“Absurd”: Google, Amazon rebuked over unsupported Chromebooks still for sale

No security or feature updates, but selling as “new.”

“Absurd”: Google, Amazon rebuked over unsupported Chromebooks still for sale

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Google resisted pleas to extend the lifetime of Chromebooks set to expire as of this June and throughout the summer. Thirteen Chromebook models have met their death date since June 1 and won't receive security updates or new features from Google anymore. But that hasn't stopped the Chromebooks from being listed for sale on sites like Amazon for the same prices as before.

Take the Asus Chromebook Flip C302. It came out in 2018, and on June 1—about five years later—it reached its automatic update expiration (AUE) date. But right now, you can buy a "new," unused Flip C302 for $550 from Amazon or $820 via Walmart's Marketplace (providing links for illustrative purposes; please don't buy these unsupported laptops).

That's just one of eight Chromebooks that expired since June while still being readily available on Amazon. The listings don't notify shoppers that the devices won't receive updates from Google. The US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) pointed this out in a press release Wednesday, sharing screenshots of the models:

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Jeanette Epps will finally go to space six years after being pulled from flight

NASA removed Epps from her first crew assignment in 2018 without explanation.

Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, astronaut Michael Barrett, commander Matthew Dominick, and mission specialist Jeanette Epps make up the Crew-8 mission.

Enlarge / Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, astronaut Michael Barrett, commander Matthew Dominick, and mission specialist Jeanette Epps make up the Crew-8 mission. (credit: NASA)

NASA confirmed on Friday that Jeanette Epps, a former CIA technology intelligence officer selected as an astronaut in 2009, will finally launch into space in early 2024 on a SpaceX flight to the International Space Station. The crew assignment comes six years after NASA pulled Epps from what would have been her first spaceflight, just months before her scheduled launch to the space station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

The removal of Epps from the Soyuz mission in 2018 raised a lot of questions. It's not the first time NASA has pulled an astronaut off of space missions soon before launch, but it's usually for medical reasons, like an illness or an injury.

That wasn't the case for Epps, who was replaced by a backup crew member on the Soyuz flight in 2018. NASA never publicly stated a reason for the crew change. Some people outside the agency theorized Epps might have been removed from her flight for political or racial reasons—she would have become the first Black astronaut to fly a long-duration stint on the space station—but Ars has reported that did not appear to be the case.

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FCC prepares $75 monthly broadband subsidies for “high-cost” areas

$75 low-income subsidy targets areas where ISPs face “economic hardship.”

Illustration of US paper currency and binary data to represent Internet connectivity.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | imagedepotpro)

The Federal Communications Commission is paving the way for $75 monthly subsidies to make broadband service more affordable for low-income households in certain "high-cost" areas.

The $75 subsidy will be part of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) that generally offers $30 monthly discounts to people with low incomes. The ACP was created by Congress in late 2021 and implemented by the FCC to replace a previous pandemic-related subsidy program.

The ACP already provides $75 monthly subsidies for homes on tribal lands, but not in other areas. The US law that created the ACP lets the FCC make $75 subsidies available in areas where the costs of building broadband networks are higher than average.

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Asahi Linux’s new “flagship” distro for M-series Macs is a Fedora Remix

An “upstream-first” effort on a more familiar platform.

Asahi Linux’s new “flagship” distro for M-series Macs is a Fedora Remix

Enlarge (credit: Asahi Linux/Fedora)

Asahi Linux, the project aiming to bring a fully functional Linux system to Apple computers running on that company's own M-series chips, has announced that its new "flagship distro" is Fedora Asahi Remix.

As announced at Fedora's Flock conference this week in Cork, Ireland, (and on Asahi Linux's blog), the Fedora Asahi Remix should be officially released by the end of August 2023. You can try it out now, but you should "expect rough spots (or even complete breakage)."

The new distro will be "upstream-first," sending as many of its bespoke M-series tools back to Fedora's mainline offerings as possible. Hector Martin, writing on Asahi Linux's blog, notes that the existing project based on Arch Linux was "fully downstream." Asahi added its own package repository with scripts, forked kernel and Mesa packages, bootloader parts, and userspace support, but with "no significant involvement with upstream Arch Linux ARM or Arch Linux." Neal Gompa from Fedora reached out to talk about integrating Asahi with Fedora after the project's debut, and work began in late 2021. Now it's ready to spread a bit further.

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XMG’s 2nd-gen Oasis liquid cooler for laptops is smaller and quieter

Gaming PCs are known for pushing the limits of their hardware… but performance is often limited by thermal constraints. PC hardware can generate a lot of heat, so you need a lot of cooling power to keep things running smoothly. That’s espe…

Gaming PCs are known for pushing the limits of their hardware… but performance is often limited by thermal constraints. PC hardware can generate a lot of heat, so you need a lot of cooling power to keep things running smoothly. That’s especially true in laptops, which don’t have as much room to dissipate heat as […]

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Qualcomm, NXP, Bosch, Infineon and Nordic team up to work on RISC-V products

Virtually every smartphone available today has a processor based on ARM architecture, and ARM-based chips are also widely used in IoT, automotive, and other applications. But one of the biggest players in the ARM-based processor space has just announc…

Virtually every smartphone available today has a processor based on ARM architecture, and ARM-based chips are also widely used in IoT, automotive, and other applications. But one of the biggest players in the ARM-based processor space has just announced it’s teaming up with other chip makers in hopes of “advancing adoption of RISC-V globally by […]

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Cortana, once a flagship feature of Windows phones, is slowly being shut down

Cortana will remain in Teams and Outlook, for now, but is going away in Windows.

Cortana is gradually fading from Windows and other Microsoft products.

Enlarge / Cortana is gradually fading from Windows and other Microsoft products. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Microsoft is working to cram its new ChatGPT-powered Bing Chat service into every product it makes, and starting this fall it will be a built-in feature of Windows 11. It makes sense, then, that Microsoft is also working to shut down its last stab at an automated virtual assistant—the standalone Cortana app in Windows 10 and Windows 11 is going to stop working this month, and Microsoft is pointing users toward Bing Chat and Windows Copilot instead.

Some users have reported that the Cortana app has already stopped working entirely following an app update. On a PC running a fully up-to-date version of Windows 11 22H2, my Cortana app still functions, but it told me that "Cortana in Windows is going away soon."

Microsoft has been pulling back on its support for Cortana for years, ending support for the iOS and Android versions in early 2021 and removing it from the Windows taskbar in Windows 11 a few months later. Before that, Microsoft had already removed most third-party app integrations, refocusing the assistant entirely on basic productivity tasks and Bing searches.

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70 Milliarden Dollar: Arm-Börsengang soll einer der größten seit Uber werden

Chipdesigns des britischen IP-Providers stecken in fast jedem Smartphone und vielen weiteren Produkten. Die Einschätzungen zum Börsenwert sind entsprechend hoch. (ARM, Prozessor)

Chipdesigns des britischen IP-Providers stecken in fast jedem Smartphone und vielen weiteren Produkten. Die Einschätzungen zum Börsenwert sind entsprechend hoch. (ARM, Prozessor)

Dude, what are those humongous plasma waves in Jupiter’s atmosphere?

Plasma collisions in the outer edges of Jupiter’s magnetosphere produce big waves.

Image of a planet with its darker hemisphere lit up by patches of lightning.

Enlarge / Lightning crackles behind the dawn edge of Jupiter's atmosphere. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/JunoCam)

There are waves on Jupiter, but not exactly the kind surfers can ride. These plasma waves are much more intense than anything that crashes onto a beach.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft keeps coming across humongous plasma waves as it orbits Jupiter. These waves are actually known as Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (KHIs), and they occur when plasma from the solar wind interacts with the magnetopause of a planet, the outer level of its magnetic field. The difference in velocity between the magnetopause and solar wind creates a furiously swirling wave—a vortex.

“The Kelvin-Helmholtz instability may be observed at the boundary that separates a planetary magnetic field (magnetosphere) from the stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun (solar wind); this boundary is known as the magnetopause.” the researchers said in a study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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GameStop, citing “regulatory uncertainty,” winds down its crypto and NFT wallet

Layoffs from late last year may have hinted at company’s drift away from crypto.

GameStop NFT marketplace page reading

Enlarge / An artifact from an earlier time in GameStop's crypto enthusiasm, the launch of its NFT marketplace in July 2022. (credit: GameStop)

GameStop will still sell you NFTs, but you now have to store and secure them yourself. The game store is ending the wallet app it offered for iOS devices and Chrome browsers as of November 1 and is telling customers to double-check their "Secret Passphrase."

GameStop's notice at the top of its wallet page and other crypto-related sub-sites cites "the regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space" for the removal of its wallet extension and app. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Binance and Coinbase in June, citing the exchanges' failure to provide protections for customers, keep records, and accept inspection by the SEC.

As noted by Game Developer, though, the decision may have been in the works before that. December 2022 layoffs at GameStop heavily impacted the team working on the Ethereum-based blockchain wallet.

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