Month: April 2022

Enlarge / Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk presents a vaccine production device during a meeting September 2, 2020 in Berlin, Germany. Musk met with vaccine maker CureVac, with which Tesla has a cooperation to build devices for producing RNA vaccines. (credit: Getty | Filip Singer)

Elon Musk has a "huge responsibility" to combat dangerous, potentially life-threatening health misinformation on Twitter, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

The United Nation's health agency commented on Monday's news that the tech billionaire has struck a deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion. WHO officials stressed how damaging misinformation and disinformation could be when it's widely spread in digital spaces like Twitter.

"In cases like this pandemic, good information is life-saving," Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's Health Emergencies Programme, said. "In some cases, [it's] more life-saving than having a vaccine in the sense that bad information sends you to some very, very bad places."

Enlarge / Hey, where'd everybody go? (credit: Chaos / Activision)

Players caught cheating in Call of Duty can now be punished with a penalty that makes them unable to see their opponents, a new anti-cheat mitigation feature that Activision calls "cloaking."

Cheaters that are subject to a cloaking penalty will find that "characters, bullets, even sound from legitimate players will be undetectable," according to a post on the official Call of Duty development blog. Those cheaters will remain fully visible to non-cheaters, though; Activision quips that "they’ll be the players you see spinning in circles hollering, "Who is shooting me?!'"

The latest anti-cheat update will roll out first for Call of Duty: Vanguard, then applied to the free-to-play Warzone, Activision says, "to minimize and issues players may encounter." It also comes on top of another cheating mitigation measure, called Damage Shield, which was announced in February and "disables the cheater’s ability to inflict critical damage on other players."

Enlarge / Flag of Russia on a computer binary codes falling from the top and fading away. (credit: Getty Images)

On March 1, Russian forces invading Ukraine took out a TV tower in Kyiv after the Kremlin declared its intention to destroy “disinformation” in the neighboring country. That public act of kinetic destruction accompanied a much more hidden but no less damaging action: targeting a prominent Ukrainian broadcaster with malware to render its computers inoperable.

The dual action is one of many examples of the “hybrid war” Russia has waged against Ukraine since before the invasion began, according to a report published Wednesday by Microsoft. Shortly before the invasion, the company said, hackers in six groups aligned with the Kremlin have launched no fewer than 237 operations in concert with the physical attacks on the battlefield. Almost 40 of them targeting hundreds of systems used wiper malware, which deletes essential files stored on hard drives so the machines can’t boot.

“As today’s report details, Russia’s use of cyberattacks appears to be strongly correlated and sometimes directly timed with its kinetic military operations targeting services and institutions crucial for civilians,” Tom Burt, Microsoft corporate vice president for customer security, wrote. He said the “relentless and destructive Russian cyberattacks” were particularly concerning because many of them targeted critical infrastructure that could have cascading negative effects on the country.

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  An iPhone undergoes repairs. [credit: Apple ]

First announced in November, Apple is now selling and renting parts to customers who want to repair their iPhones.

In a blog post, Apple describes the program, which closely matches what was previously announced. You can now visit an online "Self Service Repair Store" to read repair manuals and order tools and ports. The store is only available in the United States for now, but it's coming to other countries later this year. The first additional countries will be in Europe, Apple says.

The store offers more than 200 parts and tools. Apple says the parts are the same as those used in Apple's network of authorized repair providers.

Enlarge (credit: Getty images)

There have been a variety of demonstrations of the capabilities that atomically thin materials can bring to electronics—extremely small size, excellent performance, and some distinctive properties. But almost all of these demonstrations required that the electronics being tested were essentially assembled by hand. Materials like graphene are often placed on a surface at random, and then the wiring needed for it to function is built around that location. It's not exactly a recipe for mass production.

To the extent there's been some progress, it's been limited. One of the more recent efforts involved using graphene and molybdenum disulfide to make the transistor with the smallest gate length. In this case, the two atomically thin materials had to be placed carefully, but not exactly. Any excess material was etched away, and a key feature was made by cutting through the graphene sheet.

This week saw a somewhat different take on constructing these minuscule devices: chemistry. A research team linked up the two materials used in the earlier study, graphene and molybdenum disulfide, using a single bridging molecule that could react with each of them. The chemistry of the bridging molecule also influenced the behavior of a device made using this approach.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Time for another Dealmaster! Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes the lowest price we've tracked on the 2021 16-inch M1 MacBook Pro. The 2021 MacBook Pro brought back a number of sorely missed ports and added Face ID while delivering the best performance money can buy (provided you have a lot of money), according to our Senior Reviews Editor Samuel Axon. It's a return to form for MacBook-loving creatives, even if the physical form is larger than the last generation.

We also have some deals on Google Nest devices. Both the popular Nest Learning Thermostat and the more wallet-friendly Nest Thermostat are on sale, for instance, with the former down to $199 and the latter available for $100 at various retailers. While neither deal brings the absolute lowest price we've tracked, both are below their typical prices online and well under Google's MSRPs of $250 and $130, respectively.

In any event, both devices remain commendable options for those aiming to adopt a smart thermostat, either to cut down on energy usage or take greater control over their home's heating and cooling. The higher-end Nest still looks sharp, installs relatively easily, and works with a variety of smart home devices and platforms. It can still "learn" your usual heating and cooling preferences, then automatically schedules its future adjustments accordingly, (mostly) staying out of your way over the course of a day. The more affordable Nest Thermostat lacks that auto-scheduling feature (though you can still enter a schedule manually), has a cheaper plastic frame, and doesn't support Google's remote temperature-balancing sensors. But it still looks nice and has otherwise similar features—including tools like HVAC monitoring and voice commands via Alexa or the Google Assistant—for less money.