Month: December 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Blu-rays never quite managed to usurp DVDs entirely. Recent estimates, based on data gathered by Nielsen VideoScan and MediaPlayNews, suggest that as of Q2 2022, DVDs still controlled 51.4 percent of market share compared to 48.6 percent for Blu-rays. And no matter which format has the biggest slice, the physical media pie is shrinking. So, if your Blu-ray player has gone from your home theater centerpiece to a dust-gathering ornament, one clever hacker knows just what to do with it.

As spotted by Hackster.io this week, a YouTuber named Doctor Volt recently detailed their two-part journey of turning a Samsung BD-J5900 Blu-ray player into a laser-scanning microscope.

One of the laser-scanning microscope's primary advantages over optical ones is that the latter maxes out at 1,500 times magnification, as noted by Gizmodo. Doctor Volt says they aren't sure of the magnification of their DY microscope but told a commenter that "it can resolve structures of roundabout 5 micrometers."

Enlarge / AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX (rear) and 7900 XT (front). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT GPUs are still fresh, and as with most products based on new architectures, there are some early bugs to work out.

A driver update released earlier this week (version 22.12.2, the second driver release for the RX 7900-series in as many weeks) addresses high power use during video playback when using the cards' built-in media decoding hardware. Other problems have been acknowledged but not fixed yet, including "high idle power [...] when using select high resolution and high refresh rate displays."

German review site Computerbase (via Tom's Hardware) noticed these issues and others when testing the cards; the site also measured significantly higher power consumption than the RX 6900 series and Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3000 and 4000 series cards when sitting idle at the Windows desktop with a pair of connected 60 Hz 4K monitors.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Two men have been charged with participating in a scheme that raked in big money by using a compromised dispatch system at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to allow paying taxis to move to the front of the line.

Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman, both 48 and of Queens, New York, allegedly participated in a scheme that compromised the electronic dispatch system, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York said. Taxi drivers are required to wait in a holding lot. The computer-run dispatch system is designed to ensure that drivers are assigned in the order they arrive.

The defendants, prosecutors said, conspired with Russian nationals to compromise the dispatch system and cause it to move specific taxis to the front of the line. Participants then advertised a service allowing drivers to skip the line in exchange for $10 each time.

Enlarge (credit: Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images North America)

China-owned TikTok’s been living rent-free in many American lawmakers’ minds all year. Some lawmakers—who have been monitoring US tensions with China and coping with growing concerns that TikTok in its current form shouldn’t be trusted with millions of Americans’ data—reached a breaking point this December. In the past few weeks, many state and federal agencies introduced and passed various laws, campaigning hard to remove the popular short-video app from US devices.

It looks like the US could end up following through on Donald Trump’s thwarted 2020 plan to ban TikTok nationwide.

Possibly the only thing potentially keeping TikTok operating in the US has been an elusive deal that President Joe Biden’s administration is discussing with TikTok—a deal that just days ago, The New York Times reported, included terms that were “unlikely to satisfy anyone.” Now, Reuters has released an exclusive report, revealing new details about the terms of Biden’s deal and providing the first glimmer of hope for Americans increasingly worried that their TikTok access might soon be revoked.

Enlarge / Tesla's camera-only approach to driver assistance keeps landing it in trouble. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Tesla)

An eight-car collision on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 24) is now being blamed on Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) assistance system. The crash took place in the Bay Area in California on I-80 and left one person hospitalized and eight others with minor injuries.

According to Reuters, a California Highway Patrol report on the incident says that a Tesla Model S traveling on I-80 at 55 mph crossed several lanes of traffic and then slowed abruptly to just 20 mph, at which point it triggered the crash as other cars still traveling at highway speed had no chance to avoid the slow-moving electric vehicle.

Reuters says that the driver blamed the crash on the controversial "Full Self-Driving" system, which he claimed "malfunctioned but police were unable to determine if the software was in operation or if his statement was accurate."

Enlarge / FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried is escorted out of the Magistrate's Court on December 21, 2022 in Nassau, Bahamas. (credit: Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

Two of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s closest associates have pleaded guilty to fraud and agreed to co-operate with US authorities investigating the collapse of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan said on Wednesday.

Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced the guilty pleas and criminal charges against Caroline Ellison, former chief executive of FTX trading affiliate Alameda Research, and Zixiao “Gary” Wang, a co-founder of FTX, in a short video statement. His office had brought eight charges against Bankman-Fried last week.

The announcement from Williams came just after a plane carrying Bankman-Fried took off from the Bahamas, where he waived his right to challenge extradition to the US. He landed in New York late on Wednesday, local media reported, and is due to appear in a Manhattan court as soon as Thursday, where his bail request will be considered.

The trio of longtime friends were among the key members of a tight circle of associates who ran Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire, which included the FTX cryptocurrency exchanges and Alameda Research, the private trading firm. All three had lived together with other senior executives in a luxury apartment in Nassau’s Albany complex.