Month: January 2022

Enlarge / EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS - 2022/01/08: A vial containing Moderna COVID-19 booster vaccine at a vaccination centre. (credit: Getty | SOPA Images)

As the US weathers record COVID-19 cases from the ultra-transmissible omicron variant, vaccine makers are thinking about future waves—and the shots that could help prevent them.

Leading mRNA vaccine makers Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech are currently working up omicron-specific versions of their vaccines, which could be ready in a matter of months. And according to recent interviews, they expect that such boosters will be used as annual shots, which could be given in the fall for the next several years until global transmission dies down.

"I think the reality is that this is going to become an annual vaccination, at least for a period of time," Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner and Pfizer board member, said Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation. "We don't know what the epidemiology of this infection is going to be over the long run, but certainly over the next couple of years, you can envision boosters becoming an annual affair."

Enlarge / A cinematic intro to the WC3 human campaign? That's cool. Too bad fans had to step in to create this, since Blizzard doesn't appear poised to add anything substantial to WC3R ever again. (credit: InsaneMonster)

WarCraft III: Reforged has not received a patch or official announcement since April 2021, and the game's handlers at Blizzard have remained eerily quiet about anything previously announced for this so-called "remaster" of an RTS classic. Official matchmaking ladders, leaderboards, and user profiles never came to pass, prompting the game's remaining community to cobble together its own solution—and that's on top of the re-release's utter lack of single-player updates. (To date, custom WC3 campaign files still aren't formally supported.)

Thus, just as fans previously built their own online gameplay updates in the form of WC3Champions, so too has the game's remaining community stepped up to make the single-player campaign better resemble Blizzard's initial pitch for the project.

WarCraft III: Re-Reforged is a fan-made project apparently led by a single designer who goes by the handle InsaneMonster. It received its second substantial update on Saturday, following its original January 2021 launch as a downloadable pack of WC3R campaign files. The project is now up to 10 in-game chapters: the five chapters of WC3's Horde-specific prologue, which already launched last year, and the first five chapters of its human-focused first act. You can now access both parts of Re-Reforged as free downloads at Hive Workshop (part one, part two).

Enlarge / The "Sword of Damocles" head-mounted display, the original augmented reality headset, circa 1968. (credit: Ivan Sutherland)

Apple may delay the launch of its first mixed reality headset, according to Bloomberg.

Multiple sources had previously claimed that the device was likely to launch in 2022, and Apple seemed poised to introduce its new mixed reality platform to developers at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this June.

But according to "people familiar with the situation" with whom Bloomberg reporters Mark Gurman, Takashi Mochizuki, and Debby Wu spoke, the announcement of the new headset could fall to "the end of 2022 or later, with the product hitting shelves by 2023."

Enlarge / The PinePhone Pro is "the fastest mainline Linux smartphone on the market. (credit: Pine64)

Pine64 is launching a major hardware upgrade in its quest to build a Linux smartphone. After the launch of the original PinePhone in 2019, the organization is now taking preorders for the PinePhone Pro, a new smartphone it's calling "the fastest mainline Linux smartphone on the market." The phone was announced in October, and you can now secure a unit. The MSRP is $599, but it's up for preorder now at an introductory price of $399.

Since Pine64 wants to make an open source Linux smartphone, its choice of hardware components is limited. Most big chip companies like Qualcomm or Samsung don't want to share open drivers or schematics, and you saw that with the original PinePhone, which was based on a 40 nm Cortex A53 SoC made by Allwinner. The PinePhone Pro is upgrading things with a Rockchip RK3399 SoC. The chip sports two Cortex A72 CPUs and four Cortex A53 CPUs, and Pine64 says it worked with Rockchip to get the chip "binned and voltage locked for optimal performance with sustainable power and thermal limits." Pine64 doesn't cite a process node, but other companies list the RK3399 at 28 nm. If that's true and you're looking for something roughly comparable in Qualcomm's lineup, the Snapdragon 618/650 (a mid-range chip from 2016) would seem to fit the bill.

The phone has a 6-inch, 1440×720 LCD, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of eMMC storage, and a 3,000 mAh battery. There's a USB-C port with 15 W charging, a headphone jack, a 13MP main camera, and an 8MP front camera. The back cover pops off, and inside the phone, you'll find a removable battery (whoa!), a microSD slot, pogo pins, and a series of privacy dip switches that let you kill the modem, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and headphones.

Enlarge / A Starlink track running across the Andromeda galaxy. (credit: Caltech Optical Observatories/IPAC)

SpaceX's Starlink Internet service will require a dense constellation of satellites to provide consistent, low-latency connectivity. The system already has over 1,500 satellites in orbit and has received approval to operate 12,000 of them. And that has astronomers worried. Although SpaceX has taken steps to reduce the impact of its hardware, there's no way to completely eliminate the tracks the satellites leave across ground-based observations.

How bad is the problem? A team of astronomers has used archival images from a survey telescope to look for Starlink tracks over the past two years. Over that time, the number of images affected rose by a factor of 35, and the researchers estimate that by the time the planned Starlink constellation is complete, pretty much every image from their hardware will have at least one track in it.

Looking widely

The hardware used for the analysis is called the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory. The ZTF is designed to pick up rare events, such as supernovae. It does so by scanning the entire sky repeatedly, with software monitoring the resulting images to look for objects that were absent in early images but which appeared in later ones. The ZTF's high sensitivity makes it good for picking out dim objects, like asteroids, in our own Solar System.

Last week, we wrote about the legal status of a spate of shameless Wordle clones that briefly clogged the iOS App Store with attempts to cash in on the trend. Today, we get to focus on a story that's almost the complete opposite of that—the developer behind a pre-existing app named Wordle! is donating the proceeds from an unexpected windfall driven by the unrelated viral hit.

Developer Steven Cravotta writes about how he created a game called Wordle! five years ago, at the age of 18, "mostly for fun, to sharpen my coding skillz, and maybe make a quick buck." That game—which asks players to build as many words as they can from a set of letters in a strict time limit—drew about 100,000 free downloads in a matter of months before Cravotta "stopped updating and promoting the app," he writes on Twitter.

Imagine Cravotta's surprise when the usual pace of one or two legacy downloads a day suddenly increased to a reported 200,000 downloads a week. That popularity spike was, of course, the result of the viral popularity of the other Wordle, a daily in-browser word-guessing game created by Josh Wardle that happens to share the same name (and no other relationship).

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Google recently released a feature that allows users to quickly send data, like photos or documents, to a nearby person with a Chromebook or Android device. Now, it appears developers are working on updating that feature so users can easily send data across their own devices.

Nearby Share came to Chrome OS devices in June and competes with similar technologies like Apple's AirDrop. On Sunday, Chrome Story, a Chrome and Chrome OS-focused blog, spotted an "add feature flag" in the Chromium Gerrit referencing an addition to Nearby Share called Self Share. The feature "enables seamless sharing between a user’s own devices," the flag reads.

Self Share would allow you to send data to yourself without the use of email or third-party cloud drives. Using Bluetooth, WebRTS, or peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, data should transfer to a nearby Chrome OS or Android device in seconds.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images/Aurich Lawson)

Back in 2013, Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to pass a "right to repair" law that required carmakers to sell their proprietary diagnostic tools and software to third-party repair shops. During the 2020 election, the voters of that state voted, three-to-one, in favor of expanding the law to include the connected aspects of new cars.

From model year 2022, any new car sold in the state that features connected car services or telematics capabilities must have a standardized open data platform as a way of accessing those online services. Now, though, two bills seek to tweak the law in the hopes of getting OEMs to comply.

MY2022 cars have been on sale across the country for some months now. However, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy has held off on enforcing the new provisions of the law due to an ongoing federal lawsuit brought by a coalition of automakers who claim that the current law is incompatible with widely accepted cybersecurity practices (a view shared by a horrified-sounding National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).