Month: January 2022

Enlarge / Could Air Force officers fly on Boom Supersonic's Overture aircraft one day? (credit: Boom Supersonic)

The US military has indicated its interested in commercial supersonic flight by granting as much as $60 million to Boom Supersonic for its airliner development efforts.

The Colorado-based company has announced that the Air Force awarded a three-year contract to Boom to accelerate research and development of its Overture airliner. Separately this week, Boom also selected Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro, North Carolina, as the site of its first full-scale manufacturing facility. There, Boom plans to begin production in 2024, with the first Overture aircraft slated to roll out in 2025, fly in 2026, and carry its first passengers by 2029.

Boom is designing Overture to carry between 65 and 88 passengers at subsonic speeds over land and supersonic speeds over water—more than twice as fast as current commercial aircraft. The aircraft is designed to operate on 100 percent "sustainable" fuels, and the company says the vehicle will be net-zero carbon from day one.

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Docking stations can effectively transform a laptop computer into a desktop by allowing you to connect a display, mouse, keyboard, and other peripherals with a single cable. But a wireless docking station lets you do it without plugging anything into your laptop at all.

They’re not nearly as common yet, but Synaptics wants to make it easier for device makers to produce wireless docks – the company has unveiled a Gemini wireless laptop docking station reference design that uses WiFi 6/6E technology for high-speed connections.

The idea is that you can connect all of your wired devices to the dock, but you won’t need to plug the dock into your PC. Just walk into the room and your computer should automatically pair with the dock by the time you sit down and unfold your notebook. When you pack up and leave the room, your devices will disconnect seamlessly.

Synaptics says its system uses a combination of WiFi 6 and Bluetooth radios to ensure fast, stable connection and dynamic graphics compression to enable support for a wireless connection to up to two 4K displays.

One thing that a wireless dock won’t cover is charging your laptop, but Synaptics says that can also be handled wirelessly thanks to a wireless charging pad that you can place your notebook on top of.

While Synaptics won’t be selling the Gemini Dock itself, the company has put together a suite of hardware and software that device makers can use to produce their own Gemini-based docks. Features include a BCM43752 WiFi 6E wireless radio, a Synaptics VS641 network processor, a DisplayLink DL-1950 video interface, and a Synaptics Media Agnostic USB Interface.

There’s no word on when we’ll see wireless docks based on this reference design hit the streets or how much they’ll cost if and when they do. But Synaptics says the reference design is available to partners now.

press release

The post Synaptics Gemini is a wireless docking station with dual 4K display support (reference design) appeared first on Liliputing.

Enlarge / The 2021 12.9-inch iPad Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Today, Apple released several new operating system updates to the public: iOS 15.3, iPadOS 15.3, macOS Monterey 12.2, watchOS 8.4, tvOS 15.3, and HomePod Software 15.3.

The update notes for these releases are some of the leanest I've seen. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS simply state that the update "includes bug fixes and security updates" and is "recommended for all users."

iOS and iPadOS 15.3 do not add any new user-facing features. Rather, they fix several key security issues. The most notable is a previously reported Safari vulnerability that allowed websites that use the common IndexedDB API to access the names of databases from other websites. Note that this also affected other browsers on iOS and not just Safari (that's because all iOS web browsers must use WebKit). macOS 12.2 fixes the same bug in the desktop version of Safari. (Unlike iOS, there are macOS web browsers that were not affected.)

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Amazon is running a sale that lets you save $20 when you buy any two Kindle eReaders. It’s hardly the best sale on Kindle devices, but if you don’t feel like waiting for the next big sale to pick up a new eReader, you can save a few bucks when purchasing one for yourself and one for somebody else. And if you’re looking for something to read, Amazon’s got you covered there with a few different sales on Kindle eBooks.

Meanwhile, B&H is offering a heck of a deal for folks looking to set up a mesh WiFi network. You can pick up a 2-pack of TCL mesh WiFi routers for $40 or a 3-pack for $60. While these are WiFi 5 routers, that’s till plenty good enough for many people’s home-networking needs, and you’re not going to find a WiFi 6 mesh system that’s even close to those prices anytime in the near future.

Here are some of the day’s best deals.

Tablets & eReaders

• Open Box Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite w/64GB storage & 1-year warranty for $219 – Quick Ship Electronics (via eBay)
• Save $20 when you buy 2 Amazon Kindle devices – Amazon (coupon: 2PACK)
• Amazon Kindle 2-pack for $160 – Amazon (coupon: 2PACK)
• Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 2-pack for $260 – Amazon (coupon: 2PACK)

Digital media

• Select popular fiction Kindle eBooks for $4 or less – Amazon
• Select “top reads” Kindle eBooks for $5 or less – Amazon
• Name your price for a bundle of digital comics – Humble Humanoids MegaBundle
• Doctor Who (2005) Seasons 1 – 4 for $15 – Vudu

Other

• TCL LinkHub AC1200 dual-band WiFi 5 mesh router 2-pack for $40 – B&H
• TCL LinkHub AC1200 dual-band WiFi 5 mesh router 3-pack for $60 – B&H
• Save up to 30% on refurbished Bose audio products – Bose (via eBay)

The post Daily Deals (1-26-2022) appeared first on Liliputing.

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Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft will be tending to some of the unfinished parts of Windows 11 in an update next month, according to a blog post by Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay. Foremost among the new features will be a public preview for Android apps running in Windows, a feature Microsoft promoted when it announced Windows 11 back in June of 2021.

Microsoft also called out a few other areas of improvement in the post: redesigns for the Notepad and Media Player apps, taskbar improvements, a universal call mute and unmute button, "easier window sharing," and adding the weather directly to the taskbar instead of keeping it in a widget.

Most of these updates have already been available for Windows Insiders in the Beta and Dev channels for a while, so you can read our preview coverage (for Notepad, taskbar changes, and lots of miscellaneous bits and pieces) to get a good sense of what things will look like. It’s possible that we’ll see changes that Microsoft hasn’t made public yet, but major changes are unlikely to skip the preview channels before being widely released. 

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Valve’s Steam Deck is a handheld gaming computer with a 7 inch display, an AMD processor with RDNA 2 graphics, and built-in game controllers. First announced last summer, the Steam Deck is priced at $399 and up and Valve began taking reservations for in July 2021.

Now Valve has revealed it will begin shipping the Steam Deck to customers on February 28, 2022.

Valve had originally hoped to begin shipping the Steam Deck by the end of 2021, but global supply chain issues had something to say about that. So the company pushed back the release date by a few months and now Valve says it will begin notifying customers that their orders are ready on Friday, February 25, and folks who paid $5 to reserve one will have 72 hours to pay the rest of the purchase price for the model they reserved in order to have one shipped the following Monday, otherwise Valve will go down the reservation list and offer another person that chance to buy one.

Folks who haven’t already reserved a Steam Deck can still do that, but new reservations aren’t expected to be filled until the later this year (Valve says “after Q2, 2022, which probably means sometime in July or later).

The Steam Deck is basically a full-fledged computer, but it’s designed for gaming on the go. It’s a combination of hardware and software that sets it apart from other gaming PC including other handhelds from companies like GPD, One Netbook, and AYA.

The little computer will have the most powerful graphics of any device in this category to date – even if you opt for the entry-level model which costs much less than the competition at just $399. All models have 16GB of LPDDR5 5500 MHz memory, but the entry-level version has just 64GB of eMMC storage, while higher-priced models have up to 512GB of PCIe NVMe Gen 3 solid state storage.

Valve’s game controllers include dual analog sticks with capacitive touch, the usual action buttons, D-Pad, and analog sticks and shoulder bumpers, but there are also four assignable grip buttons, two square trackpads with haptic feedback and a 6-axis gyroscope, all of which should help when playing a variety of games – even games that were designed for keyboard and mouse input rather than game controllers.

The Steam Deck also ships with a custom Linux distribution called Steam OS that puts gaming front and center thanks to a user interface optimized for small screens and controller input. And while there are still some PC games that may be Windows-only, Valve has put a lot of work into bringing support for Windows games to Linux in recent years and the company says many of the most popular games will run on Steam OS.

Since the Steam Deck has the guts of a general-purpose computer though, there’s nothing stopping users from installing Windows if they want to.

One advantage to sticking with Steam OS though? Valve knows that people use mobile gaming devices differently from gaming PCs and living room consoles. You might want to pick up a Steam Deck, play for a bit, and then put it away quickly without first taking time to save and exit a game and shut down. So the company has added a Dynamic Cloud Sync feature that will automatically upload your gaming data to the cloud when you suspend the Steam Deck without exiting a game.

That means you’ll be able to not only pick up where you left off the next time you turn on the Steam Deck, but your data should be synchronized to your Steam account which means you can also continue playing on another PC.

At least that’s the idea. In practice it might not work perfectly all the time – developers will need to enable support for Dynamic Cloud Sync in their games, so it’s possible that certain titles will support the feature while others will not. And I also wouldn’t expect cloud saves to work if you shut down your Steam Deck when it’s in airplane mode or someplace where you don’t have a signal.

Still, at a time when rival handheld gaming PCs are debuting with $1000+ price tags, it’s exciting to see if Valve’s Steam Deck can shake up the market.

The post Valve Steam Deck begins shipping February 28 (handheld gaming PC) appeared first on Liliputing.

In the hope of accessing YouTube’s Content ID system, in 2020 musician Maria Schneider launched a class action lawsuit that alleged mass infringement and serious deficiencies in YouTube’s copyright enforcement measures.

She did so with the support of a shadowy company called ‘Pirate Monitor’ but an in-depth investigation by YouTube later revealed that the entity was up to no good.

In order to build its case against YouTube, Pirate Monitor had uploaded around 2,000 movie clips to YouTube and then filed fraudulent takedown notices to have that content removed. It later admitted it didn’t hold the copyrights to the works it asserted in the case.

YouTube went on to file a counterclaim and named Hungarian film director and California resident Gábor Csupó (who previously worked on The Simpsons, Rugrats, Duckman, Stressed Eric, and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters) as the person presiding over Pirate Monitor.

With allegations of fraud threatening to bring the class into disrepute, Pirate Monitor voluntarily dismissed its claims against YouTube but the video platform refused to back down, keeping the allegations of a “wide-ranging fraud” in its counterclaim intact.

In the wake of Pirate Monitor’s withdrawal, Schneider filed a first amended complaint that added two new parties to the action – Uniglobe Entertainment, LLC and AST Publishing. Yet again (and as it did earlier with Schneider and Pirate Monitor) YouTube pointed out huge deficiencies in the claims of the new companies and in December asked the court to dismiss the entire complaint.

Plaintiffs Want Counterclaim Handed Separately

In the meantime, however, Pirate Monitor and its behavior are back at the forefront of the case after the plaintiffs asked the court to sever YouTube’s counterclaim from the case so it can be handled separately. Predictably, YouTube is having none of it.

In its opposition to the motion to sever, YouTube says that after “handpicking” Pirate Monitor to lead the putative class action based on claims that it was suffering in the same way as other copyright holders around the world, Pirate Monitor was held up as a “perfect example” of a copyright holder wrongly denied access to Content ID. With its “fraudulent” actions showing otherwise, the opposite was evident.

“Pirate Monitor has instead proven to be a perfect example of why YouTube does not — and cannot — offer Content ID to everyone,” YouTube’s response reads. “Giving Pirate Monitor the power to control and block videos based on bogus copyright claims like those it asserted here could have visited significant hardship on countless YouTube users.”

YouTube says that when the plaintiffs could no longer deny Pirate Monitor’s misconduct, the company dismissed its own claims with prejudice. This demonstrates that the plaintiffs only wish to sever YouTube’s counterclaims against Pirate Monitor because its own actions support YouTube’s position that Content ID access will be abused if they allow anyone to use it.

“It is hard to imagine a better embodiment of YouTube’s concerns about Content ID misuse than Pirate Monitor. Its baseless assertion of copyright ownership and its fraudulent infringement claims would, if made through Content ID’s automated machinery, wreak havoc on other users and YouTube itself. As a result, the presentation of YouTube’s counterclaims against Pirate Monitor will confirm the need for Content ID access restrictions and refute Plaintiffs’ charge that the restrictions are intended to enable ‘copyright piracy’,” YouTube writes.

“Plaintiffs chose Pirate Monitor as their standard bearer at the start of this case,” the video platform continues.

“They understandably now wish to distance themselves as much as possible. But the overlap between Plaintiffs’ affirmative claims, YouTube’s counterclaims, and Pirate Monitor’s defenses is plain, and no legitimate interests would be served by severing the counterclaims at this point.”

“YouTube Believes Pirate Monitor Sullys The Case”

In their reply in support of their motion to sever, the plaintiffs frame things very differently. They argue that the idea of severance is to promote judicial economy and to avoid prejudice. They note that YouTube is seeking $20,000 in its counterclaim against Pirate Monitor but that has already resulted in “significant waste and prejudice.”

According to them, YouTube has already spent in excess of $100,000 in attorney’s fees litigating its counterclaims, an “exponential disparity” that makes a settlement “the only rational path” to resolve the claims. Indeed, the plaintiffs claim that severance would facilitate such a settlement but they believe YouTube isn’t interested in the money.

“The sole justification for this waste is YouTube’s improper desire to distract from the claims brought by Plaintiffs Maria Schneider, Uniglobe Entertainment, and AST Publishing in their pursuit of class-wide relief,” they inform the court.

“If the cases are not decoupled, however, YouTube will continue to press the claims against Pirate Monitor for the simple reason that YouTube believes these claims sully the class and will unduly influence the decision-maker — inappropriate reasons to contest severance.”

The plaintiffs further state that YouTube is using its counterclaims against Pirate Monitor as a “guilt-by-association weapon to be wielded against Plaintiffs and the putative class,” adding that severance would not prejudice YouTube.

The related court documents can be found here (1,2 pdf)

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Enlarge / Pokémon Legends: Arceus is as close as we've ever gotten to an open-world Pokémon game. (credit: Nintendo)

Last year's by-the-numbers Pokémon Diamond and Pearl remakes did even less than most Pokémon games to spruce up and modernize the series' decades-old formula. That's understandable for a remake of a 2006 Nintendo DS game, but the games were still disappointing follow-ups to the more adventurous Sword and Shield.

The good news is that if you've been waiting for Game Freak to really shake up Pokémon's gameplay without totally burning it to the ground and starting from scratch, Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the game you've been waiting for. Part Pokémon and part Breath of the Wild, Legends takes the free-roaming "Wild Area" concept from Sword and Shield and updates the series' catching and battling mechanics to match.

That's not to say it's a perfect fusion of those disparate elements. Its mission-based structure gets pretty fetch quest-y, it leans heavily on an over-familiar roster of existing Pokémon, and the aging Switch hardware sometimes struggles to make it look good, especially when docked. But despite those problems, the whole package works together surprisingly well, and it makes the Pokémon feel fresher than it has in quite a while.

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Enlarge / Amazon fulfillment center in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Getty Images | 4kodiak)

Amazon has killed a program under which it paid warehouse employees to say nice things about the company on social media. "Amazon quietly shut down and removed all traces of the influence campaign at the end of last year, people with direct knowledge of the decision told the Financial Times," FT reported today. FT noted that the social media program suffered from "poor reach and embarrassing backfires."

Amazon began paying workers to tweet in 2018 in a widely mocked effort to counter negative perceptions about the company. As Business Insider reported in August 2018, "The company now has a small army of 'FC Ambassadors' saying nice things about the company online and engaging in dialogue with average Twitter users. The ambassadors are full-time employees, according to an Amazon spokesperson, and it is their job to share their experiences working at a fulfillment center."

"FC" stands for fulfillment centers, and the "ambassadors" worked in the Amazon warehouses before being paid to tweet, and in at least some cases, they split duties between the warehouse and Twitter. "I get paid $15/hr whether I am answering tweets or out on the floor stowing. I do this 2 days a week and 2 days a week I stow," one Amazon employee explained in 2019, as seen in a Bellingcat report that found 53 Amazon FC Ambassador accounts on Twitter.

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