Month: September 2022

Enlarge / XXXXXX (credit: Netgear)

Wi-Fi 6E products are available to consumers today, but you probably wouldn't know if you looked around the average household. Although supporting gear rolled out over the past couple of years, component shortages, satisfaction with Wi-Fi 6, and the impending arrival of Wi-Fi 7 have led many to overlook the latest wireless standard. Netgear is looking to make adoption easier by announcing a USB adapter that brings Wi-Fi 6E to supporting systems via a USB 3.x Type-A connection.

Netgear's Nighthawk AXE3000 WiFi 6E USB 3.0 Adapter (A8000) announced Wednesday works with laptops and desktops. According to the San Jose, California-based company's announcement, it supports the 2.4 GHz band at up to 600 Mbps, the 5 GHz band at up to 1,200 Mbps, and the 6 GHz band at up to 1,200 Mbps.

(credit: Netgear)

The adapter uses a flip-open antenna, and there's an optional cradle that can hold the adapter and connect to a PC via its USB-A cable, allowing one to move the adapter for an improved signal.

Enlarge / The Alliance for Open Media logo. (credit: Alliance for Open Media)

Google can do basically whatever it wants regarding video and web standards. YouTube is the world's most popular video site. Chrome is the world's most popular browser. Android is the world's most popular operating system. Anything Google wants to roll out can immediately have a sizable user base of clients, servers, and content. From there, it's just a matter of getting a few partners to tag along. This is how Google's next-generation AV1 video codec is being rolled out, and next, Google is setting its sights on HDR and 3D audio standards.

Protocol's Janko Roettgers has a report on "Project Caviar," Google's plan to take on Dolby and create royalty-free alternatives to its HDR standard (Dolby Vision) and its 3D audio standard (Dolby Atmos). Dolby's old-media business model relies on royalty fees from hardware manufacturers and support from content creators. The company's technology is deeply embedded in movie theaters, Blu-rays, and more modern streaming companies like Apple are big backers of Dolby technology. That all costs money, though, and Protocol's report says $50 streaming sticks end up having around $2 of that price tag go to Dolby.

Surround sound has been a movie feature forever with various numbers of front, back, and side speakers, but Dolby Atmos adds height into the equation. If you take a 5.1 or 7.1 speaker setup—that's three front speakers, two back, a subwoofer, and for 7.1, two side speakers—Dolby Atmos adds four overhead speakers into the mix, allowing sound to pan overhead of the viewer. Atmos is supported by Apple, Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney+.

Enlarge / An excerpt from the AI-assisted comic book Zarya of the Dawn, which received a US copyright registration. (credit: Kris Kashtanova)

In what might be a first, a New York-based artist named Kris Kashtanova has received US copyright registration on their graphic novel that features AI-generated artwork, according to their Instagram feed and confirmed through a public records search by Ars Technica.

The registration, effective September 15, applies to a comic book called Zarya of the Dawn. Kashtanova created the artwork for Zarya using Midjourney, a commercial image synthesis service. In their post announcing the news from Tuesday, Kashtanova wrote:

I got Copyright from the Copyright Office of the USA on my Ai-generated graphic novel. I was open how it was made and put Midjourney on the cover page. It wasn’t altered in any other way. Just the way you saw it here.

I tried to make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI. I registered it as visual arts work. My certificate is in the mail and I got the number and a confirmation today that it was approved.

My friend lawyer gave me this idea and I decided to make a precedent.

Going by their announcement, Kashtanova approached the registration by saying the artwork was AI-assisted, and not created entirely by the AI. Kashtanova wrote the comic book story, created the layout, and made artistic choices to piece the images together.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Earlier this year, the International Organization for Migration reported that more than 3 million refugees fleeing war-torn Ukraine were "at heightened risk of exploitation." Human trafficking cases, they warned, involved refugees more likely to leave home suddenly without secure financial resources and "less likely to be identified in the immediate aftermath of mass displacement." Since February, the European Union announced that the number is even larger, counting more than 5.4 million people who "have arrived in the European Union since the beginning of the war in Ukraine."

"All relevant stakeholders have recognized that the threat of trafficking in human beings is high and imminent," EU's human trafficking plan states. Since women and children represent the majority of refugees fleeing, the plan says they are believed to be most at risk.

To respond, the EU began monitoring online and offline human trafficking risks, and experts called for countries across Europe to start working together to shield refugees during this uncertain time of conflict. This week, the EU's law enforcement agency focused on cybercrimes, Europol, reported that it had done exactly that by coordinating the first online EU-wide hackathon.

Enlarge / The Hunga Tonga eruption started under water, yet still blasted straight through much of the atmosphere. (credit: NASA)

In January this year, an undersea volcano in Tonga produced a massive eruption, the largest so far this century. The mixing of hot volcanic material and cool ocean water created an explosion that sent an atmospheric shockwave across the planet and triggered a tsunami that devastated local communities and reached as far as Japan. The only part of the crater's rim that extended above water was reduced in size and separated into two islands. A plume of material was blasted straight through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere, over 50 km above the Earth's surface.

We've taken a good look at a number of past volcanic eruptions and studied how they influence the climate. But those eruptions (most notably that of Mount Pinatubo) all came from volcanoes on land. Hunga Tonga may be the largest eruption we've ever documented that took place under water, and the eruption plume contained unusual amounts of water vapor—so much of it that it actually got in the way of satellite observations at some wavelengths. Now, researchers have used weather balloon data to reconstruct the plume and follow its progress during two circuits around the globe.

Boom meets balloon

Your vocabulary word of the day is radiosonde, which is a small instrument package and transmitter that can be carried into the atmosphere by a weather balloon. There are networks of sites where radiosondes are launched as part of weather forecasting services; the most relevant ones for Hunga Tonga are in Fiji and Eastern Australia. A balloon from Fiji was the first to take instruments into the eruption plume, doing so less than 24 hours after Hunga Tonga exploded.

Enlarge / Tesla has had to issue its largest-ever recall. (credit: Tesla)

On Thursday, Tesla issued a recall for almost 1.1 million vehicles due to a problem with their windows. The problem is related to the windows' automatic reversal function, the safety feature that lowers the glass if it's being raised and encounters part of a human being.

Unfortunately for the affected Teslas, during conformity production testing, "Tesla technicians identified window automatic reversal system performance that had greater than expected variations in response to pinch detection."

The problem affects Model 3s built between 2017 and 2022, Model Ys built between 2020 and 2021, and Models S and X built between 2021 and 2022. Tesla identified the problem in late August, and by September 12, after analyzing and validating its test results, the company made the decision to issue the recall.