Month: July 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A worldwide shortage of fiber optic cable has driven up prices and lengthened lead times, endangering companies’ ambitious plans to roll out state-of-the-art telecommunications infrastructure.

Europe, India, and China are among the regions most affected by the crunch, with prices for fiber rising by up to 70 percent from record lows in March 2021, from $3.70 to $6.30 per fiber km, according to Cru Group, a market intelligence firm.

Although the pandemic prompted some of the biggest tech and telecoms groups to slash their capex, there has been a surge in demand for Internet and data services, leading to a shortfall in availability of the crucial but often overlooked material.

Enlarge / Former Google engineer Blake Lemoine. (credit: Getty Images | Washington Post)

Google has fired Blake Lemoine, the software engineer who was previously put on paid leave after claiming the company's LaMDA chatbot is sentient. Google said Lemoine, who worked in the company's Responsible AI unit, violated data security policies.

"If an employee shares concerns about our work, as Blake did, we review them extensively. We found Blake's claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months," Google said in a statement provided to Ars and other news organizations.

Lemoine confirmed on Friday that "Google sent me an email terminating my employment with them," The Wall Street Journal wrote. Lemoine also reportedly said he's talking with lawyers "about what the appropriate next steps are." Google's statement called it "regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information."

Enlarge (credit: NFL)

A report this weekend from The New York Times says that YouTube is the latest bidder for the NFL's flagship content package, NFL Sunday Ticket. There's still no winner in the bidding process, but Google's video division is jumping into the fray to do battle with Apple, who, the Times says, is "considered the front-runner" in the deal. The winning bid is expected to run upward of $2.5 billion per season.

NFL Sunday Ticket offers every out-of-market, regular-season Sunday afternoon game as a giant, ~$300-a-year cable package. Nationally televised games and your local games aren't included in the package, but it's everything else you normally wouldn't be able to watch—around 13 extra games per week. In the US, the service has been (mostly) exclusive to satellite TV provider DirecTV for years, with the last deal being signed in 2014 for $1.5 billion per year. DirecTV's current deal expires at the end of this upcoming season, and due to plummeting TV subscribers, the beleaguered DirecTV no longer has the cash to re-up with the NFL. That means Sunday Ticket is up for grabs as the next major chess piece in The Streaming Wars.

Amazon was the first tech giant to jump into the NFL world by acquiring another major NFL package, Thursday Night Football, for $1 billion per year. Amazon has previously dipped its toes into the NFL waters by simulcasting Fox Thursday night games, but this year, Amazon's Prime Video exclusivity means Amazon needs to do its own production work. So far, it seems to be gearing up for a top-class production: The company poached legendary play-by-play announcer Al Michaels from NBC and hired NBC's 24-time Emmy-winning executive producer, Fred Gaudelli (who is executive-producing both NBC's and Amazon's NFL packages now). Amazon has also hired a bevy of former NFL players to host the pregame, halftime, and postgame shows: Hall of Fame tight end Tony Gonzalez, future Hall of Fame cornerback Richard Sherman, and recently retired quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick. It sounds like Amazon is sparing no expense.

The DC panel at San Diego Comic-Con highlighted the first official trailer for Shazam! Fury of the Gods, the sequel to 2019's Shazam!, both starring Zachary Levi. As a bonus, Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) wowed the crowd by making a grand entrance in full costume to introduce exclusive new teaser footage from his (related) upcoming film Black Adam.

The 2019 Shazam! introduced a teen foster kid named Billy Batson (Asher Angel), who has landed in a group home after running away from another one to hunt for his birth mother. He saves his new foster brother, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), from bullies, and when they chase him into the subway, he's transported to the Rock of Eternity. There, the ancient wizard Shazam (Djimon Hounsou) chooses Billy to be his new champion. When Billy says "Shazam!" he transforms into an adult superhero (Levi); repeating the word returns him to his Billy form. Billy/Shazam defeats a supervillain and shares his power with all his foster siblings, making his own family of superheroes.

The film grossed $366 worldwide and received mostly positive reviews. In his 2019 review of Shazam!, Ars Tech Culture Editor Sam Machkovech concluded, "It's fun. It's funny. It's fine," despite a few nitpicky flaws. "The end result is a superhero film that leans brazenly into an Indiana Jones vibe (complete with a John Williams-caliber score) along with a healthy dollop of Deadpool-for-kids gags about the wider DC Comics universe."

Enlarge / An ion trap, the quantum hardware that was used for this work. (credit: Honeywell)

You can almost hear the indrawn breath from newsrooms around the world. Specialist science journalists have hidden themselves in the bathroom to weep quietly. The cause of such despair? Someone has released a paper containing the word "topology"—something no one knows how to explain, which forces people to resort to metaphors about donuts being forced to become coffee cups, despite there being neither coffee nor donuts on offer.

And although topology is fundamental to the new results, it is also tangential to explaining them (in my view, anyway). So what are those results?

One of the big problems with quantum computers is that they accumulate errors, and the speed at which that happens limits the complexity of the problems they can solve. This new paper shows how to reduce errors, not by engineering but by understanding (and using) the right quantum states and their coupling to generate a system that is naturally more immune to certain types of noise. So grab a coffee and a donut, and let's dive into the noisy world of qubits.