Month: June 2022

Enlarge / A long COVID patient sits with her daughter in her wheelchair while receiving a saline infusion at her Maryland home on Friday, May 27, 2022. (credit: Getty | The Washington Post)

Among adults vaccinated against COVID-19, the odds of developing long COVID amid the omicron wave were about 20 percent to 50 percent lower than during the delta period, with variability based on age and time since vaccination.

The finding comes from a case-control observational study published this week in The Lancet by researchers at Kings College London. The study found that about 4.5 percent of the omicron breakthrough cases resulted in long COVID, while 10.8 percent of delta breakthrough cases resulted in the long-term condition.

While the news may seem a little reassuring to those nursing a breakthrough omicron infection, it's cold comfort for public health overall since the omicron coronavirus variant is much more transmissible than delta.

Enlarge / AMD's Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Cryptocurrency has had a rough year. Bitcoin has fallen by more than 50 percent since the start of the year, from nearly $48,000 in January to just over $20,000 as of publication. Celsius, a major cryptocurrency "bank," suspended withdrawals earlier this week, and the Coinbase crypto exchange announced a round of layoffs this past Tuesday after pausing hiring last month.

It may be small comfort to anyone who wanted to work at Coinbase or spent hard-earned money on an ugly picture of an ape because a celebrity told them to, but there's some good news for PC builders and gamers in all of this. As tracked by Tom's Hardware, prices for new and used graphics cards continue to fall, coming down from their peak prices in late 2021 and early 2022. For weeks, it has generally been possible to go to Amazon, Newegg, or Best Buy and buy current-generation GPUs for prices that would have seemed like bargains six months or a year ago, and pricing for used GPUs has fallen further.

As Tom's Hardware reports, most mid-range Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000-series cards are still selling at or slightly over their manufacturer-suggested retail prices—the 3050, 3060, and 3070 series are all still in high demand. But top-end 3080 Ti, 3090, and 3090 Ti GPUs are all selling below their (admittedly astronomical) MSRPs right now, as are almost all of AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series cards.

USB Type-C, the most exciting boring connector in the industry right now. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

After the European Union (EU) announced that numerous consumer tech devices using wired charging would require USB-C by 2024, three US senators are seeking similar legislation.

In a letter sent Thursday [PDF], Senators Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) asked Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo to look toward legislation that would require universal charging standards in consumer tech.

The senators didn't mention USB-C but cited the EU's upcoming policy that will require smartphones, digital cameras, e-readers, headsets, laptops, and some other consumer tech products with wired charging to use USB-C.

The teaser for the fourth season of Westworld that dropped last month was tonally evocative and visually stunning, but it told us very little about what to expect from the narrative. Now we have the full trailer, and it has made us eager to learn more, as it looks like the show is about to head into some very interesting places.

(Spoilers for prior seasons below.)

As we've reported previously, Westworld's third season was the first to take place largely outside the tightly controlled environment of the original theme parks. Opening three months after the events of the S2 finale, Dolores (Evan Rachel Woods) had re-created her host body. We learned she was targeting an AI system called Rehoboam, which was developed by a company called Incite. To access the system, Dolores had to take on its creator, Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel), and various other adversaries with their own motives for stopping her—including William, aka the Man in Black (Ed Harris), who vowed to destroy any remaining hosts.

Enlarge / Bike rally by police personnel during "We Make Pune City Safe" awareness campaign on October 3, 2017, in Pune, India. (credit: Pratham Gokhale/Getty)

Police forces around the world have increasingly used hacking tools to identify and track protesters, expose political dissidents' secrets, and turn activists' computers and phones into inescapable eavesdropping bugs. Now, new clues in a case in India connect law enforcement to a hacking campaign that used those tools to go an appalling step further: planting false incriminating files on targets' computers that the same police then used as grounds to arrest and jail them.

More than a year ago, forensic analysts revealed that unidentified hackers fabricated evidence on the computers of at least two activists arrested in Pune, India, in 2018, both of whom have languished in jail and, along with 13 others, face terrorism charges. Researchers at security firm SentinelOne and nonprofits Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have since linked that evidence fabrication to a broader hacking operation that targeted hundreds of individuals over nearly a decade, using phishing emails to infect targeted computers with spyware, as well as smartphone hacking tools sold by the Israeli hacking contractor NSO Group. But only now have SentinelOne's researchers revealed ties between the hackers and a government entity: none other than the very same Indian police agency in the city of Pune that arrested multiple activists based on the fabricated evidence.

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  Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro. [credit: Apple ]

The first machine with Apple's second-generation M2 system-on-a-chip is now available to order. Though it won't arrive until June 24, you can buy the new 13-inch MacBook Pro today. Apple is also now selling its new dual-port USB-C charger through its online store.

The 2022 refresh of the 13-inch MacBook Pro uses the same design and has all the same features as its 2020 predecessor, which used the M1 chip. The only significant difference is the inclusion of the M2, which Apple says can be up to 40 percent faster at some tasks than the M1.

The laptop starts at $1,299 for a configuration with 256GB of solid-state storage, and there's also a $1,499 configuration with 512GB. Beyond those base configs, you can further customize the 13-inch MacBook Pro with 8GB, 16GB, or 24GB of memory, and you can upgrade to 1TB or 2TB of storage. You cannot upgrade later, so those choices have to be made at the time of purchase.