Month: May 2024

Enlarge (credit: ullstein bild / Getty Images News)

Federal authorities have arrested a 23-year-old Taiwanese national and charged him with running an online market that sold $100 million worth of illicit narcotics, including fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, LSD, and ketamine.

The authorities said that for almost four years, Rui-Siang Lin operated and owned the Incognito Market, an online marketplace on the dark web that users worldwide visited to buy and sell illegal narcotics. The marketplace facilitated transactions with many of the same features provided by legitimate e-commerce sites, including buyer and user registration, branding, advertising, and customer service. When registered buyers visited the site using the Tor browser, they were presented with the following graphic:

(credit: Justice Department)

The site allowed buyers to search through thousands of listings for narcotics of their choice. It opened in October 2020 and, as reported by KrebsOnSecurity, closed last March when its operators extorted both buyers and sellers of fees ranging from $100 to $2,000 in exchange for not revealing text messages and transaction records showing their participation in the marketplace. In the 41 months that Incognito Market was open, it facilitated the sale of more than $100 million of narcotics. By June 2023, the site was generating sales of $5 million per month.

Enlarge / A better monitor refresh rate might help with all that motion blurring... (credit: Getty Images)

Just a couple of years ago, companies like Nvidia were talking up prototype 500 Hz gaming monitors as having "benefits [for] every game and gamer, not just competitive games and esports pros." Now, the high frame rate experts at Blur Busters bring word of a 4K, 1,000 Hz prototype screen being shown off by Chinese panel maker TCL CSOT at the manufacturer-focused DisplayWeek 2024 conference.

TCL's proof-of-concept panel is all the more impressive for not sacrificing resolution in the name of its high frame rate—many current 480 Hz monitors tend to top out at 1080p resolutions or offer "dual mode" options for higher resolutions at lower maximum refresh rates. And while recent advancements in pixel-flipping times have enabled TCL's LCD prototype, Blur Busters estimates that 1,000 Hz OLED displays could be commercialized as soon as 2027.

4K 1000Hz being shown off at #DisplayWeek2024 by TCL CSOT pic.twitter.com/xc2qsYocxX

— Blur Busters (@BlurBusters) May 15, 2024

The apparent, impending breaking of the four-digit refresh rate threshold got us thinking: Are we finally approaching a point of diminishing returns in monitor-makers' long-running battle of the Hz? Or is 1,000 Hz just the latest stepping stone to realms of motion smoothness yet unimagined by most gamers?

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

If things ultimately work out as hoped, brain implants will ultimately restore communication for those who have become paralyzed due to injury or disease. But we're a long way from that future, and the implants are currently limited to testing in clinical trials.

One of those clinical trials, based at the University of California, San Francisco, has now inadvertently revealed something about how the brain handles language, because one of the patients enrolled in the trial was bilingual, using English and Spanish. By tracking activity in the area of the brain where the intention to speak gets translated into control over the vocal tract, researchers found that both languages produce consistent signals in this area, so training the system to pick up English phrases would help improve its recognition of Spanish.

Making some noise

Understanding bilingualism is obviously useful for understanding how the brain handles language in general. The new paper describing the work also points out that restoring communications in multiple languages should be a goal for restoring communications to people. Bilingual people will often change languages based on different social situations or sometimes do so within a sentence in order to express themselves more clearly. They often describe bilingual abilities as a key component of their personalities.

Enlarge / A screenshot of Microsoft's new "Recall" feature in action. (credit: Microsoft)

At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called "Recall" for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. To make it work, Recall records everything users do on their PC, including activities in apps, communications in live meetings, and websites visited for research. Despite encryption and local storage, the new feature raises privacy concerns for certain Windows users.

"Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds," Microsoft says on its website. "The snapshots are encrypted and saved on your PC’s hard drive. You can use Recall to locate the content you have viewed on your PC using search or on a timeline bar that allows you to scroll through your snapshots."

By performing a Recall action, users can access a snapshot from a specific time period, providing context for the event or moment they are searching for. It also allows users to search through teleconference meetings they've participated in and videos watched using an AI-powered feature that transcribes and translates speech.

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  Microsoft's Surface Pro 11 comes with Arm chips and an optional OLED display panel. [credit: Microsoft ]

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Microsoft has announced a pair of new devices powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite processors. They're far from Microsoft's first PCs with Arm processors in them—2012's original Surface, the Surface Pro X, and the Surface Pro 9 with 5G have all shipped with Arm's chips instead of Intel's or AMD's. But today's new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are the first Arm devices to be the primary Surface offerings rather than a side offering, and they're the first to credibly claim that they can both outperform comparable Intel- and AMD-designed chips while offering better battery life, a la Apple's M1 chip in 2020.

One caveat that I hadn't seen mentioned in Microsoft's presentation or in other coverage of the announcement, though—Microsoft says that both of these devices have fans. Apple still uses fans for the MacBook Pro lineup, but the MacBook Air is totally fanless. Bear that in mind when reading Microsoft's claims about performance.