Month: November 2022

Enlarge / DuckDuckGo says its App Tracking Protection automatically blocks many kinds of known trackers, while Apple's App Tracking Transparency only blocks IDFA (Identifier for Adverstisers) and asks developers to block others. (credit: DuckDuckGo)

Privacy-focused search site DuckDuckGo has added yet another way to prevent more of your data from going to advertisers, opening its App Tracking Protection for Android to beta testers.

DuckDuckGo is positioning App Tracking Protection as something like Apple's App Tracking Transparency for iOS devices, but "even more powerful." Enabling the service in the DuckDuckGo app for Android (under the "More from DuckDuckGo" section) installs a local VPN service on your phone, which can then start automatically blocking trackers on DDG's public blocklist. DuckDuckGo says this happens "without sending app data to DuckDuckGo or other remote servers."

A false color image of the measles virus. (credit: Arizona Department of Health)

A measles outbreak in Ohio has swiftly expanded, spreading to seven childcare facilities and one school, all with unvaccinated children, according to local health officials. The outbreak highlights the risk of the highly contagious but vaccine-preventable disease mushrooming amid slipping vaccination rates.

On November 9, the health departments of the city of Columbus and Franklin County, which encompasses Columbus, announced an outbreak at one childcare facility, which had sickened four unvaccinated children. Officials reportedly expected that more cases would follow.

As of Wednesday morning, there have been 18 confirmed cases from seven childcare facilities and one school. All of the cases are in unvaccinated children, and at least 15 cases are in children under the age of four. At least six have required hospitalization, Kelli Newman, spokesperson for Columbus Public Health, told Ars.

Enlarge / Razer's newest Blade 14 laptop is getting a spec bump via firmware. (credit: Razer)

Owners of the latest Ryzen 6000-based version of Razer's 14-inch Blade laptop are getting a significant update soon: The company confirmed to The Verge that a BIOS update for the laptop would add USB 4 support to its USB-C ports, doubling the transfer speeds from 20Gbps to 40Gbps and adding support for high-bandwidth, Thunderbolt-compatible external accessories like external GPU docks.

USB 4 is kind-of-sort-of feature compatible with Thunderbolt, the spec that Intel made royalty-free back in 2019. Like Thunderbolt 3 and 4, a fully enabled USB 4 port supports data-transfer speeds of up to 40Gbps and PCIe tunneling for support of external GPUs and other high-speed accessories. Some USB 4 ports only support the spec's minimum speed of 20Gbps, the same speed as USB 3.2 Gen 2, but Razer's ports do appear to be fully enabled 40Gbps ports.

Razer isn't doing anything particularly special to boost its USB speeds. Rather, it's taking advantage of the USB 4 capabilities that are built into all Ryzen 6000 processors. As long as a laptop's manufacturer has included the hardware necessary to support USB 4 speeds, any manufacturer can "upgrade" to USB 4 via a firmware update and a chipset driver that AMD released over the summer. PCWorld tested Ryzen 6000's USB 4 support on an Asus ZenBook that also required a BIOS update before it supported the feature.

Enlarge / The DualSense Edge offers some nice improvements for pro PS5 gamers, but not the additional accessibility gamers with disabilities need.

On opening night of August's Gamescom conference, PlayStation announced its new PlayStation 5 controller, the DualSense Edge. With the new iteration, players can remap inputs and save them as custom profiles and even replace physical buttons and add levers to the controller’s backside.

Though these changes offer a certain level of accessibility, neither the announcement nor the accompanying blog post suggests this was deliberate. Rather, the DualSense Edge is a “high-performance, ultra customizable” gamepad ostensibly aimed at competitive gamers. At its heart, the Edge remains the same-old DualSense, and, as such, its accessibility improvements feel incidental rather than intended.

That has been something of a disappointment to gaming accessibility advocates and players who rely on non-standard controls. In the wake of Microsoft’s success with the Xbox Adaptive Controller, Sony’s lack of similarly accessible control options for the PlayStation 5 is starting to stick out like a sore thumb(stick).