Month: March 2024

Enlarge / A marketing image for Samsung's 83-inch S90C, its first OLED TV to quietly use an LG Display WOLED panel. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung rejuvenated the OLED TV market when its display manufacturing subsidiary, Samsung Display, announced QD-OLED two years ago. Quantum dot-infused OLED panels brought the promise of richer color compared to LG Display's white OLED panels (WOLED) and represented a viable competitor to what had become OLED TVs' only option. Various OEMs, from Samsung Electronics to Sony, bragged about the purported advantages QD-OLED brought over WOLED. Samsung is not so boastful these days.

Samsung's 2024 OLED TV lineup will feature TVs that use both QD-OLED and WOLED panels. Samsung started doing this last year with the 83-inch S90C. But this year, it will reportedly be even harder to tell if a new Samsung OLED TV has quantum dots.

Samsung announced the entry-level S85D, the S90D, and the flagship S95D in January, without specifying the type of OLED panel tech(s) involved. But it was still apparent that the S90D would include WOLED options since Samsung said it would come in 42, 48, 55, 65, 77, and 83-inch sizes. QD-OLED doesn't come in 42, 48, or 83 inches.

Enlarge / In Small Radios Big Televisions, you get the sense that workers trapped inside a series of siloed factories rely on ephemeral, easily distorted media to escape their realities. In the game, that is. (credit: Fire Face)

Warner Bros. Discovery, as part of its ongoing effort to stretch the definition of "entertainment company," recently told a solo indie developer it would be "retiring" his 2016 dreamlike puzzle adventure game Small Radios Big Televisions from the Steam and PlayStation stores. The developer, in response, has made it free to download for PC, giving us a rare chance to actually experience the thing that a giga-corp has determined to be not worth your time, before it is wiped from the archives.

In a thread on X (formerly Twitter) Tuesday, Owen Deery, a self-described "small Canadian game developer" who works as Fire Face, provided a few details in replies. Deery doesn't control the sale price of the game but will still get royalties from the games while they're up. Otherwise, you could purchase the hard-synth soundtrack as a show of support, which in this author's opinion is very good music for working or feeling a combination of nostalgia and magnetic dissolution at the same time.

Ars reached out to Deery, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Adult Swim Games for comment and will update this post with new information.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

VMware is urging customers to patch critical vulnerabilities that make it possible for hackers to break out of sandbox and hypervisor protections in all versions, including out-of-support ones, of VMware ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, and Cloud Foundation products.

A constellation of four vulnerabilities—two carrying severity ratings of 9.3 out of a possible 10—are serious because they undermine the fundamental purpose of the VMware products, which is to run sensitive operations inside a virtual machine that’s segmented from the host machine. VMware officials said that the prospect of a hypervisor escape warranted an immediate response under the company’s IT Infrastructure Library, a process usually abbreviated as ITIL.

“Emergency change”

“In ITIL terms, this situation qualifies as an emergency change, necessitating prompt action from your organization,” the officials wrote in a post. “However, the appropriate security response varies depending on specific circumstances.”

Enlarge / A Fortnite loading screen displayed on an iPhone in 2018, when Apple and Epic weren't at each other's throats. (credit: Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Last month, Epic announced that Apple had approved an iOS developer account for Epic Games Sweden, thus securing a path for Fortnite to return to the iOS App Store for the first time since 2020 (in Europe, at least). But Apple has now terminated that Swedish developer account in a move Epic says is a "serious violation of the DMA [that] shows Apple has no intention of allowing true competition on iOS devices."

No competing App Store for you

Epic is referring there to the Digital Markets Act, the European regulation that has forced Apple to officially allow sideloaded apps on European iOS devices for the first time. Since Apple announced its DMA compliance plans in January, though, many third-party developers have loudly complained about the stringent terms Apple is imposing on companies that want to establish alternative App Stores on iOS devices. Epic Games was among those public complainants, with CEO Tim Sweeney publicly calling Apple's policies "a devious new instance of Malicious Compliance" full of "hot garbage."

Epic said Apple denied its request for a DMA consultation that could have helped streamline its plans to return to iOS. Despite this, in February, Epic signaled a willingness to jump through Apple's hoops, using a newly approved developer account for Epic Games Sweden AB as a way to "start developing the Epic Games Store on iOS soon" ahead of a planned 2024 launch.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

For months, some of the biggest tech companies have been wrapped up in discussions with the European Commission (EC), seeking feedback and tweaking their plans to ensure their core platform services comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) ahead of that law taking force in the European Union tomorrow.

Under the DMA, companies designated as gatekeepers—Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft—must follow strict rules to ensure that they don't engage in unfair business practices that could limit consumer choice in core platform services. These include app stores, search engines, social networking services, online marketplaces, operating systems, web browsers, advertising services, cloud computing services, virtual assistants, and certain messaging services.

At its heart, the DMA requires more interoperability than ever, making it harder for gatekeepers to favor their own services or block other businesses from reaching consumers on their platforms.

Enlarge / Workers at a cobalt mine in the Mwenga territory of South Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on July 14, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Anadolu )

Apple and other major tech companies don't have to compensate victims of forced child labor that provided cobalt for the lithium-ion batteries used in many electronic devices, a US appeals court ruled. The lawsuit filed by former miners from the Democratic Republic of the Congo alleged that Apple, Alphabet, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla violated a trafficking law that makes it illegal to participate in a "venture" that engages in forced labor.

"The plaintiffs allege the technology companies participated in a venture with their cobalt suppliers by purchasing the metal through the global supply chain," the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit noted in its ruling issued yesterday.

A US District Court previously dismissed the lawsuit, and a panel of three appeals court judges unanimously affirmed the dismissal yesterday. "Purchasing an unspecified amount of cobalt through the global supply chain is not 'participation in a venture' within the meaning of the TVPRA [Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008]," the ruling said. "We therefore affirm the district court's dismissal of the complaint."

Enlarge / Workers at a cobalt mine in the Mwenga territory of South Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on July 14, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Anadolu )

Apple and other major tech companies don't have to compensate victims of forced child labor that provided cobalt for the lithium-ion batteries used in many electronic devices, a US appeals court ruled. The lawsuit filed by former miners from the Democratic Republic of the Congo alleged that Apple, Alphabet, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla violated a trafficking law that makes it illegal to participate in a "venture" that engages in forced labor.

"The plaintiffs allege the technology companies participated in a venture with their cobalt suppliers by purchasing the metal through the global supply chain," the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit noted in its ruling issued yesterday.

A US District Court previously dismissed the lawsuit, and a panel of three appeals court judges unanimously affirmed the dismissal yesterday. "Purchasing an unspecified amount of cobalt through the global supply chain is not 'participation in a venture' within the meaning of the TVPRA [Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008]," the ruling said. "We therefore affirm the district court's dismissal of the complaint."

Enlarge / The Huawei Mate 60 Pro+. It's a phone made without most of the traditional US-allied suppliers. (credit: Huawei)

Counterpoint Research has an interesting new report on the return of Huawei in China. Market share for the Chinese government's favorite tech company has shot up 64 percent for the first six weeks of 2024. Counterpoint says this is thanks to "continued demand for Huawei’s Mate 60 series," Huawei's first big smartphone release in its US-sanctions comeback tour.

Counterpoint says the market share for the major US incumbent, Apple, has plummeted 24 percent in 2024, allowing Huawei's 17 percent market share to beat Apple's 16 percent. For the early days of the year, Huawei is now the No. 2 smartphone manufacturer in China, Vivo is No. 1, and Apple is tied for third with Honor, a Huawei offshoot. I bet the Chinese government is thrilled.

Huawei was supposed to be dead! For a time, the company was crushed by US sanctions, which really kicked in around 2021. The company mostly retracted to China-only distribution and lost most of its market share thanks to dwindling chip supplies. A few years later, Huawei is getting its homegrown ecosystem back in gear, enough to release the Mate 60 Pro, the company's post-sanctions flagship.