Month: November 2023

Enlarge / Just some of the prizes you can win in this year's charity drive sweepstakes. (credit: Kyle Orland)

It's once again that special time of year when we give you a chance to do well by doing good. That's right—it's time for the 2023 edition of our annual Charity Drive!

Every year since 2007, we've encouraged readers to give to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity, which provides toys and games to kids being treated in hospitals around the world. In recent years, we've added the Electronic Frontier Foundation to our charity push, aiding in their efforts to defend Internet freedom. This year, as always, we're providing some extra incentive for those donations by offering donors a chance to win pieces of our big pile of vendor-provided swag. We can't keep it, and we don't want it clogging up our offices, so it's now yours to win.

This year's swag pile is full of high-value geek goodies. We have 40 prizes valued at over $2,500 total, including gaming hardware and accessories, collectibles, books, apparel, and more. In 2022, Ars readers raised over $31,500 for charity, contributing to a total haul of more than $465,000 since 2007. We want to raise even more this year, and we can do it if readers dig deep.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Windows XP was an actively supported Microsoft product for 13 years, including five years where it was the newest version available and another three years where it was vastly more popular than its successor. That longevity—plus Microsoft's total domination of personal computing in the pre-iPhone, pre-Android world—helped make its default wallpaper one of the most recognizable images on the planet.

Microsoft is returning to the Bliss hill once again with this year's entry in its now-traditional ugly retro-computing sweater series. Blue hemming at the bottom and on the sleeves evokes Windows XP's bright-blue taskbar, and in case people don't immediately recognize Bliss as "a computer thing," there's also a giant mouse pointer hovering over it.

Past ugly sweaters have included a Minesweeper motif, MS Paint, the Windows logo, and the immortal Clippy. Microsoft's ugly sweater site also has wallpapers and a few other retro Easter eggs for people with some time on their hands.

Enlarge / The VW plant in Wolfsburg, Germany. (credit: Volkswagen)

The Volkswagen passenger car brand looks set to lay off workers, according to a report in Reuters. The news organization saw a post on VW's intranet quoting CEO Thomas Schaffer, who blamed low productivity and high costs for the impending cuts.

"With many of our pre-existing structures, processes and high costs, we are no longer competitive as the Volkswagen brand," Schaffer said at a staff meeting.

VW accounts for the highest volume among the different brands owned by VW Group but is much less profitable than either Audi or Porsche. In June, VW Group announced a $10.9 billion (10 billion euro) cost-cutting plan for the namesake brand.

Enlarge / The report contrasts with a growing body of research in recent years that has connected the beginning of the smartphone era with growing rates of anxiety and depression, especially among teenage girls. (credit: Isabel Pavia)

A study of more than 2 million people’s Internet use found no “smoking gun” for widespread harm to mental health from online activities such as browsing social media and gaming, despite widely claimed concerns that mobile apps can cause depression and anxiety.

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, who said their study was the largest of its kind, said they found no evidence to support “popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk” from the technology.

However, Andrew Przybylski, professor at the institute—part of the University of Oxford—said that the data necessary to establish a causal connection was “absent” without more cooperation from tech companies. If apps do harm mental health, only the companies that build them have the user data that could prove it, he said.