Month: December 2022

Enlarge (credit: Isaac Bowen / Flickr)

For several years now, Google has wanted to kill Chrome's current extension system in favor of a more limited one, creating more restrictions on filtering extensions that block ads and/or work to preserve the user's privacy. The new extension system, called "Manifest V3" technically hit the stable channel in January 2021, but Chrome still supports the older, more powerful system, Manifest V2. The first steps toward winding down Manifest V2 were supposed to start January 2023, but as 9to5Google first spotted, Google now says it delayed the mandatory switch to Manifest V3 and won't even have a new timeline for a V2 shutdown ready until March.

The old timeline started in January 2023, when beta versions of Chrome would start running "experiments" that disable Manifest V2. This would move to the stable version in June, with the Chrome Web Store banning Manifest V2 extensions in January 2024. The new timeline is that there is no timeline, and every step is now listed as "postponed" or "under review."

In a post about the delay, Chrome Extensions Developer Advocate Simeon Vincent says, "We’ve heard your feedback on common challenges posed by the migration, specifically the service worker’s inability to use DOM capabilities and the current hard limit on extension service worker lifetimes. We’re mitigating the former with the Offscreen Documents API (added in Chrome 109) and are actively pursuing a solution to the latter." After adding that every step of the timeline is on hold, Vincent said, "Expect to hear more about the updated phase-out plan and schedule by March of 2023."

Enlarge / An unmarked AI-generated image of China's flag, which will be illegal in China after January 10, 2023. (credit: Ars Technica)

China's Cyberspace Administration recently issued regulations prohibiting the creation of AI-generated media without clear labels, such as watermarks—among other policies—reports The Register. The new rules come as part of China's evolving response to the generative AI trend that has swept the tech world in 2022, and they will take effect on January 10, 2023.

In China, the Cyberspace Administration oversees the regulation, oversight, and censorship of the Internet. Under the new regulations, the administration will keep a closer eye on what it calls "deep synthesis" technology.

In a news post on the website of China's Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the government outlined its reasons for issuing the regulation. It pointed to the recent wave of text, image, voice, and video synthesis AI, which China recognizes as important to future economic growth (translation via Google Translate):

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Suspected of alleged money laundering, tax evasion, and US sanctions violations, Binance has been under investigation by the US Department of Justice since 2018 but has never been formally accused of any wrongdoing. Now, Reuters reports that some federal prosecutors feel they’ve amassed enough evidence to file criminal charges against Binance—including individual charges against Binance founder Changpeng Zhao—but other DOJ officials are standing in the way.

Reuters reviewed Binance records and spoke to nearly a dozen sources to compile a “comprehensive” progress report detailing DOJ’s inquiry so far. Sources included former Binance advisers, as well as current and former US law enforcement officials. These sources told Reuters that prosecutors spread across three DOJ offices—the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS), the US Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, and the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET)—would have to agree “on any action against Binance.” But for now, they can't agree. It seems that while NCET and the Seattle office are eager to prepare charges, MLARS leadership is causing further delay because they want more time to weigh all the evidence gathered against the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

According to Reuters, evidence shows that Binance allegedly spent the past year processing “over $10 billion in payments for criminals and companies seeking to evade US sanctions,” while keeping “weak anti-money laundering controls” and plotting to evade regulators both in the US and globally.

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  Clone the iPhone? Xiaomi? Never! [credit: Xiaomi ]

It's still only 2022, but that's not stopping Android manufacturers from launching their big flagship phones that will sell for the majority of next year. After Vivo's launch last month, the new OEM to launch a phone with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC is Xiaomi, simply named Xiaomi 13 and Xiaomi 13 Pro. These two models represent big (6.73-inch) and small (6.36-inch) phones with different designs.

The smaller phone is more interesting because—hey look, it's an iPhone! Xiaomi is fond of copying Apple, and with the flat-sided perimeter band and square camera block, it's hard to see the Xiaomi 13 as anything other than an iPhone. It looks much better than the curved-sided Xiaomi 13 Pro, but that's just because the iPhone's flat sides also look good. (I remain shocked that no Android OEM has copied the dynamic island yet.) The bigger "Pro" model is more of a generic Samsung-style design with curved screen edges and a beveled ring around the phone. The one Pro-model design flourish is swapping out the glass back panel for ceramic.

Both phones get the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. This is a 4 nm chip with an ARM Cortex X3, two Cortex A715 CPUs, two Cortex A710 CPUs, and three Cortex A510 CPUs. Like we talked about during the chip's launch, this mix of four different core designs is a weird, non-standard layout designed to extend 32-bit support for another year. ARM wants to kill 32-bit, but Qualcomm and Android aren't ready yet.

(credit: NSF)

Germany ranks third in the world for installed wind power capacity. In 2020, almost a quarter of the country’s energy came from wind, and the government has pledged to double that by 2030, designating 2 percent of Germany’s landmass to become wind farms.

Switching away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources like wind is essential if we want to try to mitigate some of the worst consequences of the climate change we’ve started, but this switch is extraordinarily difficult for many reasons. Watching how this switch plays out in early adopters of wind power like Germany may help inform how the rest of us decarbonize.

People are generally keen on wind power in the abstract, but a huge NIMBY (not in my backyard) factor comes into play when wind farms have to actually get built in communities. Researchers in Germany wondered what it was, exactly, that made people vote against local wind farms. They found that a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking helped explain a lot of the resistance.