Month: February 2022

Enlarge / Tesla's factory in Fremont, California. (credit: Tesla)

The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) sued Tesla on Wednesday, alleging systemic racial segregation in the workplace.

"After receiving hundreds of complaints from workers, DFEH found evidence that Tesla's Fremont factory is a racially segregated workplace where Black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay, and promotion creating a hostile work environment," DFEH Director Kevin Kish said in a statement published in a Wall Street Journal article and a Bloomberg story.

The lawsuit was filed in Alameda County Superior Court but doesn't appear to be publicly available yet. We asked DFEH for a copy of the lawsuit and will update this story if we get it.

Enlarge / Section of the so-called "Tavistock letter," written by Charles Dickens in his idiosyncratic shorthand. The crowd-sourced transcription, now 70 percent complete, reveals a dispute between Dickens and The Times of London. (credit: Public domain)

Last October, a collaboration called The Dickens Code project made a public appeal to amateur puzzle fans and codebreakers for assistance in decoding a letter written by Victorian novelist Charles Dickens in a tortuously idiosyncratic style of shorthand. The crowd-sourced effort helped scholars piece together about three-quarters of the transcript. Shane Baggs, a computer technical support specialist from San Jose, California, won the overall contest, while a college student at the University of Virginia named Ken Cox was declared the runner-up.

Dickens himself hardly needs an introduction, deemed by many to be the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and of course, his timeless 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, are just a few of the works contributing to that well-deserved reputation. A lesser-known aspect of Dickens' life is that he taught himself a particularly difficult form of shorthand as a teenager, relying on an 18th-century manual called Brachygraphy by shorthand writer Thomas Gurney. Dickens mentions this in passing in his semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield:

I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence); and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep.

It took Dickens about a year to master Gurney's Brachygraphy, and he spent three years using the shorthand as a court reporter. He also began adding his own unique symbols to write personal memos to himself, maintain teaching notebooks, write letters, and so forth. Alas, very few examples survive. There are only about 10 currently known manuscripts of Dickens’ shorthand, dating from the 1830s to the late 1860s. Several of these remain undeciphered, including a letter from the 1850s and a set of shorthand booklets collected by Dickens’ shorthand pupil, Arthur Stone (the son of his friend and neighbor).

Enlarge / Corsair K70 RGB Pro. (credit: Corsair)

Razer introduced a widely available keyboard with an 8,000 Hz polling rate last year, so it hasn't been surprising to see rivals follow suit. Corsair today released the K70 RGB Pro mechanical gaming keyboard, which also claims to report to the PC 8,000 times per second instead of the standard 1,000. But as with other 8,000 Hz keyboards we've seen, that stat may not be what actually sells you on the keyboard. In truth, most people won't notice the difference between 8,000 Hz and the traditional 1,000 Hz.

Corsair's announcement of the K70 RGB Pro doesn't put a huge focus on the keyboard's overboard polling rate. The press release points to the Axon technology that the company says is "up to 8x faster than standard gaming keyboards," but there is no specific mention of 8,000 Hz or even the term "polling rate."

Corsair's new 8,000 Hz keyboard ranges from $160-$170, depending on the mechanical switches. (credit: Corsair)

Corsair also didn't provide an input lag claim, but some 8,000 Hz keyboards point to an input lag of as low as 0.125 ms (1 second divided by 8,000 reports = .000125 second). The K70 RGB Pro's product page does highlight the polling rate and 4,000 Hz key-scanning rate (elsewhere on Corsair's website, the company claims its Axon processor can deliver input lag of as low as 0.25 ms).

Enlarge / Artist's impression of low Earth-orbit satellites like those launched by SpaceX and OneWeb. (credit: NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / P. Marenfeld)

NASA has warned that SpaceX's plan for 30,000 more Starlink satellites could cause problems for science missions, human spaceflight, the Hubble telescope, and ground-based telescopes that look for asteroids that might hit the Earth.

NASA outlined its concerns in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission on Monday. "With the increase in large constellation proposals to the FCC, NASA has concerns with the potential for a significant increase in the frequency of conjunction events and possible impacts to NASA's science and human spaceflight missions," the agency said. "Consequently, NASA submits this letter for the purpose of providing a better understanding of NASA's concerns with respect to its assets on-orbit and to further mitigate the risk of collisions for the benefit of all involved."

NASA didn't urge the FCC to reject SpaceX's application, but it said it wants deployment to be "conducted prudently, in a manner that supports spaceflight safety and the long-term sustainability of the space environment." NASA also said the large number of additional satellites "will require expanded coordination and communication between the two parties to ensure the continued safety of both SpaceX and NASA assets."

Enlarge / Artist's rendition of EA saying goodbye to Russia for this expansion pack. (credit: EA)

The "My Wedding Stories" expansion pack for The Sims 4 won't be released in Russia, publisher Electronic Arts said. That's due to a "gay-propaganda" law in the country that would have meant the pack's "storytelling would be subject to changes because of federal laws."

The pack, set to launch elsewhere on February 17, features a storyline taking players through a romantic relationship between Dominique and Camille, "a couple whose love knows no boundaries," as EA puts it (and as can be seen in the official trailer for the pack). In an announcement posted Wednesday, The Sims development team writes that "as we moved through our development and brand storytelling process, we became aware that the way we wanted to tell Cam and Dom’s story would not be something we could freely share around the world."

That's an oblique reference to Russia's Article 6.13.1 law, which was passed in 2013 to prohibit "propaganda or homosexualism among minors." The law has previously been used in attempts to quiet youth protesters in the country and even to target Russians using the "same-sex kiss" emoji.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

On February 9, Google released the Android 12L Developer Preview #3, which is due for a final version in March. On February 10, Google is also releasing the Android 13 Developer Preview #1, which will hit devices sometime in the second half of the year. We now have Android developer previews for the next version of Android—and the version after that.

So what's new in Android 13? A few leaks have already detailed more Material You color options, a new notification opt-in system for users (both still unconfirmed), and per-all language preferences (now confirmed!). Here are some of the more interesting tidbits that Google is willing to disclose at this early stage.

Themed icons graduate from beta

Themed icons graduate from beta in Android 13. (credit: Google)

Android 12 included a "beta" option for "themed icons," which monochromed some of Google's icon art and gave icons a round background that matches your Material You theme. The option pulled all the color out of an icon and reduced it to its shape.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Two years ago, researchers stumbled upon one of the Internet’s most intriguing botnets: a previously undiscovered network of 500 servers, many in well-known universities and businesses around the world, that was impervious to normal takedown methods. After lying low for 16 months, those researchers said, the botnet known as FritzFrog is back with new capabilities and a larger base of infected machines.

SSH servers, beware

FritzFrog targets just about anything with an SSH, or secure shell, server—cloud instances, data center servers, routers, and the like—and installs an unusually advanced payload that was written from scratch. When researchers from security firm Guardicore Labs (now Akamai Labs) reported it in mid-2020, they called it a “next-generation” botnet because of its full suite of capabilities and well-engineered design.

It was a decentralized, peer-to-peer architecture that distributed administration among many infected nodes rather than a central server, making it hard to detect or take it down using traditional methods. Some of its advanced traits included:

Enlarge / Photo taken on Jan. 20, 2022 shows a beach resort hit by a tsunami on the outskirts of Nuku'alofa, capital of Tonga. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency)

The ultra-transmissible omicron coronavirus is now spreading in Tonga, causing the archipelago nation's first COVID-19 outbreak as it tries to recover from an underwater volcanic eruption and tsunami on January 15. The disaster killed three, wiped out several small settlements, blanketed the main island in a thick layer of ash, and severed the only fiber-optic cable to Tonga, severely hampering communications.

Prior to the eruption, the island nation—home to around 106,000 people—had logged only one confirmed case of COVID-19, which was caught in a quarantine. But amid international aid and relief efforts, two wharf workers tested positive earlier this month, as did three of their family members.

Tonga's case total is now up to 66, with 31 newly reported cases Thursday.