Month: May 2022

Enlarge / A 2003 photo of the arms and legs of a 4-year-old girl infected with monkeypox in Liberia. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

Monkeypox is presumed to have spread within the US, and nine cases have now been identified in seven states, according to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky.

In a press briefing Thursday, Walensky said the nine cases were from Massachusetts, New York, Florida, Utah, Washington, California, and Virginia. Most of the nine cases had recent international travel to areas with active monkeypox cases, but not all.

"We need to presume that there is some community spread," Walensky said. "But there is active contact tracing that is happening right now to understand whether and how these cases might have been in contact with each other or with others in other countries."

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About a year ago, President Joe Biden set an ambitious climate target: The US should cut its greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half by 2030. That's consistent with what we'd need to do to reach some of the goals of the Paris Agreement, but it provides very little time to get our emissions under control.

That raises some obvious questions. Is it even possible? If so, how? To find out, a group of energy experts used six different models of the US energy economy, tasking each with reaching a state where emissions are consistent with our goals. The good news is that all the models provide routes to getting there. While the exact details vary from model to model, their common features strongly hint at where our focus needs to be.

Route finding

Greenhouse gas emissions come primarily from energy use, both for generating electricity and powering transportation. Industrial processes can also release either carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gasses, some of which have an even higher warming potential. It's possible to track the costs and benefits of altering the weight of each of these sources. In some cases, it can involve switching an industrial process to alternate materials or from fossil fuels to a renewable source. Alternately, it could include offsetting continued emissions through things like carbon capture or reforestation.

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Elon Musk was sued by a Twitter investor who alleges that he broke the law in a scheme to drive down Twitter's stock price.

The lawsuit was filed Wednesday against Musk and Twitter in US District Court for the Northern District of California. It recounts much of Musk's behavior since he began investing in Twitter and since he agreed to buy the company for $44 billion.

The lawsuit noted that "Tesla's stock is worth much less now than when Musk agreed to buy Twitter" as "Tesla's shares have declined by over 37 percent since the announcement of the Buyout." Musk, the CEO of Tesla, "pledged his Tesla stock as collateral for a $12.5 billion loan to finance the buyout of Twitter" and is thus "at risk of a margin call or a requirement to put up more cash," it says.

Disney+ unveiled two teaser trailers for upcoming series at the Lucasfilm studio showcase panel during Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, California, on Thursday. The first was for Andor, a 12-episode prequel series set five years before the events of Rogue One, starring Diego Luna as Cassian Andor. The other was for Willow, a new series intended as a sequel to the 1988 cult classic fantasy film of the same name, set decades after the events of the original film.

The streaming platform also confirmed that the much-anticipated Star Wars series Ahsoka will premiere in 2023, along with a new kid-centric series called Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, set during The Mandalorian's timeline and starring Jude Law. Also, the third season of The Mandalorian will premiere in February 2023, featuring the bounty hunter's return to Mandalore with Grogu, as well as Katee Sackhoff reprising her S2 role as Bo-Katan Kryze. (Chances are she wants to retrieve the Darksaber that Mando won.)

Andor

We haven't seen or heard much about Andor after the reveal of a behind-the-scenes teaser in December 2020 during Disney's Investors Day. Andor has been described as a "tense nail-biting spy thriller," with Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote Rogue One, serving as showrunner.  It begins with the Empire's destruction of Cassian Andor's homeworld and will depict the birth of the Rebellion. According to Deadline Hollywood, Luna described Andor as “the journey of a migrant. That feeling of having to move is behind this story—that shapes you as a person. It defines you in many ways, and what you are willing to do.”

Enlarge / The branding on the front of an Apple Store retail location. (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

Apple plans to raise the starting pay of its hourly workers, according to a Wall Street Journal report. In the US, employees' pay will be at least $22 per hour, which could be higher in some markets. That's 45 percent higher than it was in 2018.

Additionally, Apple plans to increase starting salaries for corporate workers in the United States. It will also move up some employees' annual reviews by several months to enact pay increases as soon as July.

In a statement, an Apple spokesperson said:

Enlarge / A slide from TV manufacturer TCL guesses at some details for the next micro-generation of high-end game consoles. (credit: PPE)

With the 2020 release of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, we've started to see the era of console games that finally make full use of TVs capable of 4K resolutions (i.e., "Ultra HD" 3840×2160 pixels) that have become increasingly popular in the marketplace. Now, though, at least one TV manufacturer is already planning to support 8K-capable consoles (i.e., 7680×4320 resolution) that it thinks could launch in the next year or two.

Polish gaming site PPL reports on a recent public presentation by Chinese TV and electronics maker TCL. Tucked away in a slide during that presentation is a road map for what TCL sees as "Gen 9.5" consoles coming in 2023 or '24. Those supposed consoles—which the slide dubs the PS5 Pro and "New Xbox Series S/X"—will be capable of pushing output at 8K resolution and up to 120 frames per second, according to TCL's slide.

First off, there's little reason to believe that a lesser-known TV manufacturer has leaked the first official word of Sony and Microsoft's next console plans. As GamesBeat's Jeff Grubb points out, you can tell TCL is speculating on console makers' plans "because they put the information up in big letters on a stage. If the company knew what it was talking about, then it would be under a non-disclosure agreement."

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In January 2019, a researcher disclosed a devastating vulnerability in one of the most powerful and sensitive devices embedded into modern servers and workstations. With a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10, the vulnerability affected a wide range of baseboard management controllers made by multiple manufacturers. These tiny computers soldered into the motherboard of servers allow cloud centers, and sometimes their customers, to streamline the remote management of vast fleets of computers. They enable administrators to remotely reinstall OSes, install and uninstall apps, and control just about every other aspect of the system—even when it's turned off.

Pantsdown, as the researcher dubbed the threat, allowed anyone who already had some access to the server an extraordinary opportunity. Exploiting the arbitrary read/write flaw, the hacker could become a super admin who persistently had the highest level of control for an entire data center.

The industry mobilizes... except for one

Over the next few months, multiple BMC vendors issued patches and advisories that told customers why patching the vulnerability was critical.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham / Sam Machkovech)

Sony's latest financial forecasts, tucked into a Wednesday presentation to investors, saw the company disclose plenty about its varied tech and entertainment platforms. Still, the presentation had a ton to say about its gaming space. Deservedly so: Sony's "game and network services segment" drove a whopping $25.1 billion in global sales of hardware, software, and other products during the company's "fiscal year '21" ending in March 2022. (Microsoft won't have its forecast available until its fiscal year closes in June; its gaming division reported $15.37 billion in sales for the 2020 fiscal year in June 2021.)

While perusing the company's presentation, which combined present-day numbers with forward-looking estimates, one page stood out: "exponential growth" coming to its slate of games for PCs. The result is arguably Sony's most bullish admission of how many Sony games, including previous PlayStation exclusives, could land on PCs in the next nine months.

$300 million, spread over how many games?

This slide, as provided by Sony, doesn't clarify an important detail, but SIE president Jim Ryan later confirmed that these estimates do not account for sales of either Destiny 2 or its DLC. (credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

There's no way for Sony to reach its sales estimate for FY22 without more new games—and lots of them. Its past two fiscal years of PC game sales total roughly $115 in revenue, driven by three ports of previous PlayStation 4 exclusives onto Windows: Horizon Zero Dawn, Days Gone, and God of War (2018).