Month: May 2024

Enlarge / RIP, Neofetch. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Asahi Linux, the project that aims to bring desktop Linux to Apple hardware with Apple silicon—the M series of chips—is out with Fedora Asahi Remix 40. More hardware features of Apple devices are supported, the Fedora Linux 40-based distro ships with KDE's new Plasma 6 desktop, and untold numbers of bugs are squashed, to be replaced with reams more.

Fedora Asahi Remix is a "fully integrated distro," according to the Asahi team, and you can "expect a solid and high-quality experience without any unwanted surprises." It supports all the M1 and M2 devices in the MacBook, Mac Mini, Mac Studio, and iMac lines. It's OpenGL 4.6 and OpenGL ES 3.2 certified, and comes with "the best Linux laptop audio you've ever heard."

So, should you install it on your Mac? Keep scrolling down Asahi's release page and check the "Device support" section. Still missing from most M-series Apple devices are support for Thunderbolt and USB4, built-in microphones, and Touch ID, as well as USB-C display support. Speakers are not supported on the iMac. And HDMI audio is in rough shape, being able to "break audio on the system completely."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Monday, Stack Overflow and OpenAI announced a new API partnership that will integrate Stack Overflow's technical content with OpenAI's ChatGPT AI assistant. However, the deal has sparked controversy among Stack Overflow's user community, with many expressing anger and protest over the use of their contributed content to support and train AI models.

"I hate this. I'm just going to delete/deface my answers one by one," wrote one user on sister site Stack Exchange. "I don't care if this is against your silly policies, because as this announcement shows, your policies can change at a whim without prior consultation of your stakeholders. You don't care about your users, I don't care about you."

Stack Overflow is a popular question-and-answer site for software developers that allows users to ask and answer technical questions related to coding. The site has a large community of developers who contribute knowledge and expertise to help others solve programming problems. Over the past decade, Stack Overflow has become a heavily utilized resource for many developers seeking solutions to common coding challenges.

Enlarge / America sends five times more freight by truck than rail, so it's important to start making those trucks more fuel efficient and safer. (credit: Volvo Trucks North America)

A while ago we checked out Super Truck II, a Department of Energy program that has been challenging the makers of Class 8 heavy trucks—the ones that haul up to 80,000 lbs (36.3 tonnes) of freight. Trunk companies like Daimler Trucks North America and Volvo Trucks North America were challenged to build a big rig that used 50 percent less fuel than the machines on the road in 2017, and they stepped up.

It'll be a while before all of the efficiency improvements make their way onto production trucks, as that program has only just come to a close. But the truck makers are already starting to apply some of the lessons to production vehicles. Like Volvo's new VNL, a Class 8 long-haul truck that's been purpose-built just for our market.

"It's replacing the previous generation that had been around for several decades," explained Keith Brandis, VP of systems and solutions at VTNA. That was based on a global cab concept and design, where this was a completely new clean sheet for North America."

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Heat pumps are the most energy-efficient way of controlling indoor temperature. By moving heat between locations, they avoid the inefficiencies of generating heat in the first place. But that doesn't mean they can't be made more efficient.

Most current heat pumps rely on materials that exhibit large changes in temperature in response to changing pressures, but the energy required to pressurize them gets lost when they're cycled back to a low-pressure state, absorbing heat from their surroundings. That has gotten people interested in electrocaloric devices, where changes in temperature are driven by storing charges in a material. Since it essentially acts as a big capacitor, much of the electrical energy involved can be pulled back out as the system cycles.

But capacitors aren't especially mobile, so electrocaloric systems tended to use fluids to move heat into and out of the capacitor as it cycles. Now, however, researchers have developed an electrocaloric system that moves itself between hot and cold environments, radically simplifying the system and eliminating some of the energy required for it to operate. They even demonstrate it effectively cooling a computer chip.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

A Federal Bureau of Investigation official recently urged employees to "look for ways" to conduct warrantless surveillance on US residents, an internal email obtained by Wired shows. FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate's email was reportedly sent on April 20, the same day President Biden signed a bill that was criticized as a major expansion of warrantless surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Abbate's email seems to argue that FBI employees should make frequent use of warrantless surveillance on US people in order to justify the continued existence of the program. "To continue to demonstrate why tools like this are essential to our mission, we need to use them, while also holding ourselves accountable for doing so properly and in compliance with legal requirements," Abbate wrote, according to Wired.

Abbate oversees all FBI domestic and international investigative and intelligence activities. His email made reference to a new requirement that FBI personnel obtain prior approval from an FBI supervisor or attorney before making queries about US people.

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For years, Dell customers have been on the receiving end of scam calls from people claiming to be part of the computer maker’s support team. The scammers call from a valid Dell phone number, know the customer's name and address, and use information that should be known only to Dell and the customer, including the service tag number, computer model, and serial number associated with a past purchase. Then the callers attempt to scam the customer into making a payment, installing questionable software, or taking some other potentially harmful action.

Recently, according to numerous social media posts such as this one, Dell notified an unspecified number of customers that names, physical addresses, and hardware and order information associated with previous purchases was somehow connected to an “incident involving a Dell portal, which contains a database with limited types of customer information.” The vague wording, which Dell is declining to elaborate on, appears to confirm an April 29 post by Daily Dark Web reporting the offer to sell purported personal information of 49 million people who bought Dell gear from 2017 to 2024.

Ad posted to Breach Forums, as reported by Daily Dark Web. (credit: Daily Dark Web)

The customer information affected is identical in both the Dell notification and the for-sale ad, which was posted to, and later removed from, Breach Forums, an online bazaar for people looking to buy or sell stolen data. The customer information stolen, according to both Dell and the ad, included:

Invading aliens transform a bustling New York City into a silent wasteland in the latest trailer for A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel to the first two films in the hugely successful horror franchise.

(Mild spoilers for A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place: Part II below.)

As reported previously, the original film began in medias res over a month after an alien invasion set in early 2020. Sightless extraterrestrial creatures wiped out most of the humans and animals on Earth. They hunt by sound thanks to their hypersensitive hearing and are difficult to kill because they sport tough armored skin. The film centered on the Abbott family, struggling to survive a few months after the initial invasion. Dad Lee (John Krasinski) was an engineer focused on keeping his family alive each day. Wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) was a doctor, pregnant with their fourth child.

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  The Moto G Stylus 2024. [credit: Motorola ]

Motorola's latest phone is the 2024 Moto G Stylus 5G. For fans of pen input there isn't much out there other than this and the Galaxy S Ultra line, but for $400 you can get a phone with a stowable stylus.

The design is just a bit interesting thanks to the "vegan leather" (that's a type of plastic) back, which gives the phone some personality. You get flat aluminum sides, a flat screen, and a hole-punch camera. Android does not have a lot of built-in stylus features, so you'll mostly be relying on whatever Motorola has cooked up; the website only shows a "Moto Note" app and the ability to send your drawings over instant messaging, plus there's whatever you can find on the Play Store.

This is a mid-range phone, so for the SoC, we have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1. That's four Arm Cortex A78 cores and four Cortex A55 cores, built with a quite modern 4 nm process. There's a 6.7-inch, 120 Hz, 2400×1080 OLED display, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 5000 mAh battery with 30 W wired charging and 15 W wireless charging. Pictures will come from a 50 MP main camera, 13 MP wide-angle, or a front 32 MP camera. There's a MicroSD slot, headphone jack, in-screen fingerprint reader, stowable stylus (of course), and NFC. Wi-Fi only goes up to 802.11ac. That's "Wi-Fi 5" and is pretty old, but it will get the job done, I guess. The "IP52" dust- and water-resistant rating is also not great, promising only protection from some water drops at certain angles.