Enlarge / The Galaxy S24 render. This sure does look familiar. (credit: OnLeaks×SmartPrix)

It’s Galaxy S24 leak season! The phone, which won’t be out until early 2024, is already being detailed by OnLeaks and SmartPrix. The two have dueling posts for the S24 Ultra and another for the cheaper S24 and S24 Plus. As usual, these are CAD-derived renders that are usually passed around to accessory makers, so while all the important bits are in the right spot down to the millimeter, don’t read too much into the unconfirmed finer details.

First up are the cheaper Plus and base models, which share a design. The first thing you’ll notice this year is a switch from rounded color-matched sides to a flat metal band that wraps around the perimeter. The new flat band makes the S24 awfully close to an iPhone design, with only the camera block and lack of a dynamic island as the differentiators. Would you believe Samsung has also discovered an affection for titanium and upgraded the phones with slimmer bezels? I swear I’ve heard all this before somewhere recently.

The titanium band has a big oval cutout on the right side of the phone, and that’s reportedly for a UWB (ultra-wideband) antenna. Previously, this was reserved for the Ultra and Plus models, but now even the base model is getting it. Samsung, and seemingly everyone else in the Android ecosystem, is working on coming up with Bluetooth tracker competitors to the AirTag, and UWB’s directional location features will be a core part of that. UWB is not on many Android phones, though, so this is progress.

Enlarge / Egwene abides. (credit: Amazon Studios)

Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode of Amazon’s new WoT TV series. Now they’re doing it again for season two—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory. These recaps won’t cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We’re going to do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there’s always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven’t read the books, these recaps aren’t for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season two will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Friday. This write-up covers episode seven, which was released on September 29.

Prophecy comes at the most inconvenient times. (credit: Amazon Studios)

Mat: “THIS IS FINE. THIS IS FINE. THIS IS FINE. THIS IS FINE.” (credit: Amazon Studios)

The False Dragon Logain Ablar still has a role to play.

Siuan Sanche arrives in Falme. You can tell she’s the Amyrlin because she’s got the biggest hat. (credit: Amazon Studios)

The Horn of Valere—remember that thing? It’s still in its box with High Lord Turak. (credit: Amazon Studios)

“You’re a funny sul’dam, Renna—I like you. That’s why I’m going to kill you last.” (credit: Amazon Studios)

(credit: WoT Wiki)

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A few years before Microsoft went all-in on a ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine, the company had another idea for its perennial, also-ran search engine: sell it to Apple.

A report in Bloomberg, sourced from people familiar with the early theoretical sales talks, states that Microsoft pitched Bing as a way for Apple to replace Google as the default search provider on iPhones, MacBooks, and other devices.

The deal didn’t make it past the conversation stage, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft executives approached Eddie Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, who brokered Apple’s deal with Google—purportedly worth between $4 and $7 billion in 2020—for Google’s long-standing default placement. Google’s paid presence on Apple devices has been reviewed in court recently as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust trial over Google’s search business.

Enlarge / Cars parked at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, on February 10, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Josh Edelson)

The US agency also alleged that Tesla “unlawfully retaliated against Black employees who opposed actions they perceived to constitute unlawful employment discrimination.” The lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California and alleges that the discrimination has been ongoing since May 2015.

“Throughout the Relevant Period, racial slurs, chief among them, [different variations of the N-word] as well as racist epithets and race-based stereotyping permeated Tesla’s Fremont Factory subjecting Black employees to racial hostility and offenses,” the lawsuit said. “Non-Black perpetrators of the racial misconduct have worked in a variety of positions at Tesla, including as managers, supervisors, line leads, production leads, production associates, and temporary workers.”

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RIP to one of my favorite loopholes: Microsoft quietly announced earlier this month (via Neowin) that users will no longer be able to install and activate Windows 10 or Windows 11 with old Windows 7 and Windows 8 product keys.

At least for now, though, it seems like this change will only apply to future Windows versions. We were able to activate a fresh Windows 11 Pro 22H2 install with a Windows 8 Pro product key as of this morning, as was Neowin. But Neowin was unable to activate a newer Insider Preview build of Windows, suggesting that the change will mostly affect newer Windows versions. We’ve asked Microsoft for clarification and will update this story if we receive any.

When Windows 10 originally launched in 2015, it did so as a free upgrade to all users of Windows 7 and Windows 8—the vast majority of the Windows user base at the time. Microsoft wanted to encourage developers to use its new technologies by giving them the largest possible install base of people on the newest version of Windows. Not only would people running Windows 7 and Windows 8 be offered the option to upgrade-in-place to Windows 10, but product keys from those versions of Windows would activate the analogous editions of Windows 10.

Enlarge / All four RS-25 main engines are now installed the core stage for the Artemis II mission.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Iran has launched a small satellite. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps successfully launched a small satellite named Noor 3 into orbit Wednesday, Reuters reported. This military satellite launched aboard a Qased rocket, a small launch vehicle powered by a liquid-fueled booster stage. The Qased, which means “messenger” in Persian, is reportedly capable of carrying a payload up to about 100 pounds (45 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit. Publicly available US military tracking data indicated the rocket deployed the Noor 3 satellite into an orbit about 280 miles (450 kilometers) above Earth.

Even more Google products are getting the ax this week. Next up is Google Jamboard, a $5,000 digital whiteboard (and its $600-a-year fee) and software ecosystem marketed to schools and corporations. Google has a new post detailing the “Next phase of digital whiteboarding for Google Workspace,” and the future for Jamboard is that there is no future. In “late 2024,” the whole project will shut down, and we don’t just mean the hardware will stop being for sale; the cloud-based apps will stop working, too.

Most people probably haven’t ever heard of Jamboard, but this was a giant 55-inch, 4K touchscreen on a rolling stand that launched in 2016. Like most Google touchscreens, this ran Android with a locked-down, custom interface on top instead of the usual phone interface. The digital whiteboard could be drawn on using the included stylus or your fingers, and it even came with a big plastic “eraser” that would remove items. The SoC was an Nvidia Jetson TX1 (a quad-core Cortex-A57 CPU attached to a beefy Maxwell GPU), and it had a built-in camera, microphone, and speakers for video calls. There was HDMI input and Google cast support, and it came in whimsical colors like red, gray, and blue (it feels like Google was going for an iMac rainbow and quit halfway).

Google’s secret sauce here was that Jamboard was heavily integrated with Google Workspace, so it could pull in items from Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and all your whiteboard work was saved in a filetype called “Jams” in the usual Google storage. Like the other Workspace apps, this all worked live over the Internet. People not in front of the touchscreen could launch the “Jamboard app” instead, letting them get in on the whiteboard action remotely, complete with live handwriting.

Enlarge / Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel during a Bloomberg Television interview on the closing day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on May 26, 2022. (credit: Getty | Jason Alden)

In the current COVID-19 booster campaign, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is paying around $82 for each dose of Moderna’s 2023–2024 updated mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for its program to provide vaccine for the uninsured. That price is a little over three times the $26 per dose the federal government paid for the last updated booster, which was exclusively distributed by the government.

The price hike marks the vaccine’s move from federal distribution to the commercial market. Moderna and rival manufacturer Pfizer raised the US list price of their COVID-19 vaccines by roughly 400 percent. (Moderna’s is listed at $128 and Pfizer’s is $115).

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Like a critical zero-day Google disclosed on September 11, the new exploited vulnerability doesn’t affect just Chrome. Already, Mozilla has said that its Firefox browser is vulnerable to the same bug, which is tracked as CVE-2023-5217. And just like CVE-2023-4863 from 17 days ago, the new one resides in a widely used code library for processing media files, specifically those in the VP8 format.

Pages here and here list hundreds of packages for Ubuntu and Debian alone that rely on the library known as libvpx. Most browsers use it, and the list of software or vendors supporting it reads like a who’s who of the Internet, including Skype, Adobe, VLC, and Android.

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As spotted by MobileSyrup Wednesday, Disney+ emailed Canadian subscribers informing them of updates to the subscriber agreement as of November 1, including the addition of an “account sharing” section. Although the rules seem to be launching with Canada first, it’s likely they’ll eventually roll out to other geographies, like the US. Netflix initially tested its password-sharing crackdown in other countries before bringing it to the US.

MobileSyrup reported the update to Disney+’s Canadian agreement as saying;

Enlarge / Meta’s AI characters feature Snoop Dogg playing a dungeon master that dispenses gaming advice. (credit: Meta)

On Wednesday, Meta announced its consumer-friendly entry into the crowded AI chatbot landscape, The Verge reports. During a presentation at Meta Connect 2023, the company said it is launching its own “Meta AI” chat assistant and a selection of AI characters across its messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.

Meta’s new AI assistant will likely feel familiar to anyone who has used chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude. It is designed as a general-purpose chatbot that Meta says can help with planning trips, answering questions, and generating images from text prompts. The assistant will also integrate real-time results from Microsoft’s Bing search engine, giving it access to current information—similar to Bing Chat, ChatGPT’s browsing plugin, and Google Bard.

During demos, The Verge says that Meta’s AI was able to quickly generate high-resolution images from short text descriptions using an “/imagine” prompt, and the feature will be free to use. While Meta did not disclose full details of the new AI assistant’s training, the company said it’s a custom model that is partially based on the company’s LLaMA 2 language model, released in July.

Enlarge / Meta’s estimated Quest software sales are worryingly close to those for the Wii U at a similar point in its life. (credit: Ars / Kyle Orland)

During Wednesday’s Meta Connect keynote presentation, the company announced a new milestone for its line of standalone Quest headsets: $2 billion in lifetime revenue from Quest apps and software since the platform launched back in 2019. On first glance, that’s a pretty big number that suggests the formation of a pretty healthy VR software ecosystem.

But looked at in context, Ars’ analysis suggests the Quest software market is roughly the same size as that for the Wii U at a similar point in its short life cycle. That’s not a great comparison for Meta to be facing, since the Wii U was rightly considered an embarrassing flop by the standards of the video game market.

Comparing apples to… VR apples

In making that comparison, Ars compared Wii U software unit sales numbers from Nintendo’s own quarterly reports to estimated software sales numbers based on Meta’s sporadic public announcements of Quest revenue milestones. To convert revenue numbers to unit sales estimates for the Quest, Ars divided total Quest revenue by the median sale price for best-selling Quest software ($19.99) and the mean sale price for that same software ($17.60).

Enlarge / A new report claims that last year’s iPhone 14 could be the foundation of a new iPhone SE in 2025. (credit: Apple)

I’ve got a soft spot for Apple’s budget phone, the iPhone SE. It has never been technologically impressive, but it has always been a way to get most of what’s good about the iPhone ecosystem—an active App Store, Apple services like iMessage, and prompt software updates delivered for a respectable number of years—for several hundred dollars less than whatever the current flagship is.

The downside has been that you need to put up with an older design. In the case of the current iPhone SE and the one before that, that has meant a phone with the same 4.7-inch screen and basic dimensions as the iPhone 6, a design that will be a decade old next year. The SE has waterproofing, wireless charging, a better camera, a faster chip, and some other features that the iPhone 6 never had, but the body-to-screen ratio is much worse than pretty much any other modern smartphone.

For the last year, people who are normally mostly right about Apple rumors have been saying that the next iPhone SE is the one that will graduate to an iPhone X-style design, with a much larger screen and a display notch for the FaceID sensor and webcam. MacRumors published a report yesterday that purports to fill in a few more of the gaps.

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Reddit rolled out some changes this week as its continues its push for revenue and profitability jumpstarted by its API rule changes in July. Among the most controversial, the company will no longer allow users to opt out of ad personalization based on their Reddit activity and started a program that lets users exchange virtual rewards for their posts for real money.

On Wednesday, Reddit announced plans to “improve ad performance,” including by preventing users from opting out of personalized ads except for in “select countries.” Reddit didn’t specify which countries are excluded, but the exceptions could include countries falling under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. Reddit spokesperson Sierra Gamelgaard declined to provide further clarification when reached by Ars Technica for comment.

Reddit’s announcement, authored by Reddit’s head of privacy, going by “snoo-tuh” on the platform (Reddit has refused to confirm the identity of admins representing Reddit on the site), said that its advertisers look at “what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals” to gauge your interests.

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Now operating under the name X, Musk’s firm “is cutting around half of the global team devoted to limiting disinformation and election fraud on the platform, including the head of the group, according to three people familiar with the situation,” The Information reported yesterday, adding:

X management notified employees of the layoffs last Friday. The cuts hit all four Dublin-based members of the team, including Aaron Rodericks, its leader, who is based in Ireland, the people familiar with the matter said. X executives told the team that having elections integrity employees based in Europe wasn’t necessary, according to one of the people. The team, which was instrumental in handling coordinated spam and bot networks, had around two dozen members before Musk bought Twitter last year and is now down to less than half a dozen based primarily in North America.

NBC News later reported that it also confirmed the cuts with a source.

Enlarge / Timelapse photo of the “microflier” falling in its unfolded state, which makes it tumble chaotically in the wind. “Snapping” into a folded state results in a stable upright descent. (credit: Mark Stone/University of Washington)

University of Washington scientists have built a battery-free flying robot that stabilizes its descent by changing shape in mid-air—a design that was inspired by origami, according to a recent paper published in the journal Science Robotics. These microfliers weigh just 400 milligrams, and if there’s a nice light breeze, they can travel the length of a football field when dropped by a drone from an altitude of 40 meters (131 feet).

Miniature robotics is a very active area of research. For instance, earlier this year, we reported on how engineers built a soft robot in the shape of a Lego minifig. The robot changes shape by “melting” into liquid form in response to a magnetic field, oozing between the bars of its cage before re-solidifying on the other side—just like the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. That robot belongs to a class known as magnetically actuated miniature machines, typically made of soft polymers (like elastomers or hydrogels) embedded with ferromagnetic particles that have programmed magnetization profiles. These kinds of robots can swim, climb, roll, walk, and jump, as well as change their shape simply by altering the corresponding magnetic field.

As for flying robots, back in 2017, we reported on Dutch scientists who built a flying robot capable of executing the impressive aerodynamic feats flying insects like bees, dragonflies, and fruit flies, particularly when said insects seek to evade predators or the swatting motion of a human hand. Even though the robot was much larger than the average insect, it could hover and fly in any direction (up, down, forward, backward, and sideways), as well as perform banked turns and 360-degree flips, akin to loops or barrel rolls. It also boasted excellent power efficiency, capable of hovering for five minutes or flying more than a kilometer on a single charge.

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Effective compression is about finding patterns to make data smaller without losing information. When an algorithm or model can accurately guess the next piece of data in a sequence, it shows it’s good at spotting these patterns. This links the idea of making good guesses—which is what large language models like GPT-4 do very well—to achieving good compression.

In an arXiv research paper titled “Language Modeling Is Compression,” researchers detail their discovery that the DeepMind large language model (LLM) called Chinchilla 70B can perform lossless compression on image patches from the ImageNet image database to 43.4 percent of their original size, beating the PNG algorithm, which compressed the same data to 58.5 percent. For audio, Chinchilla compressed samples from the LibriSpeech audio data set to just 16.4 percent of their raw size, outdoing FLAC compression at 30.3 percent.

In this case, lower numbers in the results mean more compression is taking place. And lossless compression means that no data is lost during the compression process. It stands in contrast to a lossy compression technique like JPEG, which sheds some data and reconstructs some of the data with approximations during the decoding process to significantly reduce file sizes.

Enlarge / This is a prototype of the new Kia EV9 electric SUV, which goes on sale in the last quarter of 2023. (credit: Kia)

Kia has announced pricing for its next electric vehicle as it gets closer to release toward the end of this year. It’s the EV9, a three-row SUV that uses the company’s E-GMP architecture, also used to good effect in smaller EVs like the Kia EV6 and Hyundai Ioniq 5. When the EV9 arrives in showrooms, the range will start at $54,900 (plus destination charge).

“We knew we had to get the EV9 pricing right, and we believe today’s announcement will be a wake-up call to the industry,” said Kia America’s COO, Steve Center.

“A well-equipped three-row SUV EV doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive. It should offer the perfect balance of standard features, the ability to fast charge, and be equipped with the technology savvy EV buyers are looking for. The EV9 provides all of this, and we can’t wait for it to go on sale later this year,” he said.

Enlarge / The Raspberry Pi 5’s custom I/O chip, the RP1, is the result of $15M in investment over seven years. It unlocks far more data and storage capabilities in the single-board platform. (credit: Raspberry Pi)

Nearly everything on the Raspberry Pi 5 has improved over the 4 model, particularly the way you can buy it. In a first for the single-board company, the 5 is available for preorder today from approved resellers, before it’s generally available by the end of October.

Perhaps most importantly, the 5 is being prioritized for individual buyers rather than commercial partners.

“We’re incredibly grateful to the community of makers and hackers who make Raspberry Pi what it is; you’ve been extraordinarily patient throughout the supply chain issues that have made our work so challenging over the last couple of years,” writes Raspberry Pi founder and CEO Eben Upton. “We’d like to thank you: we’re going to ringfence all of the Raspberry Pi 5s we sell until at least the end of the year for single-unit sales to individuals, so you get the first bite of the cherry.”