and the company no longer intends to hit that 90 million target in that time frame.

Enlarge (credit: Remko De Waal | Getty Images)

Starting last Friday, the race was on—between a virus and information about it. And for a while, the information moved faster, even though there was hardly any of it.

Scientists in South Africa identified a new variant of the virus that causes COVID-19—within days the World Health Organization gave it the spy-sci-fi name omicron—and because of the abundant smorgasbord of mutations in its spike protein, the nanomechanical tentacle that attaches and cracks into cells, science alarms started going off.

But to be clear, they were the "We should check this out" alarms, not the "Everybody lose their effing minds" alarms. Apparently they sound alike, though. Panic took flight as scientists identified omicron in 18 countries, triggering travel bans, border closures, stock market crashes, and, in the United States, holiday weekend worries that the world was headed back to March of 2020. Researchers in South Africa and Botswana have found the most cases thus far, though that may be an artifact of looking for them; on Tuesday, Dutch authorities announced that the earliest case they can identify is 11 days old, predating omicron's identification in South Africa.

Enlarge / US and Texas flags flying outside the Texas State Capitol building in Austin. (credit: Getty Images | PA Thompson)

A federal judge yesterday blocked a Texas state law that bans "censorship" on social media platforms, ruling that the law violates the social networks' First Amendment right to moderate user-submitted content.

"Social media platforms have a First Amendment right to moderate content disseminated on their platforms," Judge Robert Pitman wrote. He found that the Texas law "compels social media platforms to disseminate objectionable content and impermissibly restricts their editorial discretion" and that the law's "prohibitions on 'censorship' and constraints on how social media platforms disseminate content violate the First Amendment."

Pitman's ruling granted a preliminary injunction requested by tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer & Communications & Industry Association (CCIA), which sued Texas in US District Court for the Western District of Texas. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and various other tech companies belong to the groups.

Months after the FPS classic Quake got a major 25th anniversary re-release, its modern handlers have returned with an update that exceeds all expectations. Thursday's new 770 MB patch on all platforms (Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC) adds an entirely new co-op combat mode, and it officially opens the game's mod floodgates for players outside the PC ecosystem.

The uncreatively named "Horde" mode works much like a mode of the same name in Gears of War. Instead of progressing through a level from start to finish, players are expected to hunker down inside a somewhat circular arena and then contend with hundreds of enemies spawning from all sides. Kill a full "wave" of foes, and your team will get a moment to breathe, replenish health and ammo (or argue over who gets to use it), and do it all over again.

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  A quick peek at the four brand-new Horde maps in Quake 1, all built by the Quake-obsessed team at MachineGames. Also, notice that this options menu allows you to add friendly, AI-controlled bots.

For the sake of Quake's first-ever official co-op mode (beyond the campaign, which always supported co-op as an option), Bethesda support studio MachineGames has whipped up four brand-new battling arenas, which are pictured above. Each includes at least one "silver key" door, which is full of more powerful weapons and is gated until players earn a key by defeating a tougher "boss wave" of foes. Get through nine enemy waves, and your team gets a "gold key." You can either exit the level at that point or stay and keep fighting increasingly tough foes until your team dies. (If you're hunting for in-game achievements or trophies, Bethesda hasn't updated Quake with any new ones for Horde, if that changes whether your team uses the gold key or not.)

Enlarge / The partially mutilated remains of a Vesuvius victim, found at the site of what would have been the beach of Herculaneum. (credit: Domenico Camardo/Herculaneum Project)

Archaeologists have announced the "sensational" discovery of the partially mutilated skeletal remains of a middle-aged man who perished on the beach at Herculaneum during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. It's the first excavation of the site in nearly three decades, and Herculaneum Archaeological Park Director Francesco Sirano expects to find even more victims' remains as the excavations continue.

Eagle-eyed excavators spotted a couple of leg bones sticking out of the edge of an escarpment; a prior excavation had chopped the skeleton off at the feet. Experts estimate that the man was between 40-45 years old. The remains were found lying with the head pointing back in the direction of the sea and surrounded by carbonized wood, including a roof beam that could have crushed the man's skull. The victim’s bones were a reddish color, which Sirano identified as stains left by the man’s blood.

“We can learn many things from his bones: his exact age, what jobs he may have done, whether he had any illnesses,” Domenico Camardo told reporters. Camardo is chief archaeologist of the Herculaneum Conservation Project.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

If you're a Google Chrome user setting up a new Windows PC, the most important feature of Microsoft Edge is the ability to download Chrome. Microsoft is apparently aware of this behavior and is doing something about it: Neowin has spotted new Edge pop-ups that specifically try to dissuade users from downloading and installing Chrome, a change that I promise I didn't know about when I wrote about Microsoft's annoying promotion of Microsoft Edge literally yesterday.

"I still love this joke construction," said no one in the last half-decade. (credit: The Verge)

You won't see the pop-ups every time you try to download Chrome (I haven't yet), but Neowin and other outlets like The Verge have spotted at least three different messages:

• "Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft."
• "'I hate saving money,' said no one ever. Microsoft Edge is the best browser for online shopping."
• "That browser is so 2008! Do you know what's new? Microsoft Edge."

While the operating system-level pop-ups are a small escalation in the ongoing browser wars, this kind of behavior isn't new. If you use Bing to search for essentially any web browser, including Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, or Brave, a large ad for Edge appears both above the search results and in a giant box to the right of the search results. And whenever you log into Google's services using Edge or any other non-Chrome browser for the first time, you'll get a "helpful" nudge about downloading and installing Chrome. But as the provider of Windows, Microsoft definitely has more opportunities to suggest using Edge, and it takes advantage of those opportunities with frustrating regularity.

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  Rendering of the Neutron rocket on the launch pad.

Rocket Lab chief executive Peter Beck on Thursday provided an update on the company's plans to develop a medium-lift rocket, named Neutron.

In a slickly produced video, Beck shared the company's thinking about how best to develop a reusable rocket that could remain competitive for decades. Neutron, he said, is optimized to serve both for the deployment of megaconstellations as well as geostationary satellites and even interplanetary spacecraft.

"This is what a rocket should look like in 2050," Beck said. "But we're building it today."

Enlarge / Activision's publishing HQ in Santa Monica, California. (credit: Activision)

The continuing lawsuits and investigations surrounding widespread reports of employee harassment and gender inequity issues at Activision Blizzard have now attracted the attention of six state treasurers who are seeking substantial changes at the company.

Axios reports on a letter sent last month by the state treasurers of California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Oregon, Delaware, and Nevada to Activision Blizzard, asking to meet with the company's board of directors regarding their "response to the challenges and investment risk exposures that face Activision." The group also writes that it is considering a "call to vote against the re-election of incumbent directors," echoing similar calls from activist investors in recent weeks.

"We think there needs to be sweeping changes made in the company," Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs told Axios. "We're concerned that the current CEO and board directors don't have the skill set nor the conviction to institute these sweeping changes needed to transform their culture, to restore trust with employees and shareholders and their partners."

Enlarge / Gigi Sohn answering questions on December 1, 2021 at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on her nomination to the Federal Communications Commission. (credit: Senate Commerce Committee)

Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn faced off against Republican senators at a nomination hearing yesterday, disputing the senators' shaky claims that she would use a post at the FCC to censor conservatives.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) repeated arguments previously made by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which mostly boil down to complaints about Sohn's tweets criticizing Fox News and her criticism of Sinclair Broadcast Group. In the Sinclair case, as we previously wrote, Sohn was actually on the same side as then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. Pai led a unanimous FCC vote that blocked Sinclair's attempt to purchase Tribune Media Company because of evidence that Sinclair's merger plan was illegal.

Sullivan and Cruz seized on these issues as evidence that Sohn would censor Fox News and conservatives in general during yesterday's Senate Commerce Committee hearing. They did so even though the leaders of conservative news networks Newsmax and One America News Network supported Sohn's nomination and praised her longtime commitment to free speech.

Enlarge / Gov. Mike Parson at a press conference on May 29, 2019, in Jefferson City, Missouri. (credit: Getty Images | Jacob Moscovitch )

As the delta wave rose in Missouri last summer, much of the state remained unmasked. Four jurisdictions, though, restored their mask mandates, creating a natural experiment that was studied by the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services. It confirmed that, in cities and counties with mandates, masks significantly reduced infections and deaths from COVID.

Yet Gov. Mike Parson’s office, which had requested the data, kept it hidden from the public, according to a new report from the Missouri Independent.

The data was initially requested by Alex Tuttle, Gov. Parson’s legislative liaison for DHSS, on November 1, 2021. “Can you provide examples of local mandates and how those mandates impacted the spread of COVID in those areas?” he wrote.