Month: November 2023

Enlarge / This is the engine bay of a 2018 RAV4 Hybrid, but the problem is not the hybrid traction battery. (credit: Alun Taylor)

There's plenty of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about electric cars and the potential risk of battery fires, but the regular old 12 V battery is responsible for Toyota issuing a recall for more than 1.8 million cars this week.

Toyota says the problem is due to differences in the sizes of replacement batteries—some have smaller tops than others, and if a smaller-top battery isn't held in properly by its clamp, the battery could move under hard cornering, letting the positive terminal contact the clamp, causing a short-circuit and possible fire risk.

The problem affects 2013–2018 RAV4s—about 1,854,000 of them, according to Toyota. The official National Highway Traffic Safety Administration safety recall notice has not yet been posted, but NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation has had an open case looking into the problem since February 2021, after 11 complaints about "non-crash thermal events" starting in the engine bays of RAV4s.

Enlarge / The grocery items and random thoughts you shout at your phone or your speaker are now kept in Google Keep, not in Assistant. Assistant, which in 2018 earned its own monorail wrap at CES in Las Vegas. (credit: Getty Images)

Google Assistant, the app that was once Google's guiding star and is now slowly losing features, is handing over control of notes and lists to Google Keep. This is somewhat good news, as Keep is a decent note-keeping app. But it's also concerning because there's now one major place to keep your data that Google might one day abandon.

As spotted by 9to5Google, Google is moving the Shopping List and other notes you may have dictated to its voice-centered Assistant into Google Keep. Google Keep is originally where the Assistant kept your shopping list, but in 2017, Google moved it into Google Express. Express was Google's shopping-centered site that used to offer an Amazon-Prime-like membership, but it has morphed somewhat into the Google Shopping storefront. As Ars' Ron Amadeo emphatically noted at the time, moving the shopping list created a new, weird, ad-link-littered, non-intuitive place to store the fact that you need to buy more cat food.

Google brought support for storing shopping and other lists in other apps in 2019. This included Keep, but also third-party apps like Any.do, AnyList, and Bring. Third-party support ended in June, so now there's just Keep.

Enlarge / Unlike Intel's E-cores, AMD's Zen 4c supports all the same capabilities as Zen 4, just in a smaller package with lower clock speeds. (credit: AMD)

AMD sells a lot of 7000-series Ryzen processors for laptops, but the most advanced ones are in the 7040 family. These are the only chips that combine AMD's latest Zen 4 CPU architecture and its latest RDNA 3 graphics cores, whereas other 7000-series laptop chips mix and match various older CPU and GPU architectures.

Today, the company is announcing two new Ryzen 7040U-series chips for thin and light laptops, but with a twist: They combine regular Zen 4 CPU cores with "Zen 4c" cores that are designed to save space rather than hit high clock speeds (via AnandTech). AMD says that a Zen 4c CPU core has the same capabilities as a Zen 4 core but takes up 35 percent less space in a silicon die.

These new chips are codenamed "Phoenix 2," denoting that they are similar to but distinct from the original Phoenix design used in earlier Ryzen 7040U chips. Phoenix 2 combines two high-performance Zen 4 cores, four high-efficiency Zen 4c cores, and a Radeon 740M integrated GPU with four RDNA3 graphics cores. They also lack the Ryzen AI neural processing unit that accelerates some AI and machine learning tasks in the regular Phoenix chips.

Enlarge (credit: Hulu)

The Walt Disney Company, which currently owns two-thirds of Hulu, is buying the remaining third from Comcast's NBCUniversal to "further [its] streaming objectives."

Disney's announcement Wednesday said it's expecting to pay "approximately" $8.61 billion for the remaining 33 percent stake in Hulu. That figure is based on a 2019 valuation of Hulu, pegging the streaming service's value at $27.5 billion.

But Disney noted that it may pay more than $8.61 billion, pending an appraisal. Disney said it's unsure how long the appraisal process will take but expects to complete the deal in 2024.

Enlarge / Mitchell Baker, Mozilla CEO, at a conference in 2019. (credit: Horacio Villalobos / Contributor | Corbis News)

This week, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker rose as a key figure in Google's defense against the Justice Department's monopoly claims. Providing a video deposition for the landmark trial, Baker testified that Mozilla's popular browser Firefox tried to switch from using Google as a default search engine but reverted back after a "failed" bet on Yahoo made it clear that Google was Firefox users' preferred search engine.

According to Bloomberg, Mozilla's temporary switch to Yahoo is "the only situation in which a browser has switched the default search engine provider." This makes Baker's testimony potentially very powerful because it's a clear example that backs up Google's core argument that its search engine wins default status due to its quality, not due to anticompetitive behaviors.

"The evidence will show that the reasons behind Mozilla’s switch back to Google after selecting Yahoo as the default search engine for its Firefox browser confirms," Google's pre-trial brief said. "Google wins competitions that browser suppliers create for choosing their default search service by offering the best product at the best price. That is quintessential 'competition on the merits.'" In another court filing, Google argued, "there is no evidence of coercive conduct."

Enlarge / Ride-share pick-up and drop-off location in August 2023 for US Open in Flushing Meadows, New York. (credit: Getty Images | Universal Images Group)

Uber and Lyft have agreed to pay $328 million after "cheating drivers out of hundreds of millions of dollars," New York Attorney General Letitia James' office said today. "Uber will pay $290 million and Lyft will pay $38 million into two separate settlement funds which will be entirely distributed to current and former drivers," the AG's office said.

The ride-hailing companies also agreed to provide sick leave and better pay to drivers going forward. "The settlements resolve multi-year investigations into Uber and Lyft, which found that the companies’ policies withheld hard-earned pay from drivers and prevented them from receiving valuable benefits available under New York labor laws," the announcement said, calling it the largest back-pay settlement in the NY AG office's history.

The AG's office estimates that over 100,000 drivers, most of whom are immigrants, will be eligible for payments. Notices will be sent to people who are eligible for payments, and links to claims forms are available here.