Month: May 2022

Enlarge / Parents look after their son, age 5, who is being treated for croup and asthma in an emergency room at a California hospital March 24, 2010. (credit: Getty | Mark Boster)

The omicron coronavirus variant caused a spike in cases of a potentially severe breathing condition in babies and toddlers, according to a hospital study recently published in the journal Pediatrics.

The study is small, focusing only on COVID-19-associated cases at one large children's hospital in Massachusetts during the pandemic. But, it provides some of the initial data on the subject and backs up anecdotes from health care providers that the latest pandemic variant causes more cases of laryngotracheobronchitis—aka croup—in younger children than earlier variants.

Generally, croup is a common upper-respiratory tract condition in which significant inflammation and swelling develop in the larynx and trachea, imperiling breathing. Some viral infection usually triggers swelling, but allergies and other irritants can also be culprits. Croup can occur at any age but mostly strikes the tiny upper airways of infants and young children, ages 3 months to 5 years.

(credit: Apple)

Both members of our favorite mobile duopoly, Google and Apple, recently announced plans to cull outdated apps in their respective app stores. Last month, both companies decided any app that hadn't been updated in two years would be removed. Early in April, Google announced a two-year cutoff plan that would kick-in in November, and later in the month, Apple started emailing developers, giving them 30 days' notice to update or be removed. It's hard to know what culling two-year-old apps will look like, so exactly how many apps are we talking about?

CNET has data from the analyst firm Pixalate, which says the two-year cutoff would remove 869,000 apps from Google Play and around 650,000 from the App Store. That's about a third of each store's current total app selection. Those numbers would have Google Play changing from 2.6 million apps to 1.7 million apps and the App Store from 1.95 million apps to 1.3 million.

That Google number is an estimate since Google officially said the cutoff point is two years. Apple has not publicly specified a cutoff point. The company has only personally emailed developers, saying it is removing apps that have "not been updated in a significant amount of time," but some developers have pegged this date as two years.

Enlarge (credit: Classen et al.)

When you turn off an iPhone, it doesn’t fully power down. Chips inside the device continue to run in a low-power mode that makes it possible to locate lost or stolen devices using the Find My feature or use credit cards and car keys after the battery dies. Now researchers have devised a way to abuse this always-on mechanism to run malware that remains active even when an iPhone appears to be powered down.

It turns out that the iPhone’s Bluetooth chip—which is key to making features like Find My work—has no mechanism for digitally signing or even encrypting the firmware it runs. Academics at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt figured out how to exploit this lack of hardening to run malicious firmware that allows the attacker to track the phone’s location or run new features when the device is turned off.

This video provides a high overview of some of the ways an attack can work.

Enlarge / Nvidia's "Lovelace" RTX 4000 GPUs will be faster than the top-end RTX 3090 Ti. (credit: Nvidia)

It has been nearly two years since Nvidia introduced its Ampere GPU architecture in the GeForce RTX 3080, and the company is reportedly gearing up to announce its replacement. Tom's Hardware reports, based on tweets from a normally reliable leaker, that the RTX 4000-series and its Lovelace GPU architecture will begin rolling out early in Q3 of this year.

It has been so difficult to buy Nvidia's RTX 3000-series GPUs for so long that it feels almost too soon to be talking about their replacements, though there was a similar two-year-ish gap between the first RTX 2000 GPUs and the RTX 3000 series. The difference is in how long it took Ampere to trickle all the way down to the bottom of the lineup. The Turing architecture debuted in September 2018 and had made its way down to the low-end GeForce GTX 1650 by April 2019; the first Ampere cards appeared in September 2020 but didn't come to the GeForce RTX 3050 until January 2022.

Other reports from the same source suggest that the RTX 4000 GPU could be a big boost over the top-end RTX 3090 Ti, stepping up from 84 of Nvidia's streaming multiprocessors (SMs) to somewhere between 126 and 140 SMs. The supposed RTX 4090 will come with 24GB of GDDR6 RAM (the same amount as the RTX 3090 and 3090 Ti) and is said to roughly double the RTX 3090's performance within the same 450 W power envelope. Whether any of these performance claims are true remains to be seen—Nvidia's GPUs do typically offer impressive performance bumps between generations, but double the performance in the same power envelope would be an anomalously large jump, historically speaking.