Month: February 2022

Enlarge / In 2018, during happier times, NASA, Russian, and European astronauts are seen on board the International Space Station. (credit: NASA)

Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine this week will have devastating consequences for the people on the ground. Although the terrestrial implications of this war are far greater than those for spaceflight, there will nonetheless be ripple effects felt by space programs around the world.

During a speech on Thursday about US sanctions on Russia as a result of its invasion, President Joe Biden even mentioned space. "Between our actions and those of our allies and partners, we estimate that we’ll cut off more than half of Russia’s high tech imports and will strike a blow to their ability to continue to modernize their military," he said. "It’ll degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program."

So what does this mean? While it is very early in this crisis, this article will attempt to draw the broad outlines of how this conflict may impact spaceflight. As the situation is dynamic and the political landscape is tumultuous, please note that rapid changes are possible.

Enlarge / The Steam Deck has arrived. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

The Steam Deck, the new $399-and-up Switch-like PC made by Valve, sometimes feels like the most impressive portable gaming system ever made. But it's also not finished.

Like other hot electronics in 2022, Valve's first bespoke PC launch—which resembles a supersized Game Gear but is, at its heart, a Linux PC—is limited by a strained supply chain and an ongoing chip shortage. But if you'd like to feel better about missing the Deck's first wave of preorders, or seeing a delayed shipping estimate of "Q2 2022" and beyond for new orders, this review is for you.

Produced by Sean Dacanay. Transcript available soon. (video link)

Enlarge / Linux on a Steam Deck! Let's dive in. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Our Steam Deck review is now live, and it's massive—almost as big as Valve's new portable PC. With that in mind, I decided to write a shorter article about the Steam Deck's implementation of Linux since a lot of Ars Technica readers are interested in that use case.

Our full review goes into greater detail about installing and playing Windows games through Valve's customized Wine compatibility layer, dubbed Steam Proton. This is the default way to access your favorite Steam games, and as our review explores, that proposition is currently iffy. But that's not the same as using the Deck as a Linux machine. In this companion article, we'll explain what's going on with Valve's first dedicated Linux PC and what it currently can (and cannot) do.

Donating some Plasma knowledge

As Ars Technica reported last year, the Steam Deck runs on a customized fork of Arch Linux. SteamOS is basically a GUI wrapper that runs on top of Arch Linux, and visually, it splits the difference between Steam's "Big Picture Mode" and the controller-friendly menus of the Nintendo Switch. If you want to use the Deck primarily as a gaming machine, with access to common Steam features like friends lists, notifications, achievements, and forums, SteamOS delivers. Many of its pages work natively with the Steam Deck's buttons and joysticks, but some run inside a web browser and can only be manipulated by swiping and tapping the Deck's screen.

Enlarge / The EVGA RTX 3060, as posed in front of some sort of high-tech honeycomb array. (credit: EVGA / Nvidia)

Both Nvidia and AMD have made changes to their gaming GPU lineups in an effort to make them less appealing to cryptocurrency miners, including releasing mining-specific GPU models and making entry-level GPUs with specs that aren't good enough for mining. One of the most significant changes came in mid-2021, when Nvidia released "Lite Hash Rate" (LHR) versions of its RTX 3000-series GPUs that halved their performance when mining Ethereum or similar coins but didn't affect their gaming performance.

Cryptocurrency miners have tried to circumvent the LHR limitations in a bunch of ways since then, including by using non-LHR drivers that Nvidia leaked (oops!) and flashing the BIOSes from 3090-series cards onto 3080-series cards to bump up the hash-rate limit. And earlier this week, a hacker by the name of Sergey released an "Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker" that promised to remove the hash-rate limits on most Nvidia cards using a combination of BIOS updates and specially modified drivers.

Surprising no one, the sketchy drivers with the too-good-to-be-true performance promises turned out to be full of viruses. An extensive report shows that the software package modifies Windows Powershell policies, deletes and creates new files in system directories, and causes abnormally high CPU usage, among other things.

Enlarge / Kimbal Musk at the ETHDenver conference in Denver, Colorado, on Friday, Feb. 18, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his brother, Kimbal Musk, violated insider-trading rules with recent stock sales, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

"The SEC's investigation began last year after Kimbal Musk sold shares of Tesla valued at $108 million, one day before the Tesla chief polled Twitter users asking whether he should unload 10 percent of his stake in the electric-car maker and pledging to abide by the vote's results," the Journal wrote.

Separately, a US judge yesterday denied Tesla and Musk's various requests related to their claim that the SEC is "harassing" the company and its CEO. (More on that later in this article.)