January 2022 – Page 93 – news.buyenne.com

CDC to update advice on best masks—but just wants you to wear one, any of them

The best mask is the one Americans will actually wear, CDC director says.

As cases of the ultra-transmissible omicron coronavirus variant continue to increase in the US, many experts have pushed for Americans to upgrade their masks to better protect themselves—i.e., ditch the handmade cloth masks that were fashionable in spring 2020 for options like the high-quality N95s and KN95s that are now more available.

Taking note of the shift, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today that it is working to update the mask guidance on its website, which hasn't been refreshed since last fall, prior to omicron's rise. Meanwhile, the White House is actively considering providing high-quality masks to Americans.

In a press briefing Wednesday, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeffrey Zients offered little detail on what a federal mask distribution program might look like or when it could come, noting only, "We're in the process right now of strongly considering options to make more high-quality masks available to all Americans."

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sony brings a compact, flagship smartphone to the US

Sony’s small phone has a headphone jack and a microSD slot.

Promotional image of cutting-edge smartphone.

Sony is bringing a $1,000 flagship smartphone, the Xperia 5 III, to the US market. Calling the device "new," however, is a bit of a stretch, as the phone was announced nine months ago.

As you'd expect from the price, the Xperia 5 III is a high-end flagship. It has a Snapdragon 888 SoC, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a 4500 mAh battery, and a 6.1-inch, 120 Hz, 2520×1080 OLED display. There are three rear cameras—a 12 MP main camera, a 12 MP ultrawide, and a 12 MP 3x telephoto. At just 68 mm wide, the Xperia 5 III is one of the most compact Android phones on the market. It has a very tall 21:9 display, but in terms of width, it's only 4 mm bigger than an iPhone 13 Mini. Although it ships with Android 11, an Android 12 update is due sometime soon.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Lilbits: Android 12L Beta 2, Windows 11 Preview 22533, and Rockchip RK3588S

Windows PC shipments were up nearly 15% year-over-year in 2021 according to the latest report from research firm IDC. Google has released a second beta of Android 12L, the upcoming version of its mobile operating system optimized for tablets & foldables. Microsoft has released a new preview build of Windows 11 to Insiders. And Rockchip […]

The post Lilbits: Android 12L Beta 2, Windows 11 Preview 22533, and Rockchip RK3588S appeared first on Liliputing.

Android 12L Picture-in-Picture window (via Mishaal Rahman)

Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web,

Growth Streak for Traditional PCs Continues During Holiday Quarter of 2021 [IDC]

Worldwide global PC shipments (including desktops, laptops & workstations) hit 92.7 million during Q4, 2021 for 1% year-over-year growth and total shipments for the year were up 14.8% to 348.8 million, according to

Android 12L Beta 2 released [Google via Reddit]

Google has released Android 12L Beta 2 with “improved functionality and user experience,” bug fixes, and security updates. Optimized for tablets and foldables, it’s currently available for the Android Emulator and coming soon to the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro. It’s also available for Pixel 3a and later phones, but you won’t see most of the tablet-specific features on those devices. Changes in this build are minor, but include a few updates for the picture-in-picture video window, airplane mode, and lock screen clock.

Picture-in-picture windows now have a shortcut to launch the app in split-screen window. This only shows when the PiP window is on top of another app and not the launcher. pic.twitter.com/XRop2FMYtJ

— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) January 12, 2022

Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22533 [Microsoft]

The latest Windows 11 Insider Preview build brings an updated design for flyout hardware indicators for brightness, volume, camera, etc, options to uninstall the Clock app or pin voice access to the taskbar and new Calls experience for Your Phone app.

Rockchip RK3588S cost-optimized Cortex-A76/A55 processor [CNX Software]

The Rockchip RK3588S is expected to be a slightly cheaper alternative to the RK3588, optimized for use in tablets. It lacks PCIe 3.0 and has fewer video, Ethernet, and USB interfaces, but the same CPU, GPU, and AI features.

Keep up on the latest headlines by following Liliputing on Twitter and Facebook and follow @LinuxSmartphone on Twitter and Facebook for the latest news on open source mobile phones.

The post Lilbits: Android 12L Beta 2, Windows 11 Preview 22533, and Rockchip RK3588S appeared first on Liliputing.

PCI Express 6.0 will bring up to 256GB/s bandwidth to PCs and servers… eventually

The PCI Special Interest Group (SIG) has finalized the PCIe 6.0 specification which will allow next-gen SSDs, graphics cards, and other PC and server components to offer data transfer speeds as high as 256GB/s in a full 16-lane configuration. That’s twice as fast as PCIe 5.0 and four times as fast as PCIe 4.0, which […]

The post PCI Express 6.0 will bring up to 256GB/s bandwidth to PCs and servers… eventually appeared first on Liliputing.

That’s twice as fast as PCIe 5.0 and four times as fast as PCIe 4.0, which is still far more commonly used today. But it might be a few years before you can actually buy a computer that supports the standard.

It’s been three years since the PCIe 5.0 standard was announced, and companies are just now starting to introduce SSDs and other hardware that uses that standard. And they’ll only work with desktop or server computers, because all of those brand new mobile chips Intel and AMD just introduced earlier this month? None of them support PCIe 5.0 yet, which means that for the foreseeable future, laptops will be limited to PCIe 4.0 or older.

So yeah, it’ll probably be a while before you can buy a computer with PCIe 6.0 support.

But when it does arrive, you can expect blazing fast speeds… although just how fast will depend on your setup. Expect up to 256GB/s for a bi-directional 16-lane setup or 128GB/s for single-direction. But some systems might only support 8 lanes, 4 lanes, 2 lanes, or just one. Cut the speeds in half every time you half the number of lanes.

The PCI SIG says in order to double the speeds of PCIe 5.0, the new standard uses a new PAM4 signaling technology for greater bandwidth and efficiency with low latency. The architecture remains backward-compatible though, which means you could still use SSDs or other components designed to meet earlier PCIe standards.

The folks at Anandtech have a deep dive into the technical details if you’re interested, or you can check out the PCI SIG website for more information.

press release

via Ars Technica, The Verge, and Tom’s Hardware

The post PCI Express 6.0 will bring up to 256GB/s bandwidth to PCs and servers… eventually appeared first on Liliputing.

Run (some) Windows apps on Haiku operating system thanks to Wine port

Haiku is free and open source operating system designed to be compatible with BeOS, a legacy operating system from the 1990s. Haiku itself has been under development for two decades, but it’s still considered beta software (and it only hit that state a few years ago). While there’s a relatively limited number of native apps […]

The post Run (some) Windows apps on Haiku operating system thanks to Wine port appeared first on Liliputing.

Haiku is free and open source operating system designed to be compatible with BeOS, a legacy operating system from the 1990s. Haiku itself has been under development for two decades, but it’s still considered beta software (and it only hit that state a few years ago).

While there’s a relatively limited number of native apps available for the platform, one potential solution to that app gap could be on the horizon: a developer has been porting Wine to Haiku, which makes it possible to run some Windows applications on Haiku.

Wine is a Windows compatibility layer initially designed for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems including macOS and BSD. By porting it to work with Haiku, developer X512 has been able to get Windows applications including 7-Zip, Inkscape, Paint, and Notepad++ to run alongside native Haiku applications.

There are some limitations. So far only 64-bit applications are supported, which leaves out many older Windows apps which may be 32-bit only. Some features are still non-functional, including detection for screen size and focus control. And not all Windows applications work with Wine, but you can find a list of thousand of apps that do in the Wine Application Database.

You can find more details about the work-in-progress porting of Wine to Haiku in a thread at the Haiku forum.

via The Register

The post Run (some) Windows apps on Haiku operating system thanks to Wine port appeared first on Liliputing.

PrimeWire Down: Streaming Site Prepares To Counter Domain Seizures

After being targeted in a lawsuit filed by Hollywood and Netflix, pirate streaming site PrimeWire appears to be digging in for the long haul. In preparation for imminent domain seizures, the site is now advertising a new service that will provide up-to-date information on where the official platform can be accessed in the future.

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

The Hollywood studios of the Motion Picture Association are certainly not averse to filing copyright infringement lawsuits against pirate sites. Sometimes, however, it takes them a long time to do so.

PrimeWire, a site that has been around in various forms for at least eight years, had to wait until last December to find out it had been targeted by Paramount, Universal, Warner, Columbia, Disney and Netflix in the United States.

But with the ante upped, would the site cave under pressure or come out fighting?

PrimeWire Chooses Not To Fight Conventionally

Perhaps the most obvious response to a lawsuit is for the defendant to file an answer to the complaint. That hasn’t happened yet and may never, so the legal process in the United States is probably set to become a one-sided affair. The studios don’t appear to know the identity of the PrimeWire operators so while winning damages is likely, recovering them won’t be as straightforward.

However, there are other issues at play too, such as the preliminary injunction handed down by a California court this week. That requires domain name registrars and registries API Gmbh, Gandi SAS, Namecheap, Inc., Nic AG, SWITCH, and Afilias, Inc., to freeze and disable three active PrimeWire domains.

That is likely to happen very soon and it is against these measures PrimeWire is preparing to fight.

Is PrimeWire Down?

At the time of writing PrimeWire is still accessible via primewire.li, primewire.ag and primewire.vc but that is likely to change very soon when the registries and registrars take action. The disabling of those domains will mean that site access will be limited but it appears that news has already reached PrimeWire.

A few hours ago a new banner appeared on the streaming portal. In an apparent effort not to spook users it makes no mention of the live lawsuit. Instead, it publicizes a new domain that will provide information to counter any domain issues.

PrimeWireStatus Serves Two Purposes

The primewirestatus.org domain was registered on January 11, 2022, and claims it has nothing to do with the main PrimeWire operation.

“PrimeWireStatus.org is an independently run informational website that is not affiliated with any other website or service. PrimeWireStatus.org does not promote or provide any hyperlinks to any other website. The sole purpose of PrimeWireStatus.org is to relay signed PGP messages that have been sent to us,” the site’s footer reads.

The only signed PGP message published thus far details the three current official domains, all of which are at risk of being disabled without notice. The primary purpose of the messages, therefore, is to provide updates on where new and official domains can be found.

Second, since domain seizures tend to encourage the launch of copycat sites to fill the perceived gap, these signed messages can also be used to find out whether any new domains that subsequently appear are actually official, as the image below shows.

Checking the referenced URL on primewire.vc does indeed return the promised public key, showing that the domain is official and not a third-party clone or proxy.

Preliminary Injunction Served

Court records show that PrimeWire seems to be violating the preliminary injunction. The platform was served with the necessary documentation on January 10, 2022, via three email addresses – one on the primewire.li domain, one on primewire.ag, and another on a ProtonMail address. The court was notified of service to PrimeWire on the same date. Searches on specific movies in the plaintiffs’ list of 138 infringed copyrighted works are still in PrimeWire’s indexes.

There’s no indication thus far that the registries and registrars have received the injunction but the Motion Picture Association certainly won’t be hanging around. What additional measures the studios will seek to counter PrimeWire’s apparent countermeasures remain to be seen but it’s not beyond realms of possibility that they will return to court to seek further action, including against additional new domains.

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

PCI Express 6.0 spec is finalized, doubling bandwidth for SSDs, GPUs, and more

PCIe 6.0 will provide up to 256GB/s of bandwidth for next-gen servers and PCs.

The PCIe 6.0 standard's ability to interoperate with all older versions of the standard is a point of pride for the PCI-SIG.

The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has finalized version 6.0 of the PCI Express standard, the communication bus that lets all the stuff inside your computer communicate. The new version of the spec comes roughly three years after the PCI Express 5.0 spec was finalized, and version 6.0 once again doubles the bandwidth of a PCIe lane from 32GT/s (8GB/s in total, or 4GB/s in each direction) to 64GT/s (16GB/s, or 8GB/s in each direction). For a full 16-lane PCIe 6.0 connection, that's as much as 256GB/s of total bandwidth, compared to the 32GB/s or 64GB/s of now-common PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 connections.

Like past PCIe versions, PCIe 6.0 will "interoperate and maintain backwards compatibility" with all existing PCIe versions, so your PCIe 4.0 GPU or SSD will continue to work in a PCIe 6.0 slot and vice-versa. The PCI-SIG bragged about the specification's longevity in a blog post by PCI-SIG board member Debendra Das Sharma: "An interconnect technology is considered successful if it can sustain three generations of bandwidth improvement spanning a decade. PCIe architecture has far exceeded that mark."

PCI Express speeds compared. Note that these bandwidth numbers are bidirectional—if you're only sending or only receiving data, you'll only have half as much bandwidth. (credit: PCI-SIG)

To boost its speeds, PCIe 6.0 uses a new kind of signaling called "Pulse Amplitude Modulation 4" (PAM4), which allows for faster data transfers than the previous Non-Return-To-Zero (NRZ) signaling at the expense of a higher error rate. To compensate, PCIe 6.0 includes technologies like Forward Error Correction (FEC) to correct errors and Cyclic Redundancy Checking (CRC) to ask for packets to be retransmitted when errors can't be corrected. The PCI-SIG says that this combination of technologies should catch all errors without adding latency to the connection.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Here’s why modern cars feel so lifeless to drive

People say only enthusiasts care about steering feel, but that’s not true.

A person drives a Porsche Taycan on track

In almost every regard, new cars are better than they've been at any time in their history. They're safer than they used to be—though that is less true for women. Powertrains, particularly battery electric ones, are more powerful and more efficient, which helps to compensate for the extra weight of that added safety equipment. Vehicles are far more reliable, at least for their first 100,000 miles, and even cheap cars come with standard equipment that would seem like science fiction to drivers from just a few decades ago.

They ride better; they stop better—so everything's great, right? The problem is that modern cars almost invariably feel a bit boring to drive. The issue is more acute the longer you've been driving, as you might expect, since the cause is technological progression—specifically, power steering.

What happened to steering feel?

For much of the car's existence, steering was entirely unassisted. The driver turns the wheel connected to a steering column that, through links and pivots and usually a gear, turns the front wheels in either direction. That setup was marvelous for feedback, but it wasn't great in terms of the effort required to turn the wheel, particularly at lower speeds.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Scammers put fake QR codes on parking meters to intercept parkers’ payments

Fraudulent QR codes on parking meters found in Houston, Austin, and San Antonio.

Illustration of a parking meter and a warning not to scan any QR codes on meters.

Scammers in a few big Texas cities have been putting fake QR codes on parking meters to trick people into paying the fraudsters. Parking enforcement officers recently found stickers with fraudulent QR codes on pay stations in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.

San Antonio police warned the public of the scam on December 20, saying that "people attempting to pay for parking using those QR codes may have been directed to a fraudulent website and submitted payment to a fraudulent vendor." Similar scams were then found in Austin and Houston.

The Austin Transportation Department started examining their own meters after being "notified of a QR code scam by the City of San Antonio in late December—when more than 100 pay stations were stickered with fraudulent codes," Fox 7 Austin reported last week. Austin officials checked the city's 900 or so parking pay stations and found fraudulent QR codes on 29 of them, according to a KXAN article.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Wordle and IP law: What happens when a hot game gets cloned

Apple is belatedly purging copies that were clogging up the iOS App Store.

And you thought the tweets were annoying...

On Tuesday afternoon, searching for "Wordle" on the iOS App Store turned up a small handful of apps aping the name and gameplay of the simple word game that has gone viral in recent weeks. But none of those iOS apps were made by Josh Wardle, the Brooklyn-based software engineer who created the free web-based game last October.

Today, all of those copycat apps are gone, the apparent result of a belated purge by App Store reviewers following some social media attention. But this likely doesn't mean the end of Wordle clones. Those quick removals paper over the complicated legal and social landscape surrounding copycat apps and the protections developers can claim on their game ideas.

Who owns “Wordle”?

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments