Month: July 2022

Enlarge / Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition in its graphite color. (credit: Dell)

Dell is extending its love for Linux to the Dell XPS 13 Plus. The Developer Edition of the laptop has been Ubuntu 22.04 LTS-certified, Canonical announced today. That means the laptop will be sold starting in August with the latest version of Ubuntu, and owners of the XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition can download Ubuntu 22.04 LTS today (even if they bought it with Windows 11) for guaranteed performance.

The XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition is the first 22.04 LTS-certified laptop, joining only some Raspberry Pi devices in certification. However, Dell has been certifying some of its XPS laptops, as well as other machines, for Ubuntu for generations. HP and Lenovo also have Ubuntu-certified systems.

Of course, Ubuntu certification means all the components will "work as expected," as Canonical's announcement today put it. Further, Ubuntu LTS certification means the device will have support for at least 10 years. Ubuntu's release cycle page states that LTS (long-term support) releases include 10 years of "Base Package" maintenance and security updates.

Enlarge / Robert Califf, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, speaks during the COVID Federal Response Hearing on Capitol Hill on June 16, 2022 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)

The Food and Drug Administration has commissioned an external review of its food and tobacco programs in the wake of high-profile debacles—including bungled oversight of e-cigarettes, most notably of Juul products, and a dire nationwide shortage of infant and specialty formulas that left many parents scrambling and some babies in the hospital.

"The agency has confronted a series of challenges that have tested our regulatory frameworks and stressed the agency's operations, prompting me to take a closer look at how we do business," FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in a statement Tuesday.

Califf commissioned The Reagan-Udall Foundation, which will work with unnamed outside experts, to conduct evaluations of the agency's Human Foods Program and the Center for Tobacco Products. The foundation is a private nonprofit tasked by Congress to support and advise the FDA. The foundation's evaluation will scrutinize the two FDA programs' "processes and procedures, resourcing, and organizational structure," and the foundation will report initial findings to the agency within 60 days, Califf said.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Pro-Russian threat actors are continuing their unrelenting pursuit of Ukrainian targets, with an array of campaigns that include fake Android apps, hack attacks exploiting critical vulnerabilities, and email phishing attacks that attempt to harvest login credentials, researchers from Google said.

One of the more recent campaigns came from Turla, a Russian-speaking advanced persistent threat actor that's been active since at least 1997 and is among the most technically sophisticated in the world. According to Google, the group targeted pro-Ukrainian volunteers with Android apps that posed as launchpads for performing denial-of-service attacks against Russian websites.

(credit: Google)

"All you need to do to launch the process is install the app, open it and press start," the fake website promoting the app claimed. "The app immediately begins sending requests to the Russian websites to overwhelm their resources and cause the denial of service."

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  The MacBook Air after the teardown. [credit: iFixit ]

The M2 MacBook Air has been arriving to those who pre-ordered it over the past few days, and repair supplies vendor iFixit is among those who received a unit. If you've been tracking iFixit's work after other Apple launches over the past several years, you know what that means: teardown time.

Like the 24-inch iMac before it, the MacBook Air is mostly full of... a lot of empty space. The battery dominates the device's interior, but beyond that, we're mostly just looking at mechanisms for the trackpad, keyboard, and a small logic board.

The teardown revealed thermal paste and graphite tape, but no active cooling and not even a heat spreader. iFixit notes that the machine will likely run hot, which we found in our throttling tests.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Google formed its exit strategy from Russia, suspending all ads by March, then blocking Play Store app sales and removing most of its employees by May. After that, Google has only continued to provide free services to Russian Internet users, like Search, Gmail, Maps, or YouTube, and now, Google might be paying big for that decision.

This week, Russian regulator Roskomnadzor announced that a Russian court ordered the tech giant to pay its steepest fine yet since the Ukraine war started, citing Google’s “repeated failure” to remove “prohibited content” deemed “fake.” Unless Google manages to appeal the decision, it will have to fork over approximately $374 million for not restricting content that goes against Russian interests. Examples include content discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, promoting extremism, or inciting young people to join mass protests (which Russia banned).

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on a possible appeal, but the company knew a fine was coming. It just perhaps didn’t know how large a fine. Roskomnadzor warned Google last month that it would be fined 5 to 10 percent of its annual turnover, but TechCrunch estimates that ultimately “the new fine would be around 15 percent of the company’s annual turnover.” (Roskomnadzor did not immediately respond to Ars' request to clarify the percent of Google’s annual turnover the fee represents.)