Apple technicians will decline to fix iPhones that had been reported as stolen or lost, according to MacRumors. The tech giant has reportedly sent out a memo to Apple Stores and authorized providers not to accept a device for repair if they get a notice on their internal MobileGenius or GSX systems that the phone had been marked as missing. Presumably, that means technicians will check a device’s IMEI against the GSMA Device Registry when a customer brings it in for repair.
The GSMA registry is a global database where owners can register their devices’ IMEI and designate a status for them, such as whether they’d been lost, stolen or were fraudulently obtained. This move expands Apple’s existing policy to decline repairs for devices whose owners cannot disable the Find My iPhone feature. It could discourage more people from buying second-hand devices outside of official and authorized sources in case they unknowingly end up with a stolen unit. That said, users could just as easily go to a third-party repair shop that doesn’t care where they got their devices from.
Apple’s iPhones have become increasingly cost-prohibitive over the years, giving rise to a market for second-hand units. According to a recent Bloomberg report, though, the tech giant is working on a subscription service for the iPhone and other hardware to make regular upgrades more accessible with monthly fees and no huge upfront costs.
Dyson just unveiled its first wearable product and… it’s not what you think it is. The device is called the Dyson Zone, and it’s a set of noise-canceling, air-purifying headphones. It comes with a detachable visor for the bottom half of the wearer’s face that looks, to put it mildly, odd. That vizor actually blows filtered air to your nose, mouth and chin, sort of like a portable fan dedicated to the lower portion of your face. Dyson integrated a smaller version of its air filtration system into the earcups, and the idea is that people can protect themselves from pollution while out and about.
The Zone might seem like a response to the pandemic, but Dyson says this device has actually been six years in the making. It’s not borne from a desire to keep out COVID-19 germs, per se, and more as a means to help people breathe less-polluted air wherever they go. The Zone is not only a wearable air filtration system, but it’s also the company’s first audio product. In fact, Dyson describes it as “headphones delivering pure air and pure sound.”
If you’re thinking this thing looks absurd, you’re not alone. My first reaction to seeing the Zone on a mannequin’s head during a virtual briefing was complete and utter amusement. Shortly after, I saw it on an actual person on the demo call and it did not look like they were enjoying themselves. So when Dyson offered to show the contraption to me in person, I knew I had to see and try this thing out for myself. Sadly, I wasn’t allowed to take any photos or video of the Zone, so I’ll do my best to describe the experience.
Dyson
My biggest takeaway after spending some time with a prototype is that, yes, it does look just as ridiculous in real life. But somehow, in spite of its wild appearance, I still really want one. Dyson said it engineered the headset to fit comfortably and distribute weight evenly, by drawing inspiration from horse saddles. There are three cushions on the headband, and the central one is slightly curved like a saddle to distribute the load through “contact areas.”
When I put on the Zone and adjusted its arms to fit my head, it felt balanced and didn’t feel heavy. The earcups themselves were spongy and soft, and once they clamped on there was a noticeable noise canceling effect. That’s because the demo unit had already been set to enable active noise canceling when it’s worn. By clicking through a physical switch on the earcup, I toggled through different sound profiles, and though I occasionally heard some static, the pass-through and complete cancellation modes were effective.
Three ANC modes are available: Isolation, Conversation and Transparency. Isolation provides the highest level of muffling, while Conversation, which kicks in when you dip the visor, turns off the filtration motors to let you better hear who you’re talking to. Transparency allows certain sounds to pass through, so you can be aware of your surroundings.
For an initial foray into the audio space, the Zone is impressively satisfying. A company rep streamed Spotify to the demo unit and I enjoyed the ample bass and clear sound in songs like Doja Cat’s Say So.
Dyson
The highlight of my time with the Zone, though, has got to be when I snapped the magnetic visor on. After I figured out where on the headphones to aim the edges, taking the attachment on and off was easy. Once the mask was connected, the motors in the earcups whirred to life and a gentle, clean-smelling trickle of air started blowing at my lips and nose. It was surprisingly comfortable and, for an obsessive clean freak like me, felt borderline magical. This could not only be the personal air bubble I’ve dreamed of, but also might be a portable air conditioner for the lower half of my face, which would be a blessing in the summer.
Four air purification modes are available as well — low, medium, high and auto. You can toggle these to, say, use the maximum level when you need a higher purification speed if you’re breathing rapidly during a quick jog on the streets. For the Auto mode, the Zone will use onboard accelerometers to determine which setting to choose.
The visor was also designed to diffuse two jets of airflow and at no point during my time with the Dyson Zone did I feel like I was being overwhelmed or pummeled by wind. The earcup’s compressors draw air through dual-layer filters, including negatively charged electrostatic filters to catch particles like allergens and dust. A potassium-enriched carbon layer captures gas pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and ozone.
Earlier versions of the Zone took the form of a snorkel-like mouthpiece connected to a backpack (like oxygen tanks in a scuba diving setup). 500 prototypes later, the company settled on the headset and visor combination, and the mouthpiece can deliver clean air without touching the wearer’s face. “Developing a non-contact solution was a must for Dyson engineers, to avoid the discomfort and irritation often associated with full-contact alternatives,” the company said in a statement.
Dyson
It does leave room for you to insert a face mask, though, and Dyson provides attachments for coverings that would meet FFP2 filtration standards in the box. It also includes a “community face covering attachment” that would form a “sealed solution” so you can mask up while keeping your filtered air clean.
Dyson also made a companion app that shows the air quality of the region you’re in, though at the time of the demo it didn’t offer information that was more location-specific than a city. You couldn’t, for instance, see if your place of work had more air pollutants than the park you’d walk to for lunch.
The company hasn’t shared pricing and availability information for the Zone just yet, other than to say it’s coming this year. I can already see this being a great device for my future travels — whether in an airplane or a commuter train, and at the demo I even went to lay down on a couch to see how comfortable the Zone would be to wear on a redeye flight. It felt surprisingly comfortable for the admittedly brief period of time I was lying down. But of course, there are still things I’d need to know before spending money on the Zone — like battery life and real-world performance. Hopefully, Dyson will share more information on those things soon.
Dyson’s expertise seems to be focused on moving air—vacuums, hair dryers, fans—so it was confusing at first to encounter wireless headphones from the company. But the Dyson Zone is unlike any pair of headphones on the market today. Built into each ear cup is a miniature air purifier that pumps fresh air to the wearer…
If you speak to people running Kubernetes in production, one of the complaints you’ll often hear is how difficult multitenancy is. Organizations use two main models to share Kubernetes clusters with multiple tenants, but both present issues.
In continuation of last week’s article that the GCC steering committee approved landing of LoongArch as a new port to this MIPS-derived Chinese CPU architecture, the code was merged on Tuesday…
Greenpeace and other environmental groups launched a new campaign today to push the Bitcoin network to slash its growing greenhouse gas emissions. The Verge reports: The goal of the campaign, dubbed “Change the code, not the climate,” is to switch up the energy-hungry process of verifying transactions and mining new Bitcoins. […] In order to validate transactions, Bitcoin miners rely on specialized hardware to solve complex puzzles. Their computers gobble up a lot of energy in the process, and the miners get new tokens in return. It’s a process called “proof of work,” in which the energy used is sort of the price paid to verify transactions. The process is deliberately energy-intensive as a safety measure. The baked-in inefficiency is meant to discourage bad actors from manipulating the data because it would cost a lot of energy to do so.
The new campaign aims to move Bitcoin away from that energy-hungry proof of work process. The most popular alternative is called proof of stake. Cryptocurrencies that use proof of stake use vastly less energy because there are no puzzles to solve. Instead of essentially paying with electricity to participate in the process, you have to offer up some of your own tokens. This is supposed to prove that you have a “stake” in keeping the ledger accurate. If you mess anything up, you lose tokens as a penalty. While proof of stake might make solve a lot of Bitcoin’s pollution problems, experts have been skeptical that miners would be willing to make the change. Miners invest a lot in their hardware and would be hard-pressed to abandon it. And some fans of proof of work maintain that it’s the most secure way to maintain the ledger. “We know Bitcoin stakeholders are incentivized not to change,” the campaign acknowledges on its website. “Changing Bitcoin would render a whole lot of expensive infrastructure worthless, meaning Bitcoin stakeholders will need to walk away from sunk costs — or find other creative solutions.”
As the Guardian notes, the campaign is launching a huge digital advertising push via the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Marketwatch, Politico, Facebook and others. “Organizers are also taking legal action against proposed mining sites and using their large memberships to push bitcoin’s biggest investors and influencers to call for a code change.” Additionally, the campaign is urging people to tweet at cryptocurrency influencers to support the campaign.
For the second summer, Major League Hacking (MLH) is running the Production Engineering Track of the MLH Fellowship, powered by Meta. This 12-week educational program is 100% remote and uses industry-leading curriculum from Linux Foundation Training & Certification. The program is hands-on, project-based, and teaches students how to become Production Engineers. The goal of the program is for all participants to land a job or internship in the Site Reliability Engineering space, and it will be opened to 100 active college students who meet our admissions criteria.
Louis Laurent is an artist at Framestore, a studio that has worked on movies like No Time To Die, the upcoming Dr Strange sequel and Spider-Man: No Way Home.
In this tutorial, we are going to explain the “du” command used on every Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, Debian, or CentOS.“Du” stands for Disk Usage and every Linux user should use it very often to check the amount of disk space used by directory or file. Using the “du” command is very simple by typing it on the console and adding additional phrases called options. In other words, the “du” command is different every time, according to the needs of the user and what the user wants to be displayed as output.
“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it will once again require applicants to take the SAT or ACT, reversing a Covid-era policy that made the standardized tests optional and rejecting the idea that the tests hurt diversity,” reports CNN. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a blog post announcing the decision, writing: From the policy announcement, there’s an excess of delicacy — to the point where you might find it funny or terribly disturbing: “Our research can’t explain why these tests are so predictive of academic preparedness for MIT, but we believe it is likely related to the centrality of mathematics — and mathematics examinations — in our education. All MIT students, regardless of intended major, must pass two semesters of calculus, plus two semesters of calculus-based physics […]. The substance and pace of these courses are both very demanding, and they culminate in long, challenging final exams that students must pass to proceed with their education. In other words, there is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that as soon as they arrive.”
Did the entire admissions department threaten to quit? Or did the incoming class turn out to be morons? “Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT,” Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill wrote in the policy announcement.
“We believe a requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy.”
A number of elite schools, including Harvard and University of California, announced plans to stop using the SAT and ACT college admissions exams. Last May, Colorado became the first state to ban “legacy” admissions and signed a bill that removes a requirement that public colleges consider SAT or ACAT scores for freshmen.
Pop!_OS is a rather new player in the world of Linux operating systems but it has quickly risen up the ranks to become one of the more enjoyable options overall. With a custom Pop!_OS Shop and a variety of user experience optimizations, it certainly does appeal to the target audience of beginners, and professionals alike.
“Ukrainian special forces teamed up with IT professionals on ATV four-wheelers to target the infamous Kiev convoy,” writes longtime Slashdot reader darkseid. “Every Help Desk Geek’s Walter Mitty fantasy!” The Guardian reports: One week into its invasion of Ukraine, Russia massed a 40-mile mechanized column in order to mount an overwhelming attack on Kyiv from the north. But the convoy of armored vehicles and supply trucks ground to a halt within days, and the offensive failed, in significant part because of a series of night ambushes carried out by a team of 30 Ukrainian special forces and drone operators on quad bikes, according to a Ukrainian commander.
The drone operators were drawn from an air reconnaissance unit, Aerorozvidka, which began eight years ago as a group of volunteer IT specialists and hobbyists designing their own machines and has evolved into an essential element in Ukraine’s successful David-and-Goliath resistance. […] The unit’s commander, Lt Col Yaroslav Honchar, gave an account of the ambush near the town of Ivankiv that helped stop the vast, lumbering Russian offensive in its tracks. He said the Ukrainian fighters on quad bikes were able to approach the advancing Russian column at night by riding through the forest on either side of the road leading south towards Kyiv from the direction of Chernobyl.
The Ukrainian soldiers were equipped with night vision goggles, sniper rifles, remotely detonated mines, drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras and others capable of dropping small 1.5kg bombs. “This one little unit in the night destroyed two or three vehicles at the head of this convoy, and after that it was stuck. They stayed there two more nights, and [destroyed] many vehicles,” Honchar said. The Russians broke the column into smaller units to try to make headway towards the Ukrainian capital, but the same assault team was able to mount an attack on its supply depot, he claimed, crippling the Russians’ capacity to advance. “The first echelon of the Russian force was stuck without heat, without oil, without bombs and without gas. And it all happened because of the work of 30 people,” Honchar said. “The Aerorozvidka unit also claims to have helped defeat a Russian airborne attack on Hostomel airport, just north-west of Kyiv, in the first day of the war,” adds the Guardian. Similar to the convoy ambush, they “[used] drones to locate, target and shell about 200 Russian paratroopers concealed at one end of the airfield.”
Many technology firms are turning to open source tools to accelerate innovation and growth. As these firms work to influence open source projects, governance practices sometimes shift from coordination among a small group of developers and firms to management by large communities of contributors and organizations, often with competing priorities.
theodp shares a report from Chicago Sun-Times, written by Frank Main: When the school system [Chicago Public Schools] shifted to having students learn remotely in the spring of 2020 near the beginning of the pandemic, it lent students iPads, MacBooks and Windows computer devices so they could do school work and attend virtual classes from home. CPS then spent about $165 million to buy Chromebook desktop computers so that every student from kindergarten through senior year in high school who needed a computer could have one. Students borrowed 161,100 Chromebooks in September 2020. By June 2021, more than 210,000 of those devices had been given out. Of them, nearly 40,000 Chromebooks have been reported lost — nearly a fifth of those that were lent.
“Schools have made repeated efforts to recover the lost devices from families without success,” according to a written statement from CPS officials in response to questions about the missing school property. Also missing are more than 9,600 iPads, 114 televisions, 1,680 printers and 1,127 audiovisual projectors, among many other items. Officials say CPS has bought new computer devices to replace the missing ones. Longtime Slashdot reader theodp notes that “there were 340,658 students enrolled in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) at the start of the 2020-2021 school year.”
An incredible amount has changed in Mesa and in the Vulkan ecosystems since the first Vulkan driver was written in Mesa for Intel hardware back in 2015. Not only has Vulkan grown, but Mesa has as well, and we’ve built up quite a suite of utilities and helpers for making writing Vulkan drivers easier. Jason Ekstrand looks at the latest Mesa utilities, helpers & best practices for writing Vulkan drivers.
A Dutch foundation has hit Apple with a lawsuit over the App Store’s developer fees, seeking €5.5 billion euro in damages for what it alleges is monopolistic behavior. In a press release, the Dutch Consumer Competition Claims Foundation stated it was filing a “collective claim” for damages, on behalf of any iPhone or iPad owners in the EU who have downloaded a paid app or made purchases within an app.
Suing Apple for its app store policies on behalf of consumers— instead of developers — might seem like an unusual move on the Dutch foundation’s part. Most of the scrutiny over the tech giant’s so-called “Apple tax” has focused on its deleterious impact on the profits of developers. Just this past January, Apple agreed to settle a class-action settlement by US developers for $100 million.
The Consumer Competition Claims Foundation alleges that Apple’s developer fees were passed on to consumers, in the form of higher prices. “App developers are forced to pass on to consumers the increased costs caused by Apple’s monopolistic practices and unfair terms,” wrote the foundation in its press release.
The foundation is asking EU consumers who purchased an app in Apple’s App Store or made an in-app purchase since September 2009 to join its complaint. The lawsuit is set to be filed in the Amsterdam District Court.
This isn’t the first time Apple is taking heat from Dutch authorities. Apple has yet to comply with a January order from Dutch regulators that requires the company to offer third-party payment options for dating app customers. The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) is fining Apple €5 million for every week it doesn’t follow through with the order. Dutch regulators have already fined Apple more than €50 million and counting.
But according to TechCrunch, there’s a sign of a potential compromise. Apple is working on an amended proposal of its dating app policy, which will be reviewed by ACM. But even if the two parties reach a consensus, Apple will soon have much larger battles to fight in the EU. The EU is working on finalizing the Digital Markets Act, which will (among a number of other anti-competitive measures) require companies like Apple and Google to allow alternatives for in-app payments.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The Log4Shell vulnerability is being actively exploited to deliver backdoors and cryptocurrency miners to vulnerable VMware Horizon servers. On Tuesday, Sophos cybersecurity researchers said the attacks were first detected in mid-January and are ongoing. Not only are backdoors and cryptocurrency miners being deployed, but in addition, scripts are used to gather and steal device information. Log4Shell is a critical vulnerability in Apache Log4J Java logging library. The unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability was made public in December 2021 and is tracked as CVE-2021-44228 with a CVSS score of 10.0.
According to Sophos, the latest Log4Shell attacks target unpatched VMware Horizon servers with three different backdoors and four cryptocurrency miners. The attackers behind the campaign are leveraging the bug to obtain access to vulnerable servers. Once they have infiltrated the system, Atera agent or Splashtop Streamer, two legitimate remote monitoring software packages, may be installed, with their purpose twisted into becoming backdoor surveillance tools.
The other backdoor detected by Sophos is Silver, an open source offensive security implant released for use by pen testers and red teams. Sophos says that four miners are linked to this wave of attacks: z0Miner, JavaX miner, Jin, and Mimu, which mine for Monero (XMR). Previously, Trend Micro found z0Miner operators were exploiting the Atlassian Confluence RCE (CVE-2021-26084) for cryptojacking attacks. A PowerShell URL connected to this both campaigns suggests there may also be a link, although that is uncertain. […] In addition, the researchers uncovered evidence of reverse shell deployment designed to collect device and backup information.
