Month: September 2023

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg/Getty)

Google announced today that it's extending Chromebooks' automatic update support from 8 years to 10 years for devices released from 2019 and later. The move follows increasing criticism from consumers, schools, and advocacy groups around the many Chromebooks in use and on sale with looming death dates.

"All Chromebook platforms will now get regular automatic updates for 10 years," Google's blog post says. Numerous Chromebooks released in 2019 were about to expire next year. Now, no Chromebooks should be expiring within the next two years.

Google's blog continues:

Enlarge / The common "Powered by Unity" logo

Update (Sept. 15): A Polygon report cites a statement from San Francisco police stating that the threat to the Unity offices came via social media, from "an employee" working in "an out of state location for the company."

Original Story

Unity Technologies has temporarily closed two of its offices amid what the company says are threats to employee safety. The move follows Tuesday's announcement of a highly controversial new fee structure for the company's popular Unity Engine.

Enlarge / The Pixel Tablet on the magnetic dock. (credit: Google)

Google and iFixit keep trucking along with their official parts store partnership. The latest device to get a parts selection is the Pixel Tablet, along with a whole bunch of repair guides with the usual lovingly detailed teardown photos. The Pixel Tablet did not draw a whole lot of attention when it launched in June, so this also counts as the Pixel Tablet teardown we've seen out there on the Internet, and, wow, is it interesting.

It's hard to know how tough of a process a repair is going to be, since iFixit never gave the Pixel Tablet a repairability score. It looks like breaking through the adhesive is a lot of work, with iFixit recommending an "anti-clamp" screen-pulling tool, a hair dryer, iFixit's "iOpener" heat pad, a suction cup, and a pick—they're emptying the whole toolbox to get this thing open. The first 18 steps of every guide go like this: Step 1, turn off the tablet. Step 2: put tape on the display if it's cracked. Steps 3 through 19: fighting the adhesive. iFixit's photos after this step all feature shredded adhesive leftovers stuck to the separated screen and body halves, too.

You have a much better shot of winning that battle with this guide, though, thanks to detailed information about where the adhesive is the strongest and what cables you could possibly break while doing this. On the plus side, once you get it open, replacing parts looks really easy, because the inside of this tablet looks like it was made in someone's garage with a 3D printer.

Enlarge / Kenneth Dintzer, litigator for the US Department of Justice, exits federal court in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2023. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

The Department of Justice kicked off its antitrust trial against Google this week by presenting evidence that Google allegedly hid monopolistic behaviors not just by auto-deleting four years of chats, but also by training employees to avoid using certain words in office communications.

DOJ attorney Kenneth Dintzer argued that Google executives knew the company would be scrutinized as a monopoly and since at least 2003 have circulated "unambiguous instructions on phrases" employees should "avoid" to ensure that the company doesn't "come across like monopolists," Bloomberg reported.

“We should be careful about what we say in both public and private,” Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, wrote in a July 2003 memo.

Enlarge / An X sign at company headquarters in San Francisco. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Elon Musk's X Corp. has reportedly agreed to settlement talks on arbitration claims from about 2,000 employees laid off after Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022.

"After 10 months of pressing them in every direction we have succeeded in getting Twitter to the table," attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan wrote in a memo to clients that was quoted in a Bloomberg article today. "Twitter wants to mediate with us in a global attempt to settle all claims we have filed."

Bloomberg said it obtained the Liss-Riordan memo from a former Twitter employee. The memo reportedly said that private negotiations with a mediator are scheduled for December 1 and December 2.

Enlarge / The iPhone 12, a phone that Apple no longer actively sells, is under investigation in France for potentially violating one of two electromagnetic radiation standards. (credit: Samuel Axon)

For many people, the iPhone 12 effectively disappeared from the market on Tuesday, when Apple introduced iPhone 15 models and stopped selling the 12, first released in October 2020. In Europe, however, the iPhone 12 remains a notable device, as a number of countries are following France's lead in looking into the device's electromagnetic profile.

What kicked off the unexpected concern about a nearly 3-year-old phone was France's National Frequency Agency (ANFR). On the same day as Apple's fall product announcements, the ANFR informed Apple that the iPhone 12 exceeds European Union regulations for Specific Absorption Rate (SAR), the rate at which a human body would absorb radiation from a device. A translated version of the ANFR report has the agency calling on Apple to withdraw the iPhone 12, "quickly remedy this malfunction," and if not, "recall copies already sold."

There are two measures of SAR for a device operating in the same frequency range as an iPhone, per EU standards. The "head and trunk" value, taken to protect against "acute exposure effects on central nervous tissues" when a phone is against the head or in a pants pocket, must not exceed 2 Watts of power per kilogram of body tissue, averaged over six minutes. When the phone is held in the hand or in clothing or accessories, for a "limbs" value, it's 4 W/kg.

Enlarge / Ions of nitrogen and carbon show up in the spectrum of X-rays from a black hole's accretion disk. (credit: NASA/Chandra)

Even huge stars are not always safe out there. When the orbit of a star three times as massive as our own took the star too close to a hefty black hole, the black hole’s gravity ripped the star’s guts out and scattered them across a cosmic crime scene.

Nearly a decade ago, this tidal disruption event caught scientists’ attention not only because of its enormity but also because the carnage happened “only” 290 million light-years away, which is relatively close to Earth. This event, termed ASASSN-14li, was almost mistaken for a supernova when it was discovered in 2014). While a closer tidal disruption event has been discovered since, ASASSN-14li has continued to draw astronomers because the star involved might be one of the largest, if not the largest, known to have been devoured by a black hole. Now, a new forensic analysis of this event brings more about the stellar victim to light.

Exhibit A

While the proximity of ASASSN-14li and the cause of the star’s death were already known, the research team had to think like cosmic medical examiners to figure out the size of the star. For this, they relied on data from NASA’s Chandra and ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray telescopes. When a star is ripped apart by the gravitational forces of a black hole, what is left of the star is heated so much by the intensity of those forces that a flare occurs. Flares like this can be observed in X-rays, as well as visible and ultraviolet light.