Month: September 2022

Enlarge / Health measures are taken at Mubende Regional Referral Hospital after an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. (credit: Getty | Anadolu Agency)

Health officials in Uganda are scrambling to catch up to a burgeoning Ebola outbreak caused by a lesser-seen Ebolavirus species called Sudan virus (SUDV), for which there is no vaccine or treatment.

Information so far suggests that the outbreak response efforts may be three weeks behind the initial spread of SUDV, which has an incubation period of up to 21 days and a case fatality rate between 41 percent and 100 percent. So far, 36 cases (18 confirmed, 18 probable) have been identified, with 23 deaths. Health officials have listed a total of 223 contacts.

But that number is likely an undercount. Several transmission chains have not been tracked, and some health facilities that saw Ebola patients did not follow optimal infection control measures, the World Health Organization warned. Further, because of the delayed recognition of the outbreak, some patients were buried in traditional ceremonies with large gatherings that could have allowed the virus to transmit further.

Enlarge / These jagged, colorful blocks are exactly what the concept of image compression looks like. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)

Last week, Swiss software engineer Matthias Bühlmann discovered that the popular image synthesis model Stable Diffusion could compress existing bitmapped images with fewer visual artifacts than JPEG or WebP at high compression ratios, though there are significant caveats.

Stable Diffusion is an AI image synthesis model that typically generates images based on text descriptions (called "prompts"). The AI model learned this ability by studying millions of images pulled from the Internet. During the training process, the model makes statistical associations between images and related words, making a much smaller representation of key information about each image and storing them as "weights," which are mathematical values that represent what the AI image model knows, so to speak.

When Stable Diffusion analyzes and "compresses" images into weight form, they reside in what researchers call "latent space," which is a way of saying that they exist as a sort of fuzzy potential that can be realized into images once they're decoded. With Stable Diffusion 1.4, the weights file is roughly 4GB, but it represents knowledge about hundreds of millions of images.

Enlarge / Apple is willing to actually replace the battery on its newest, smallest iPad, with potentially more to follow, according to a MacRumors report. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Replacing a battery can be fraught with peril, at least for the iPad. Repair shops and experienced DIY-ers know this, and Apple seems to acknowledge it, usually giving customers seeking battery swaps a new iPad instead. Starting soon, with at least one model, Apple and its repair techs could start actually replacing an iPad's battery instead of sending it into the refurbishment ether.

A report at MacRumors claims that Apple is issuing a new policy for the iPad mini 6 (i.e., the 2021 iPad mini), allowing repair centers (where devices are shipped for more in-depth service) to replace just the battery, rather than provide a Whole Unit Replacement (WUR) from existing or refurbished stock. MacRumors states that "other iPads may follow in the coming weeks and months," without specifics.

Replacing the battery on an iPad requires removing the screen, and that's tricky on almost all of them. Apple's proprietary repair tools, sized to each device, may be easier to use than using hand tools at home. But there's an unavoidable physics issue of having to apply strong suction or prying force to a long, wide, and thin display. The sixth-generation mini iPad, being the smallest of them, likely represents a device with the highest success rate of screen removal.

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot / Contributor | Getty Images News)

China's ability to influence American politics by manipulating social media platforms has been a topic of much scrutiny ahead of the midterm elections, and this week has marked some progress toward mitigating risks on some of the most popular US platforms.

US President Joe Biden is currently working on a deal with China-based TikTok—often regarded as a significant threat to US national security—with the one goal of blocking potential propaganda or misinformation campaigns. Now today, Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, shared a report detailing the steps it took to remove the first "Chinese-origin influence operation" that Meta has identified attempting "to target US domestic politics ahead of the 2022 midterms."

In the press release, Meta Global Threat Intelligence Lead Ben Nimmo joined Meta Director of Threat Disruption David Agranovich in describing the operation as initiated by a "small network." They said that between fall 2021 and September 2022, there were four "largely separate and short-lived" efforts launched by clusters of "around half a dozen" China-based accounts, which targeted both US-based conservatives and liberals using platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Enlarge / True external display support is coming to M1-powered iPads in iPadOS 16. (credit: Apple)

When Apple delayed iPadOS 16 in August, one of the primary culprits was the new "Stage Manager" multitasking feature. Stage Manager was meant to extend a new multi-window multitasking model to the iPad, but developers and people who cover Apple for a living have been complaining about stability and unpredictable behavior for months, problems that were still present even in recent betas. Controversially, the feature also required a recent M1-powered iPad Pro or Air to work.

In the beta of iPadOS 16.1 shipped today, Apple is narrowing Stage Manager's scope and adjusting its system requirements. According to an Apple statement provided to Engadget, the company "worked hard to find a way to deliver a single screen version [of Stage Manager]" for users of the 2018- and 2020-model iPad Pros.

These models have less RAM and a less-powerful processor than the M1 iPad Pros and the fourth-generation iPad Air. But with their four efficiency cores and four performance cores, both the A12X and A12Z chips were clearly dry-runs for the M1, and they're still powerful enough to run iPadOS and its apps well—it's nice to see them pick up support for Stage Manager, too.