Month: November 2023

Enlarge / DOS_deck is an impressive technical feat, sure. But it's also a very keen curation of some DOS shareware classics (pun somewhat intended). (credit: DOS_deck/Martin Kool)

Revisiting a classic game from the AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS era of MS-DOS can be a fun distraction. But the more friction and configuration between you and a playable game, the more likely you are to fall off before you ever hit the menu screen. You spend enough time fine-tuning your modern systems; doing so within an arcane framework, for a single game, is not everybody's idea of fun.

DOS_deck seems to get this, providing the most frictionless path to playing classic DOS shareware and abandonware, like Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, Command & Conquer, and Syndicate, with reconfigured controller support and a simplified interface benevolently looted from the Steam Deck. You can play it in a browser, right now, the one you're using to read this post.

In fact, I stopped between that last sentence and this one to play a couple levels of Doom in a Chrome browser. And now I've taken another punctuation break to play the first level of Syndicate, which moves much faster than I remember. The control schemes are clever, the interface is easy to get used to and move around, and there's a host of little extras to appreciate, including constant game progress (game state) saving, and linking and setting certain games as favorites.

Enlarge / A blog post from AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr shows the Workspaces Thin Client setup. (credit: Jeff Barr/Amazon)

Amazon has turned its Fire TV Cube streaming device into a thin client optimized for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon's Workspaces Thin Client also supports Amazon's Workspaces Web, for accessing virtual desktops from a browser, and AppStream.

The computer is a Fire TV Cube with a new software stack. All the hardware—from the 2GB of LPDDR4x RAM and 16GB of storage, to the Arm processor with 8 cores, including four running at up to 2.2 GHz—remain identical whether buying the device as an Alexa-powered entertainment-streaming device or thin client computer. Both the Fire TV Cube and Workspaces Thin Client run an Android Open Source Project-based Android fork (for now).

Enlarge (credit: Pool / Pool | Getty Images Europe)

The latest advertiser fallout on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, could end up costing Elon Musk's company much more than the $11 million in revenue that the company previously estimated could be "at risk" due to backlash over antisemitic content on X.

According to internal X sales team documents reviewed by The New York Times, X may lose "up to $75 million" as more than 100 major brands—including Airbnb, Amazon, Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Uber—have stopped advertising, while "dozens" more are considering pausing ads on the platform.

These sales team documents, The Times reported, "are meant to track the impact of all the advertising lapses" in November. On top of noting which brands have stopped advertising, the documents also flag brands at risk of halting ads. Ultimately, the sales team's goal is listing "how much ad revenue X employees fear the company could lose through the end of the year if advertisers do not return," The Times reported.

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  Those are some strange bumps at the top of the screen. [credit: temperlancer ]

Pixel phones always seem to ship with some bizarre hardware malady, and this year it's that not all the parts fit inside the phone quite right. Some users are reporting "bumpy" screens on their Pixel 8 and 8 Pros. The bumps aren't in the top surface, which is still smooth glass, but in the OLED display under the glass, which can show raised, usually circular bumps. It looks like components inside the phone are pressing up against the back of the OLED display, resulting in visible bumps under the right lighting conditions. Google gave a statement about the issue to 9to5Google and surprisingly says it's nothing to worry about.

Pixel 8 phones have a new display. When the screen is turned off, not in use and in specific lighting conditions, some users may see impressions from components in the device that look like small bumps. There is no functional impact to Pixel 8 performance or durability.

That's certainly an interesting take. All phones come with "new" displays, so what exactly does that first sentence mean? The bumps definitely aren't on every Pixel 8, and even the bumpy displays aren't noticeable in normal usage. The pictures and videos out there all involve people shining flashlights into a turned-off display, so it's not the end of the world. It's just worrying to have the delicate OLED panel be dented by internal components. Is this going to be ok long-term? Does this make the glass or OLED panel more susceptible to breaking after a shock? It's certainly not normal phone construction.

We count eight puncture marks in the back of this Pixel 8 Pro display. Check out the full-res version. (credit: JerryRigEverything)

Match up anyone's pockmark video with a teardown and you'll usually be able to spot the offending item. They are all either screw heads, spring clips designed to ground some component to the display copper, or the corners of some other component. No one item accounts for every pockmark, so everything seems just a little too close to the display on some models. YouTuber JerryRigEverything actually took apart a Pixel 8 Pro that had a bumpy screen. It wasn't noticed in the video, but freeze-frame it and you'll see some pretty alarming indents in the copper sheet on the back of the display that you can try to match up to the other half of the phone. They are almost puncture marks!

Enlarge / The fingerprint sensor on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Since Windows 10 introduced Windows Hello back in 2015, most Windows laptops and tablets have shipped with some kind of biometric authentication device installed. Sometimes that means a face- or iris-scanning infrared webcam, and sometimes it means a fingerprint sensor mounted on the power button or elsewhere on the device.

While these authentication methods are convenient, they aren't totally immune to security exploits. In 2021, researchers were able to fool some Windows Hello IR webcams with infrared images of users' faces. And last week, researchers at Blackwing Intelligence published an extensive document showing how they had managed to work around some of the most popular fingerprint sensors used in Windows PCs.

Security researchers Jesse D'Aguanno and Timo Teräs write that, with varying degrees of reverse-engineering and external hardware, they were able to fool the Goodix fingerprint sensor in a Dell Inspiron 15, the Synaptic sensor in a Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and the ELAN sensor in one of Microsoft's own Surface Pro Type Covers. These are just three laptop models from the wide universe of PCs, but one of these three companies usually does make the fingerprint sensor in every laptop we've reviewed in the last few years. It's likely that most Windows PCs with fingerprint readers will be vulnerable to similar exploits.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chesnot )

It has never been a big secret that underage kids use social networks like Instagram and Facebook despite the Meta-owned platforms' rule that every user be at least 13 years old. But while the company says publicly that it does what it can to remove kids' accounts, US states suing Meta say they have evidence that the company routinely ignores reports of underage users.

"Within the company, Meta's actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed, and zealously protected from disclosure to the public," said a newly unredacted complaint released last week.

Meta received 1.1 million reports of under-13 users on Instagram between 2019 and the first half of 2023, but "disabled only a fraction of those accounts and routinely continued to collect children's data without parental consent," the complaint said. In 2021, Meta received over 402,000 reports of under-13 Instagram users through its website and app reporting systems, but its "records show that fewer than 164,000—far fewer than half of the reported accounts—were 'disabled for potentially being under the age of 13' that year," the lawsuit said.

Enlarge / Alfa Romeo has a new crossover called the Tonale. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

I don't believe that Jeremy Clarkson was right when he said that you could only be a true petrolhead once you'd owned an Alfa Romeo, but the oafish TV presenter wasn't entirely off-base. I've just spent a week with Alfa's latest creation, the unfortunately named Tonale, and it has left me scratching my head. Beset by gremlins and not exactly cheap, it nonetheless charmed me in a way that I really don't think would have happened if I'd been driving, say, a Dodge.

Once upon a time, Alfa Romeo was Ferrari before there really was a Ferrari, building Grand Prix-winning race cars and drop-dead gorgeous road cars. That feels like a very long time ago now. A planned resurgence, set in motion while the brand was under the control of the late Sergio Marchionne, has fallen far short of its original ambitious sales targets—100,000 Guilias a year, we were told at the time.

But the brand lives on, and it has an all-new model out. The Tonale is a smaller crossover than the Stelvio, and here in the US it is only available with a plug-in hybrid powertrain. It pairs a 180 hp (135 kW), 1.3 L four-cylinder gasoline engine that drives the front wheels via a six-speed automatic transmission with a 121 hp (90 kW) electric motor that drives the rear wheels, fed by a 15.5 kWh lithium-ion battery.