Month: July 2022

Enlarge / The Novavax Inc. Nuvaxovid COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg )

Update 7/20/2022 10:35am ET: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday signed off on the use of Novavax's COVID-19 vaccine for unvaccinated adults ages 18 and older. The vaccine, which is intended to tempt vaccine holdouts with its more traditional design, should become available in the coming weeks, the CDC said.

On Tuesday afternoon, a panel of independent expert advisors for the CDC—the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices—voted unanimously (12-to-0) in favor of recommending use of the Novavax vaccine after reviewing efficacy and safety data. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky endorsed their recommendation hours later, completing the last step before the vaccine can go into arms.

"Today, we have expanded the options available to adults in the US by recommending another safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine," Walensky said in a statement Tuesday evening. "If you have been waiting for a COVID-19 vaccine built on a different technology than those previously available, now is the time to join the millions of Americans who have been vaccinated. With COVID-19 cases on the rise again across parts of the country, vaccination is critical to help protect against the complications of severe COVID-19 disease."

Enlarge (credit: Netflix)

Netflix has hired Microsoft to provide the advertising technology for the streaming service's planned ad-supported tier, the companies announced Wednesday. Comcast's NBCUniversal subsidiary and Google were reportedly "top contenders" to serve ads on Netflix before Microsoft won the contract.

Microsoft will be the "global advertising technology and sales partner" for the "new lower priced ad-supported subscription plan," Netflix said Wednesday.

"Microsoft has the proven ability to support all our advertising needs as we work together to build a new ad-supported offering," Netflix said. "More importantly, Microsoft offered the flexibility to innovate over time on both the technology and sales side, as well as strong privacy protections for our members." The ad-supported streaming subscription will be offered "in addition to our existing ads-free basic, standard and premium plans," Netflix said.

Enlarge / An event on the surface of a magnetar may produce fast radio bursts. (credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

Fast radio bursts are exactly what their name implies: a sudden surge of photons at radio frequencies that often lasts for less than a second. Once scientists had finished convincing themselves that they weren't looking at equipment glitches, the search was on for what was producing the vast amounts of energy involved in a fast radio burst (FRB).

The discovery of the first repeating FRB told us that the process that generates an FRB doesn't destroy the object that does the producing. Eventually, an FRB was found that was associated with events at additional wavelengths, allowing the source to be identified: a magnetar, a subset of neutron stars that has the Universe's most extreme magnetic fields. While that represents excellent progress, it still doesn't tell us anything about the physics of how the burst is produced—knowledge that would presumably tell us why most magnetars don't produce them and why the burst tends to start and stop so suddenly.

Now, researchers have identified an FRB that helps limit our ideas about what can produce them. The FRB itself appears to be a single event, but it's composed of nine individual bursts separated by about 215 milliseconds. The rapid pace means that the source of the burst almost certainly has to be near the surface of the magnetar.

Enlarge / The OLED display provides a nice pop of color. (credit: Corey Gaskin)

Amazon's Prime Day sale is still chugging along, but if you're not an Amazon Prime member (or don't want to be), there are still some good deals to take advantage of from other retailers. It has become commonplace for competitors to match, and sometimes undercut, some of Amazon's sale prices, and that's once again the case this year. We poked around the web and picked through these competing sales to highlight the most worthwhile non-Prime Day tech deals that are still kicking at retailers besides Amazon.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

More Prime Day 2022 coverage

Enlarge (credit: Lenovo)

For owners of more than 70 Lenovo laptop models, it’s time once again to patch the UEFI firmware against critical vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit to install malware that’s nearly impossible to detect or remove.

The laptop maker on Tuesday released updates for three vulnerabilities that researchers found in the UEFI firmware used to boot up a host of its laptop models, including the Yoga, ThinkBook, and IdeaPad lines. The company assigned a medium severity rating to the vulnerabilities, which are tracked CVE-2022-1890, CVE-2022-1891, and CVE-2022-1892 and affect the ReadyBootDxe, SystemLoadDefaultDxe, and SystemBootManagerDxe drivers, respectively.

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  [credit: ESET ]

“The vulnerabilities can be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution in the early phases of the platform boot, possibly allowing the attackers to hijack the OS execution flow and disable some important security features,” security firm ESET said. “These vulnerabilities were caused by insufficient validation of DataSize parameter passed to the UEFI Runtime Services function GetVariable. An attacker could create a specially crafted NVRAM variable, causing buffer overflow of the Data buffer in the second GetVariable call.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Alicia Llop)

Fifty-four members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are protesting what they call a "radical proposal" to require payments from online service providers to Internet service providers.

Noting that Europe's 2015 "Open Internet Regulation ensures that citizens are free to use whichever apps and websites they wish," the MEPs said they have "deep concern about the European Commission's plans to change our net neutrality legislation in the upcoming Connectivity Infrastructure Act to be proposed in autumn, without having consulted the public, technology experts, academics, civil society, or expert regulatory agencies."

No specific proposal has been released, but "statements to the press indicate that a new provision would require payments from online service providers to broadband providers—ostensibly to fund the rollout of 5G and fiber to the home," the MEPs wrote in the letter yesterday to the European Commission.