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A California federal appeals court has denied legal immunity to Snap for the 2017 death of two teens and a 20-year-old when their car crashed into a tree at 113 miles per hour (180 km/h). Parents of two of the boys sued Snap, arguing that Snapchat's "Speed Filter" encouraged the boys to accelerate their car to more than 100 miles per hour.

Last year, Snap convinced a federal trial judge that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shielded Snap from liability in the case. The once-obscure 1996 law has become a frequent source of controversy as technology giants have used it to disclaim responsibility for harmful content on their platforms.

Snap, maker of the popular Snapchat messaging app, argued that the law gave it immunity in the boys' death. Snapchat pioneered the concept of image filters that has been widely copied by other apps. In 2017, Snapchat's offerings included a Speed Filter that displayed a user's current speed—either on its own or superimposed on the user's photo. Users could use this filter to show their friends how fast they were moving.

Enlarge / RDNA 3 is expected to run on TSMC's 5 nm process and become available in late 2022 or early 2023. (credit: AMD)

According to wccftech and well-known hardware leaker @KittyYYuko, AMD's next-generation Radeon graphics cards should be a massive upgrade—as much as three times faster than AMD's current flagship graphics cards.

In the above reply to RedGamingTech's Paul Eccleston, @KittyYYuko claims a 3x performance increase when upgrading from AMD's flagship Navi 21 (as found in current-gen RX 6800XT and RX 6900 XT cards) to Navi 31.

RDNA3—the architecture beneath the new GPUs—will shift process-node size from 7 nm down to 5 nm, which tends to result in major performance gains and even larger performance-per-watt gains. The downshift in process node isn't enough to account for the claimed performance uplift by itself, though—that comes from making the GPU itself significantly bigger and meaner.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The worldwide semiconductor shortage continues to affect the automotive industry. One by one, automakers have warned that the silicon chip shortage will negatively impact production output and revenues in the coming months.

Renault identified the chip shortage as a major problem when reporting its Q1 results in April. A week later, Ford said it expects to lose half of its Q2 production, up from 17 percent in Q1. And on Wednesday, Stellantis Chief Financial Officer Richard Palmer added to the chorus, warning that "it would be imprudent to assume that the issue is just going to go away."

The shortage has its roots in the pandemic as carmakers canceled pending semiconductor orders in the face of heavily reduced demand for new vehicles. Since then, a drought in Taiwan and a fire at a Japanese chipmaker have compounded the problem, as has strong demand for consumer electronics.

Enlarge / Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle is a capsule with a view. (credit: Blue Origin)

On Wednesday, Blue Origin officially announced that its first crewed flight to space is targeted for July 20, suggesting that its extended period of test flights is finally coming to an end. Rather than simply placing a seat on sale, however, the company announced it will auction one off, with the proceeds going to the company's charity.

New Shepard flights will take passengers above much of the atmosphere and into space, then allow them an extended period of apparent weightlessness as the capsule free-falls back to Earth. The capsule itself is relatively spacious and is equipped with large windows and cushy-looking seats, which are clearly meant to make flight a pleasant experience. The free fall is followed by a parachute-assisted landing, with the booster performing a powered landing separately.

If that sounds like a compelling experience to you, your first chance to get in on it is via an auction for a single seat on its first crewed flight. You can get the process started now by submitting a bid at the Blue Origin website. On May 19, the highest bids will be unsealed, and any further online bidding will have to exceed an existing bid. On June 12, the auction will wrap up with live online bidding.

Pasta comes in many shapes and sizes, which is part of its inherent delight. But all those irregular shapes tend to be inefficient when it comes to packaging. So what if you could buy your pasta of choice in a simple, compact 2D form and then watch it take on the desired final 3D shape as it cooks, thereby doubling the fun factor? Scientists at Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) have figured out a simple mechanism to do just that, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.

"We were inspired by flat-packed furniture and how it saved space, made storage easier, and reduced the carbon footprint associated with transportation," said co-author Lining Yao, director of the Morphing Matter Lab at CMU's School of Computer Science. "We decided to look at how the morphing matter technology we were developing in the lab could create flat-packed pastas that offered similar sustainability outcomes." According to the team's calculations, even if you pack macaroni pasta perfectly, you will still end up with as much as 67 percent of the volume being air. The ability to make flat pasta for shipping that takes on a specific 3D shape when cooked is one potential solution.

Yao and co-author Wen Wang, also at CMU, began experimenting with what they term "transformative appetite," or shape-changing food, several years ago, inspired by their work with a bacterium that would shrink or expand in response to humidity—the same bacterium used to ferment soybeans to create natto, a popular Japanese breakfast dish that frankly smells a bit like aged cheese (and hence can be an acquired taste).

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  Plume's new Wi-Fi 6 Superpods are visually indistinguishable from the older 802.11ac version, pictured here. [credit: Plume ]

Today, Wi-Fi mesh vendor Plume released its newest gear—a Wi-Fi 6 enabled version of its flagship Superpod design. We were the first to get our hands on the new Superpods, which retail at $159 apiece. Plume recommended four Superpods total for our 3,500-square-foot test house, so that's precisely how we tested.

To give the Superpod design every chance to shine, we used a new Wi-Fi 6 enabled test fleet—one equipped with Intel AX201 Wi-Fi 6 adapters in place of the 802.11ac Intel 7265 adapters in our old test fleet. But replacing the test fleet means needing to generate new baselines. So rather than re-using old tests, we broke out our original 802.11ac Superpods and a three-piece 802.11ac Amazon Eero mesh kit to serve as a competitive measurement baseline.

All three of these kits are top performers—including the Amazon Eero, which routinely beats much higher-spec and higher-priced kits in our testing. And Plume's Superpods have been leading the pack in our various iterations of The Great Ars Mesh Wi-Fi Throwdown for at least five years now.

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  The YouTube Shorts beta. It's like TikTok. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

YouTube's TikTok clone, "Shorts," is out of beta and should roll out to everyone in the US by next week. Shorts are 15- to 60-second videos that, on mobile, launch in a full-screen, vertical video interface that users can swipe between. Shorts are just an alternative interface for YouTube videos, and on the desktop site or on a channel page, Shorts appear as regular videos in the normal YouTube interface.

A big draw for TikTok is the video editor, which comes with all sorts of effects, music, filters, and variable playback speeds. YouTube's Shorts editor doesn't have nearly as many features as Tiktok, but Google says that "over the next year, we'll be releasing a ton of new filters and effects so you can get the vibe you want."

Even if you don't want to watch Shorts, the most noticeable change from this rollout will be a new "Shorts" tab in the mobile app. The tab will live in the bottom app-wide tab bar. This will give users a dedicated space to explore all the TikTok-type content people have been creating, and it provides a blazingly bright app-wide advertisement for the new feature. The bottom tab bar is premium real estate in the YouTube app—it's present on nearly every screen of the app, and it elevates Shorts to the same importance level as "Subscriptions," "Library," and the home page. Previously, Shorts only appeared in an easily ignorable horizontal carousel on the home screen. Shorts will be taking the spot of the "Explore" tab, which shows trending videos. The Explore page has been demoted to the home page.