Month: April 2025

If I knew how much I’d end up loving my Logitech mice, I would’ve taken better care of them from the start. The MX Master 3S and Lift are my favorite mice for productivity, but their rubber coating can get grimy quickly. My white MX Master 3S looks especially shameful atop my desk, so I’ve been considering purchasing a replacement for a while.

Overturning my plans, though, Logitech recently raised prices across 51 percent of its portfolio, as detailed by YouTube channel Cameron Doughterty Tech. The firm has raised prices by as much as 25 percent.

The MX Master 3S I just mentioned is now $120, which is $20 more than before. That 20 percent increase makes it even harder to justify a new mouse, which I already considered a luxury purchase.

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What does the "typical" exosolar system look like? We know it's not likely to look like our own Solar System, given that our familiar planets don't include entire classes of planets (Hot Jupiters! Mini-Neptunes!) that we've found elsewhere. And our discovery methods have been heavily biased toward planets that orbit close to their host star, so we don't really have a strong sense of what might be lurking in more distant orbits.

A new study released on Thursday describes a search for what are called "microlensing" events, where a planet acts as a gravitational lens that magnifies the star it's orbiting, causing it to brighten briefly. These events are difficult to capture, but can potentially indicate the presence of planets in more distant orbits. The researchers behind the new work find indications that there's a significant population of rocky super-Earths that are traveling in orbits similar to that of Jupiter and Saturn.

Lenses go micro

The two primary methods we've used to discover exoplanets are called transit and radial velocity. In the transit method, we simply watch the star for dips in the light it sends to Earth, which can be an indication of a planet orbiting in a way that it eclipses a small fraction of the star. For radial velocity, we look for red- or blue-shifts in the light received from the star, caused by a planet tugging the star in different directions as it orbits.

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Multiple studies and investigations have found that about half of American households watch TV and movies with subtitles on, but only a relatively small portion of those include someone with a hearing disability. That's because of the trouble many people have understanding dialogue in modern viewing situations, and Netflix has now introduced a subtitles option to help.

The closed captioning we've all been using for years includes not only the words the people on-screen are saying, but additional information needed by the hard of hearing, including character names, music cues ("dramatic music intensifies") and sound effects ("loud explosion").

For those who just wanted to make sure they didn't miss a word here and there, the frequent descriptions of sound effects and music could be distracting. This new format omits those extras, just including the spoken words and nothing else—even in the same language as the spoken dialogue.

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The FBI is offering $10 million for information about the China-state hacking group tracked as Salt Typhoon and its intrusion last year into sensitive networks belonging to multiple US telecommunications companies.

Salt Typhoon is one of a half-dozen or more hacking groups that work on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. Intelligence agencies and private security companies have concluded the group has been behind a string of espionage attacks designed to collect vital information, in part for use in any military conflicts that may arise in the future.

A broad and significant cyber campaign

The agency on Thursday published a statement offering up to $10 million, relocation assistance, and other compensation for information about Salt Typhoon. The announcement specifically sought information about the specific members of Salt Typhoon and the group's compromise of multiple US telecommunications companies last year.

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Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC platform was predicated on the idea that Windows computers with processors that have newfangled neural processing units would be able to do all sorts of nifty things with AI. But the most impressive features that Microsoft promised have been slow to arrive… after the company faced backlash over the potential privacy and […]

The post Lilbits: Recall, AI-enhanced search, and Click to Do are rolling out for Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft also preview support for swearing while using voice typing appeared first on Liliputing.

Elon Musk raced to build Colossus, the world's largest supercomputer, in Memphis, Tennessee. He bragged that construction only took 122 days and expected that his biggest AI rivals would struggle to catch up.

To leap ahead, his firm xAI "removed whatever was unnecessary" to complete the build, questioning "everything" that might delay operations and taking the timeline "into our own hands," xAI's website said.

Now, xAI is facing calls to shut down gas turbines that power the supercomputer, as Memphis residents in historically Black communities—which have long suffered from industrial pollution causing poor air quality and decreasing life expectancy—allege that xAI has been secretly running more turbines than the local government knows, without permits.

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Google's oldest smart thermostats have an expiration date. The company has announced that the first and second generation Nest Learning Thermostats will lose support in October 2025, disabling most of the connected features. Google is offering some compensation for anyone still using these devices, but there's no Google upgrade for European users. Google is also discontinuing its only European model, and it's not planning to release another.

Both affected North American thermostats predate Google's ownership of the company, which it acquired in 2014. Nest released the original Learning Thermostat to almost universal praise in 2011, with the sequel arriving a year later. Google's second-gen Euro unit launched in 2014. Since launch, all these devices have been getting regular software updates and have migrated across multiple app redesigns. However, all good things must come to an end.

As Google points out, these products have had a long life, and they're not being rendered totally inoperable. Come October 25, 2025, these devices will no longer receive software updates or connect to Google's cloud services. That means you won't be able to control them from the Google Home app or via Assistant (or more likely Gemini by that point). The devices will still work as a regular dumb thermostat to control temperature, and scheduling will remain accessible from the thermostat's screen.

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It's long been the stuff of science fiction: humans achieving immortality by uploading their consciousness into a silicon virtual paradise, ruled over by a benevolent super-intelligent AI. Or maybe one dreams of leaving a dying Earth to colonize Mars or other distant planets. It's a tantalizing visionary future that has been embraced by tech billionaires in particular. But is that future truly the utopian ideal, or something potentially darker? And are those goals even scientifically feasible?

These are the kinds of questions astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker poses in his new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. Becker's widely praised first book, What Is Real?, focused on competing interpretations of quantum mechanics and questioned the long dominance of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation championed by Niels Bohr, among other luminaries. This time around, he's tackling Silicon Valley's far-reaching ideas about the future, which have moved out of online subcultures and into mainstream culture, including our political discourse.

"It seemed like it was only going to become more relevant and someone needed to speak out about it, and I didn't see enough people connecting the dots in a way that looked right to me," Becker told Ars. "One current critique of Silicon Valley is that they moved fast and broke democracy and institutional norms. That's true. Another is that they're contemptuous of government, and I think that's true, too. But there wasn't much critique of their visions of the future, maybe because not enough people realized they meant it. Even among Silicon Valley critics, there was this idea that at the very least, you could trust that the statements they made about science and technology were true because they were experts in science and technology. That's not the case."

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Chinese PC makers have been offering mini ITX boards for build-your-own NAS solutions for at least a few years, but I recently ran across one that has an interesting mix of features including 6 SATA connectors for storage and three LAN ports: two with support for 2.5 Gb Ethernet connections and one with support for […]

The post This Intel Twin Lake mini ITX NAS board has 6 SATA connectors and 2.5 GbE and 10 Gb LAN ports appeared first on Liliputing.

Nearly a year after announcing the feature, Microsoft is finally ready to roll the controversial Windows Recall feature out to the general public, the company announced today on its Windows Experience Blog.

Only available on Copilot+ PCs, a subset of Windows 11 systems sold within the last year or so, Recall takes continuous screenshots of everything you do on your PC, saving them, scraping text from them, and saving it all in a searchable database. This obviously has major security and privacy implications—anyone who can get access to your Recall database can see nearly everything you've done on your PC—which is why Microsoft's initial rollout attempt was such a mess.

Recall's long road to release involved a rushed initial almost-launch, harsh criticism of its (then mostly nonexistent) security protections, multiple delays, a major under-the-hood overhaul, and five months of testing in Microsoft's Windows Insider beta program. Microsoft signaled that Recall was nearly ready for release two weeks ago when it came to the near-final Release Preview channel.

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