Month: June 2022

Enlarge / Drowning in a sea of data. (credit: Getty Images)

Internet services in Lithuania came under "intense" distributed denial of service attacks on Monday as the pro-Russia threat-actor group Killnet took credit. Killnet said its attacks were in retaliation regarding Lithuania's recent banning of shipments sanctioned by the European Union to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Lithuania's government said that the flood of malicious traffic disrupted parts of the Secure National Data Transfer Network, which it says is "one of the critical components of Lithuania's strategy on ensuring national security in cyberspace" and "is built to be operational during crises or war to ensure the continuity of activity of critical institutions." The country's Core Center of State Telecommunications was identifying the sites most affected in real time and providing them with DDoS mitigations while also working with international web service providers.

"It is highly probable that such or even more intense attacks will continue into the coming days, especially against the communications, energy, and financial sectors," Jonas Skardinskas, acting director of Lithuania's National Cyber Security Center, said in a statement. The statement warned of website defacements, ransomware, and other destructive attacks in the coming days.

Enlarge (credit: Tesla)

Last week, Tesla announced a program for California-based owners of its home battery products. Sign up with the company, and you'd become part of what the company calls a "virtual power plant." You would be able to use your battery to keep the grid stable during periods of high demand and be well-compensated for the electrons.

While this may conjure images of Powerwall batteries across the state sending electricity to the grid during a crisis, that doesn't appear to be what's happening here. Instead, the batteries will be taking part in a utility's program that's designed to reduce demand, which the utility company will presumably do by using the battery to supply some of the demand inside the battery owner's house. It's a clever way for homeowners to take advantage of a program that's otherwise limited to commercial users.

It's an emergency

Tesla's announcement of the program says that it will be part of Pacific Gas and Electric Company's (PG&E, a California utility) Emergency Load Reduction Program, which we'll focus on in the next section. At the moment, we'll look at what participants will end up doing.

Enlarge / Packages of Juul e-cigarettes are displayed for sale in the Brazil Outlet shop on June 22, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. (credit: Getty | Mario Tama)

With its business going up in smoke, e-cigarette giant Juul filed an emergency motion Monday to halt the Food and Drug Administration's decision to deny the company authorization to market any of its products in the US, effectively forcing it out of business.

The decision was leaked to The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, June 22, and the regulator publicly announced the decision Thursday. On Friday, a panel of federal appeals court judges granted Juul a temporary administrative stay, allowing the company to continue to sell its products while the court reviews Juul's emergency petition to halt the FDA's decision. Juul had until noon Monday to submit its petition. The administrative stay is not based on the merits of Juul's argument in any way, the judges noted.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that in addition to fighting the FDA denial, Juul is also considering filing for bankruptcy. The report cited unnamed people familiar with the matter. Juul did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment regarding a possible bankruptcy filing.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

It sounds like Google is finally getting ready to move on from Google Hangouts, the company's most successful messaging app to date. A new blog post from the company is finally giving consumer Google Hangouts a shutdown date: November 2022. Today is also the day when existing Google Hangouts users will start getting nagged to switch to Google's hot, new messaging app, Google Chat.

The shutdown of Hangouts has been a long time coming. The service launched in 2013 as an in-place upgrade to Google Talk. As Android's default messaging service, Hangouts amassed 5 billion downloads, and at one point, it even handled Android SMS duties, just like Apple's iMessage. The service fell out of favor with Google's legendarily fickle messaging strategy in 2016 with the launch of Google Allo. Google announced in 2018 that Hangouts would eventually be shut down. After several delays, Workspace customers (the paid business version of Google apps) finally had Hangouts removed in March 2022, but regular consumers can still switch between Google Chat and Hangouts.

Starting today, most Google Hangouts clients will start pushing users to Google Chat. While most follow-ups to Google Hangouts have been severely lacking in comparable features, Google Chat is a decent upgrade to Google Hangouts, so there are Google Chat options for all the Hangouts clients you may have been using. On desktop, instead of hangouts.google.com or the Hangouts Chrome extension, there's https://chat.google.com/, which is also an installable progressive web app. Instead of the iOS and Android versions of Hangouts, you'll be pushed to the Google Chat apps, which both have better interfaces. As usual, there's a client built into Gmail.com, and there's even a client built into the Gmail app, which can lead to the awkward situation of your Chat messages arriving in two apps.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

For anyone trying to buy a modern piece of gaming hardware, good news is beginning to peek through the dreary clouds of chip shortages and manufacturing hold-ups. This week's optimism comes from a player outside the expected console- and GPU-making fray.

Valve, the longtime software maker responsible for the mostly brilliant Steam Deck handheld PC, announced on Monday that it has caught up with that system's "shipping estimate" schedule. According to Valve, everyone who ordered a Steam Deck system with a "Q2 2022" shipping window has been emailed with the option to order and pay for their own device.

The real news begins with buyers in the Q3 2022 window, as they'll be contacted beginning on June 30—at higher volumes.

Enlarge / This is the 2022 13-inch MacBook Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

The use of the M2 chip is the new 13-inch MacBook Pro's biggest change compared to the M1 version Apple launched in 2020, but it's apparently not the only one. YouTubers on the Max Tech and Created Tech channels (via MacRumors) have run speed tests on the 256GB version of the M2 MacBook Pro and discovered that the SSD's read and write speeds are as much as 50 percent slower than the 256GB SSD in the M1 MacBook Pro.

The culprit appears to be the NAND flash configuration. Both YouTubers took the bottom off of the new MacBook Pro and discovered that the 256GB versions use just one 256GB NAND flash chip, whereas the M1 MacBook Pro uses a pair of 128GB flash chips. On drives with more physical NAND chips, SSD controllers use a process called interleaving to read data from and write data to multiple physical chips at once. Use fewer chips, and you can limit your peak performance.

While unfortunate for anyone who buys the cheapest version of the MacBook Pro, this problem isn't unique to Apple. Many modern SSDs for PCs only offer their maximum rated speeds starting at the 1TB or 2TB capacities. Higher-density NAND chips can increase your maximum capacity, making it possible to fit 4TB of storage in a drive that's just a bit bigger than a stick of gum. But speed drops at lower capacities are one unfortunate side effect of increased density.