Well, some of us need a nap. Gamescom’s Opening Night Live 2021 event kicked off at 2pm ET today, and what ensued was a rapid-fire parade of game trailers and teasers. It was quite an eclectic selection, too, including a new Saints Row game, Lego Star Wars, a turn-based RPG, kung-fu battles, dinosaur building, something called a “season 0 beta,” and confirmed launch dates for Halo Infinite and Horizon Forbidden West. Oh, and there was some hardware as well — always a good time. The Engadget staff is admittedly feeling some whiplash, but for our readers this means there’s almost surely something for everyone. Check out the highlights in the (relatively) brief video below.
Enlarge/ Police officers surround Jacob Wohl as he taunts protesters during a “Trump/Pence Out Now” rally at Black Lives Matter plaza August 27, 2020 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Michael Santiago )
The Federal Communications Commission yesterday proposed a $5.1 million fine against two right-wing political operatives accused of making over 1,100 illegal robocalls. The calls were an attempt to convince people not to vote.
The recorded messages sent before the November 2020 election “told potential voters that if they voted by mail, their ‘personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts,'” the FCC said. Those messages were apparently targeted at Black voters and told them, “don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man.”
John Burkman and Jacob Wohl were already facing felony charges in Wayne County Circuit Court for “orchestrating a robocall to suppress the vote in Detroit and other cities with significant minority populations,” as Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced in November 2020. They were also indicted in Ohio, and New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking fines that would add up to $2.75 million.
According to analysts at Canalys, the PC market in the United States is booming. Sales in Q2 2021 have grown 17% with 36.8 million units shipped. “Notebooks and desktops led the way with a growth in shipments of 27% and 23% respectively compared to last year,” reports ZDNet. From the report: HP was the leading company in the US, delivering more than 8 million devices to customers and dominating the Chromebook sector with a 42% market share. Apple suffered a 3% decline in devices shipped but still held on to the second place slot behind HP. Canalys noted that Apple was the only major PC manufacturer to see negative growth in Q2, due in no small part to waning consumer interest in iPads, according to the report. The company did see a 24% increase in notebook shipments thanks to recent success with the M1 chip.
The rest of the list is rounded out by Samsung, which saw a 51% growth in shipments year over year while Lenovo and Dell posted 25% and 11% growth respectively in Q2. Canalys attributed Lenovo’s success to its growing influence over the Chromebook market while Samsung solidified its place in the tablet market, seeing a growth of 19% in the US for Q2 even as the overall tablet market shrank. [Tablet shipments were down 1% in Q2.] Following a spike in tablet interest in Q2 2020, there has been a slowdown as the COVID-19 pandemic has waned and more people spent the summer outdoors.
Enlarge/ Delta Air Lines plane taxis toward a gate between other Delta planes at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Monday, July 20, 2009. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)
Hospital care for seriously ill COVID-19 patients is costing the US health care system billions of dollars. And with vaccines highly effective at preventing hospitalization now widely and freely available to everyone over the age of 12, insurers and some businesses want the unvaccinated—who make up the vast majority of COVID-19 hospitalizations—to cover more of those costs.
This past June and July alone, the estimated cost of caring for unvaccinated people who were hospitalized for preventable cases of COVID-19 reached about $2.3 billion, according to a recent analysis by the Peterson Center on Healthcare and Kaiser Family Foundation. The analysis estimated that in those two months there were 113,000 unvaccinated people who were hospitalized primarily for COVID-19 and that their infection would have been prevented with vaccination. They then multiplied that number by $20,000, a rough estimate of the average cost of hospital care for COVID-19 patients, bringing the total to $2.3 billion.
Waived waivers
Hospitalizations have only skyrocketed since then. On the last day of July, the country’s seven-day rolling average of hospitalizations was around 40,000. Now, that average is nearly 86,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Basically, a Linux terminal environment enables a user to carry out various system functionalities like file management, system update, and applications management through a variety of executable commands. What if you are able to achieve all these Linux terminal environment objectives but in a flexible manner?
It’s been 30 years since Finnish graduate student Linus Torvalds drafted a brief note saying he was starting a hobby operating system. The world would never be the same.
Pokémon Go developers Niantic recently decided to dial back the social distancing requirements in the game for players in the USA and New Zealand, and it did not go down well with fans.
Enlarge/ Detail from Matina Stavropoulou’s original painting, Triton and Nereid, one of several used for a series of experiments with graphene veils. (credit: Matina Stavropoulou)
Graphene is the thinnest material yet known, composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. That structure gives it many unusual properties that hold great promise for real-world applications: batteries, super capacitors, antennas, water filters, transistors, solar cells, and touchscreens, just to name a few. And now this wonder material might just provide a solution to the fading of colors of many artistic masterpieces, according to a recent paper published in Nature Nanotechnology.
“All art establishments are concerned with the discoloration of paintings upon exhibition and storage, since harmful factors such as sunlight, moisture, and certain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) accelerate the degradation,” said co-author Costas Galiotis, a chemical engineer at the University of Patras in Greece. “There are many references to well-known endangered artworks, such as [Vincent] Van Gogh’s The Bedroom and Sunflowers, or [Edvard] Munch’s The Scream.”
A variety of culprits are behind the degradation of fine art. For instance, several of Georgia O’Keeffe’s oil paintings housed in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have developed tiny pin-sized blisters, almost like acne, for decades. Conservators have found similar deterioration in oil-based masterpieces across all time periods, including works by Rembrandt. As we’ve previously reported, conservationists and scholars initially assumed they were grains of sand trapped in the paint. But then the protrusions grew, spread, and started flaking off.
Escuelas Linux 7.1 comes only one and a half months after the major Escuelas Linux 7.0 release and introduces a newer kernel, Linux 5.11, from the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (Focal Fossa) point release. Of course, Escuelas Linux 7.1 is still derived from Bodhi Linux 6.0 and uses the latest Moksha (version 0.3.3-13) graphical desktop environment.
Updated educational apps in Escuelas Linux 7.1 include Blender 2.93.3 3D modeling software, eXe Learning 2.6 software for creating educational interactive web content, GeoGebra 5.0.650 interactive geometry, algebra, statistics and calculus application, Inkscape 1.1.1 vector graphics editor, LiveCode 9.6.3, and Scratch Desktop 3.25 IDEs, LibreOffice 7.2 office suite, and Veyon 4.5.6 computer monitoring and classroom management tool.
On DL239: we have an exclusive product interview with Pine64 about the new PineNote E-Ink Tablet! Plus an interview with Bill Shouten who is here to discuss open-source in education & Much More!
Kojima Productions showed off more of the add-ons and enhancements coming to Death Stranding Director’s Cut and they all look like they will help ease your pain and make delivering packages across the game’s grueling, ghostly world easier. In other words, they seem to miss the point.
As Apple and other big tech companies postpone their planned returns to physical offices, a survey has found that workers around the United States would give up a lot to stay remote.
As previously reported by ZDNet, GoodHire published a survey this week of 3,500 workers in the US and found that just over two-thirds of them would prefer to work remotely rather than in an office.
Further, 70 percent of those people said they would give up most or all of their benefits, like health insurance and holidays, to be able to work remotely. Sixty-one percent say they would take a pay cut to make it happen. Most said they’d take a 10 percent pay reduction, but some claimed they’d even accept half their current salary in exchange for remote work.
Audio-Technica has pulled back the curtain on its latest set of budget headphones. The $59 ATH-S220BT offers a decent set of features for the price, including a battery life that offers up to 60 hours of use on a single charge, according to the company. You’ll be able to add up to 3.5 hours of listening time with just 10 minutes of USB-C charging, Audio-Technica says.
The Bluetooth 5.0 headphones have 40mm drivers, which, Audio-Technica claims, deliver low-latency audio. You can also plug them in using an included 3.5mm cable, which has an in-line mic and controls.
The ATH-S220BT can connect to two Bluetooth devices simultaneously for fast switching between tasks. There’s a built-in microphone, earcup controls and Google Fast Pair support for Android devices. Along with Siri and Google Assistant compatibility, there’s a “voice guidance” function, which can provide info on the current battery level, pairing status and more.
Audio-Technica
Although the headphones lack higher-end features such as active noise cancellation, they seem worth a look if you’re in the market for a budget set, even if the audio quality turns out to be just fine (Audio-Technica says they deliver “excellent sound quality”). They’re lightweight too, at just 6.3 ounces or 180 grams.
The ATH-S220BT is available now in a number of color options. You can pick them up in black with dark-gray accents, navy with beige earpads and headband or white with a black trim.
Instagram is working on making its search function more intuitive. The app is experimenting with changes that allow users to search for content based on topics rather than account names or hashtags.
Up until now, Instagram’s search has been fairly rudimentary. Typing “kittens” into the search bar would turn up results for specific accounts or hashtags, for example, but you’d have to jump around different pages to actually find kitten content. But with the update, searching for topical content on Instagram will be more like Pinterest, with a grid of photos and videos related to that topic.
“We’ve been experimenting with what we are internally calling interest search,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a video posted to Twitter. He added that the new search results are available for “a range of topics and a range of languages” but that Instagram is still “working to expand” the feature. For now, users can browse the new results by looking for search terms that have a magnifying glass next to them.
How Search Works 🔎
In this video I cover… – How we rank search – How to show up on search – How we keep search safe – What’s new for search
Instagram has teased other major updates to its search features in recent months. The app is also working on a visual search feature that would allow users to find products using the in-app camera, though the company hasn’t shared additional details.
Pour one out for the avid gamers in your life, because come next winter, you’ll never hear from them again. Following today’s Gamescom Opening Night Live showcase, hosted by Geoff Keighley’s heart red blazer and jet black sneakers, it’s clear that February 2022 is gonna suuuck (but also be awesome).
An anonymous reader writes: Software used by the Department of Homeland Security to scan the records of millions of immigrants can automatically flag naturalized Americans to potentially have their citizenship revoked based on secret criteria, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. The software, known as ATLAS, takes information from immigrants’ case files and runs it though various federal databases. ATLAS looks for indicators that someone is dangerous or dishonest and is ostensibly designed to detect fraud among people who come into contact with the U.S. immigration system. But advocates for immigrants believe that the real purpose of the computer program is to create a pretext to strip people of citizenship. Whatever the motivation, ATLAS’s intended outcome is ultimately deportation, judging from the documents, which originate within DHS and were obtained by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Muslim Advocates through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.
ATLAS helps DHS investigate immigrants’ personal relationships and backgrounds, examining biometric information like fingerprints and, in certain circumstances, considering an immigrant’s race, ethnicity, and national origin. It draws information from a variety of unknown sources, plus two that have been criticized as being poorly managed: the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, also known as the terrorist watchlist, and the National Crime Information Center. Powered by servers at tech giant Amazon, the system in 2019 alone conducted 16.5 million screenings and flagged more than 120,000 cases of potential fraud or threats to national security and public safety. Ultimately, humans at DHS are involved in determining how to handle immigrants flagged by ATLAS. But the software threatens to amplify the harm caused by bureaucratic mistakes within the immigration system, mistakes that already drive many denaturalization and deportation cases. “ATLAS should be considered as suspect until it is shown not to generate unfair, arbitrary, and discriminatory results,” said Laura Bingham, a lawyer with the Open Society Justice Initiative. “From what we are able to scrutinize in terms of the end results — like the disparate impact of denaturalization based on national origin — there is ample reason to consider ATLAS a threat to naturalized citizens.”
Keyboard customization software, particularly from mainstream keyboard brands, is already a bit of a racket. Most are either too bloated for daily use or ask you to sign up for an account before you can configure anything. Razer and SteelSeries both offer software like this for their lineups of gaming peripherals and…
Autonomous cargo hauling won’t be limited to a handful of trucks and aircraft. As CNNreports, Yara International now expects to sail the first autonomous, fully electric cargo ship in Norway by the end of 2021. The Yara Birkeland will travel from Herøya to Brevik with only three remote control centers keeping watch over the journey.
Yara first developed the concept in 2017 and had planned to set sail in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the trip. It’s not the first crewless ship of any kind to venture forth (a Finnish ferry launched in 2018), but it is the first all-electric model.
It’s a slow vessel with a 13-knot top speed from its two 900kW propulsion systems (container ships typically travel at 16 to 25 knots), and it’s safe to say the giant 7MWh battery will take a while to charge. However, Yara believes it will be worthwhile for the environmental gains. The firm estimated the Yara Birkeland would replace about 40,000 truck trips per year, dramatically reducing CO2 and nitrous oxide emissions in a country that already relies heavily on hydroelectric power. The ship could also alleviate traffic congestion on land, not to mention keep humans out of danger (albeit at the possible expense of jobs).
It may still be a long while before you see autonomous cargo haulers making trips elsewhere. Even if range isn’t an issue, docks are — it would be harder for a self-sailing ship to navigate a busy port like Durban or Shanghai. There are also legal issues. Different countries have their own rules for the sea. As with self-driving cars, there’s also the matter of liability. Who’s to blame if an autonomous ship runs aground? While it’s easy to see a day when autonomous electric ships are commonplace, that day likely isn’t close at hand.
