Month: September 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | B4LLS)

The Federal Communications Commission today released a plan to require mobile carriers to block a wide range of illegal text messages.

"In this Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), we propose to require mobile wireless providers to block illegal text messages, building on our ongoing work to stop illegal and unwanted robocalls," the FCC order said. "Specifically, we propose to require mobile wireless providers to block texts, at the network level, that purport to be from invalid, unallocated, or unused numbers, and numbers on a Do-Not-Originate (DNO) list." These texts "are highly likely to be illegal," the FCC said.

The NPRM seeks public comment on the plan. Once the NPRM is published in the Federal Register, there will be 30 days for comments and another 15 days for reply comments. After that, the FCC can draft new requirements for mobile carriers and set up a final vote.

Enlarge / The MSI MEG X670E Godlike raises interesting questions, like, "could God make a motherboard so expensive that even He could not afford it?" (credit: MSI)

Building a PC around a new processor is expensive at the best of times, and that's triple-true of AMD's new Ryzen 7000 chips. AMD has started with its $300-and-up high-end chips, leaving mid-range options until next year. The CPUs only support DDR5 RAM, which is still more expensive than DDR4 at the same capacities. And the first round of motherboards that include the new AM5 CPU socket are here, and they're pretty expensive.

The cheapest motherboard currently available from the likes of Newegg and Micro Center is the ASRock X670E PG Lightning, which, despite being the least expensive motherboard available, is an X670E board that will support PCIe 5.0 GPUs when they eventually arrive (even the newly announced GeForce RTX 4000-series still uses PCIe 4.0). The motherboard is missing a few features we like to see—no built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, limited audio outputs, relatively small heatsinks for the voltage-regulator modules (VRMs) and other components—but it does have four M.2 SSD slots of varying speeds and plenty of hookups for case fans and front USB ports.

If it's something you care about, the cheapest X670E board with Wi-Fi is also one of ASRock's, the X670E Pro RS, available for $280 at Newegg and Micro Center.

Enlarge / The Arc A770 GPU, coming from Intel on October 12, starting at $329. (credit: Intel)

One week after Nvidia moved forward with some of its highest graphics card prices, Intel emerged with splashy news: a price for its 2023 graphics cards that lands a bit closer to Earth.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger took the keynote stage on Tuesday at the latest Intel Innovation event to confirm a starting price and release date for the upcoming Arc A770 GPU: $329 on October 12.

That price comes well below last week's highest-end Nvidia GPU prices but is meant to more closely correlate with existing GPUs from AMD and Nvidia in the $300 range. Crucially, Intel claims that its A770, the highest-end product from the company's first wave of graphics cards, will compare to or even exceed the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, which debuted last year at $399 and continues to stick to that price point at most marketplaces.

A traumatized survivor of a zombie apocalypse must face hordes of the "Infected" to protect a teenage girl who might hold the key to a cure in The Last of Us, a new HBO series based on the blockbuster action/adventure game of the same name. HBO just dropped the first official teaser, giving gaming fans their first look at this long-awaited TV adaptation.

(Some spoilers from the game below.)

The Last of Us game from Naughty Dog debuted in 2013 to pretty much universal acclaim for its narrative, gameplay, visuals, and sound design. Ars senior gaming editor Kyle Orland called it "a thrilling, beautiful, exceptionally human zombie apocalypse story" in his 2013 review. The game sold more than 1 million units in the first week of its release and won multiple gaming awards. It's still often cited as among the greatest video games ever made. Co-showrunner Craig Mazin called it the "Lawrence of Arabia of video game narratives." Naughty Dog co-President Neil Druckmann, who wrote and directed the original game, co-wrote the first season of the TV series with Mazin.

When it comes to World of Warcraft's long-demanded "Classic" servers, players understandably want an experience that's identical to the MMO experience they remember from years ago. At least one player has taken that concept to an extreme this week, using years-old exploits to reach the level 80 cap on Blizzard's Wrath of the Lich King Classic (aka Wrath Classic) servers mere hours after they launched.

Streamer Naowh and his compatriots at Echo Guild announced their level 80 speedrun achievement on Twitter early Tuesday morning. As Naowh explains in an accompanying video, the rapid leveling takes advantage of a bugged Icecrown boss that continually spawns mobs of undead zombies. A player can "tag" those zombies with a single attack, then get full experience for defeating all the zombies when the next mob spawns in.

Naowh said he practiced this method in the live retail version of World of Warcraft before the launch of Wrath Classic servers Monday. "It's still the same to this day in retail," Naowh said. "I'm surprised no one has noticed this."

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  The Roombo Combo j7+. Sick spoiler, bro! Wait, that's a mop?! [credit: Roomba ]

iRobot—soon to be owned by Amazon—is announcing a flagship Roomba with a new feature: It can vacuum and mop simultaneously. Meet the Roomba Combo j7+, a $1,100 combo cleaning robot that ships on October 4.

iRobot is not doing a ground-up redesign of the j7+ series to add mop functionality. In fact, the update almost looks like a retrofit. The new j7 looks just like the old j7 with a camera in the front, a big dust bin in the back, and a bottom layout that is almost identical to the old bot. There's a new dust bin and... is that a rear spoiler?

The mop functionality lives on the top (yes, the top) of the j7+, which has a big rear cutout now. The top of this cutout is plastic, and the bottom is the wet mop pad, which is connected to the robot by two side arms. When it's time to do some mopping, a dramatic, Transformers-like transition occurs. Two flaps on the side of the Roomba open up, revealing that the top mop cutout is actually connected to the robot by a pair of swing arms. The cutout section on top of the robot is lifted up and swings down and under the robot in a big, 180-degree motion. Now you're dragging a wet mop pad across the floor with minimal changes to the layout of the j7+.

Enlarge / A new hard-case battery inside the Apple Watch Ultra is easier to remove for DIY fixers. Getting to that battery is still a tricky, tight-space operation, iFixit writes. (credit: iFixit)

Like the iPhone 14, the Apple Watch Ultra has a quietly revolutionary aspect that went under the radar—at least until the people at iFixit tore down the device. Apple's new category of wearables is "a potentially giant step towards making the Watch more repairable," iFixit writes, and it all starts with the screws.

Four pentalobe screws on the back of the Watch Ultra, unique among all Apple's Watch models, suggested the same kind of front-and-back access that iFixit's iPhone 14 teardown revealed. But opening from the back will almost certainly damage the Ultra's waterproof gasket. And the experienced teardown team at iFixit also lost one of the band release button's springs during removal. Most disappointingly, there's not much to be replaced from the back other than the back itself and its sensor array.

The promising but ultimately non-revelatory screws, making their first appearance on an Apple Watch exterior. (credit: iFixit)

As such, replacing the battery on an Apple Watch Ultra will likely take days, not hours, and will be done at a regional service depot, not in-store, iFixit's Sam Goldheart writes. "It's a missed opportunity—if Apple could get the battery under the [system-in-a-package], then these new screws on the bottom could enable a battery swap without going through the extremely well-sealed display."