Month: December 2021

Enlarge / Eric Schmitt, Missouri attorney general. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

As COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations rise sharply in Missouri, local health departments are abandoning efforts to stop the spread of the pandemic disease, saying their hands have been tied by the state's attorney general and a recent court ruling.

One local agency, the Laclede County Health Department, northeast of Springfield, announced that it has ceased all COVID-19-related work, including case investigations, contact tracing, quarantine orders, and public announcements of current cases and deaths.

"While this is a huge concern for our agency, we have no other options but to follow the orders of the Missouri Attorney General at this time," the department wrote in a Facebook post on December 9.

Enlarge (credit: Kevin Beaumont)

The list of services with Internet-facing infrastructure that is vulnerable to a critical zero-day vulnerability in the open source Log4j logging utility is immense and reads like a who’s who of the biggest names on the Internet, including Apple, Amazon, Cloudflare, Steam, Tesla, Twitter, and Baidu.

The vulnerability, now going by the name Log4Shell, came to light on Thursday afternoon, when several Minecraft services and news sites warned of actively circulating attack code that exploited the vulnerability to execute malicious code on servers and clients running the world’s bestselling game. Soon, it became clear that Minecraft was only one of likely thousands of big-name services that can be felled by similar attacks.

A compilation of screenshots posted online documents how some of the world’s most popular and trusted cloud-based services react when they are fed parameters used in the attack. To wit:

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Last year, Apple rolled out a set of onerous guidelines that required streaming game subscription services like Xbox Game Pass to package each available title as a separate app in the iOS App Store. At the time, Microsoft said this solution "remains a bad experience for customers. Gamers want to jump directly into a game from their curated catalog within one app, just like they do with movies or songs, and not be forced to download over 100 apps to play individual games from the cloud."

However, new emails revealed as part of the Epic v. Apple trial (and unearthed by The Verge) show how seriously Microsoft was considering working within these guidelines. The emails show that Microsoft engaged Apple in detailed negotiations about how individual xCloud streaming apps could work as a technical matter and even dangled the possibility of streaming "exclusive AAA titles" from outside of Game Pass to help broker a compromise position.

Splitting the baby

In the emails, sent between February and April of 2020, Microsoft Xbox head of business development Lori Wright laid out some concerns about the idea of packaging each Xbox streaming game as an individual iOS app. For users, such a system would lead to cluttered home screens and the potential for "orphaned" app icons when games were removed from Game Pass, Wright wrote. For Microsoft and Apple, the system would also lead to lots of extra overhead in terms of app store metadata management and app review time, she wrote.

Enlarge / 2020 MacBook Air. (credit: Apple)

Nvidia's GeForce Now, like Google Stadia, lets you stream PC games to your computer, even if it's not powerful enough to run the titles natively. Nvidia's data centers stream content from the cloud, which means you can do high-level gaming on machines like thin-and-light Windows laptops or even MacBooks. And at a time when finding a modern GPU feels like searching for a unicorn, the idea of game streaming is starting to make even more sense.

There are some caveats, of course. There's bound to be some lag, whether it comes from latency, Internet connectivity issues, or bandwidth overages. And while gaming services like GeForce Now aim to make it easy to run PC games on a Mac, users of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro have had to make another sacrifice: resolution.

A different resolution

The MacBook Air has a native resolution of 2560×1600, as does the 13-inch MacBook Pro. If that seems like an odd resolution, that's because the laptops use the 16:10 aspect ratio. 16:9 is still the most common aspect ratio among laptops, making 2560×1440 more common as well. GeForce Now subscribers with a MacBook Air or 13-inch MacBook Pro have had to resort to using that resolution, which is technically less sharp than the Macs' native resolution (4,096,000 versus 3,686,400 pixels).

Enlarge / Supporters of Julian Assange outside the Royal Courts of Justice on December 10, 2021, in London, England. (credit: Getty Images | Chris Ratcliffe )

A UK court ruling today brought the US government one step closer to securing the extradition of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who faces criminal charges for his alleged role in helping Chelsea Manning steal classified information from the US Department of Defense. The ruling was issued today by the UK's High Court of Justice in London.

Today's decision came in response to the United States' appeal of a January 2021 district judge's ruling that rejected the extradition request on the grounds that Assange would be at greater risk of suicide in the American prison system. The district judge's ruling criticized US prison conditions and noted that "Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide at the MCC jail in August 2019" and Chelsea Manning "was hospitalized after an attempt to commit suicide at the ADC jail [William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center in Alexandria, Virginia] in 2020."

In February, the US offered several assurances to the UK about how Assange will be treated after extradition. The High Court was satisfied that these assurances "[e]xclude the possibility of Mr. Assange being made subject to 'special administrative measures' or held at the 'ADX' facility (a maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado, USA), either pretrial or after any conviction, unless, after entry of the assurances, he commits any future act which renders him liable to such conditions of detention," according to the court's summary of today's ruling.