A spate of new studies on lab animals and human tissues are providing the first indication of why the Omicron variant causes milder disease than previous versions of the coronavirus. From a report: In studies on mice and hamsters, Omicron produced less damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe. The variant did much less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and serious breathing difficulty. "It's fair to say that the idea of a disease that manifests itself primarily in the upper respiratory system is emerging," said Roland Eils, a computational biologist at the Berlin Institute of Health, who has studied how coronaviruses infect the airway. In November, when the first report on the Omicron variant came out of South Africa, scientists could only guess at how it might behave differently from earlier forms of the virus. All they knew was that it had a distinctive and alarming combination of more than 50 genetic mutations.

Previous research had shown that some of these mutations enabled coronaviruses to grab onto cells more tightly. Others allowed the virus to evade antibodies, which serve as an early line of defense against infection. But how the new variant might behave inside of the body was a mystery. "You can't predict the behavior of virus from just the mutations," said Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge. Over the past month, more than a dozen research groups, including Dr. Gupta's, have been observing the new pathogen in the lab, infecting cells in Petri dishes with Omicron and spraying the virus into the noses of animals. As they worked, Omicron surged across the planet, readily infecting even people who were vaccinated or had recovered from infections. But as cases skyrocketed, hospitalizations increased only modestly. Early studies of patients suggested that Omicron was less likely to cause severe illness than other variants, especially in vaccinated people. Still, those findings came with a lot of caveats.

AMD's $35 billion acquisition of Xilinx is now expected to close in the first quarter of 2022, which is a few months after AMD and Xilinix's originally proposed closing of the deal before the end of 2021. Tom's Hardware reports: AMD has cleared regulatory hurdles in all but China. News filtered out earlier this month that AMD has filed certain undefined 'behavioral remedies' to appease Chinese regulators, and mid-month found news that China's antitrust agency, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), was still market-testing AMD's proposed remedies.

Here's AMD's statement on the matter: "We continue making good progress on the required regulatory approvals to close our transaction. While we had previously expected that we would secure all approvals by the end of 2021, we have not yet completed the process and we now expect the transaction to close in the first quarter of 2022. Our conversations with regulators continue to progress productively, and we expect to secure all required approvals. There are no additional changes to the previously announced terms or plans regarding the transaction and the companies continue to look forward to the proposed combination creating the industry's high-performance and adaptive computing leader."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Behind every TikTok, Zoom call, and cat meme is a data center that stores, processes, or reroutes that data around the world. The more we do online, the bigger these data centers and their energy footprint get. At full capacity, servers within a modern "hyperscale" (aka "massive") data center can use as much power as 80,000 households. Although the data center industry is global, places with the right combination of stable climate and friendly regulations attract outsized attention from data center developers. Ireland is one of these places. The island nation hosts 70 data centers and is now the fastest-growing data center market in Europe. Unfortunately, supplying the equivalent of several extra cities worth of electricity to servers that aid your doomscrolling is starting to take a toll on Ireland's power grid.

Data centers already use around 900 megawatts of electricity in Ireland. According to Paul Deane, an energy researcher working with the MaREI Environmental Research Institute in Ireland, this adds up to at least 11% of Ireland's total electricity supply at present, a situation he described "as a serious energy systems problem." As Deane outlined, meeting this demand is making Ireland's current energy crisis worse and its target of halving greenhouse emissions by 2030 harder to reach. And things are only getting more challenging. A recent report from Eirgrid, Ireland's state-owned grid operator, shows that data centers will consume almost 30% (PDF) of Ireland's annual electricity supply by 2029.

Although, as Deane pointed out, data centers are essential to modern life, a small country with little grid power to spare hosting so many of them puts the sustainability of Ireland's entire power supply at risk. Deane summed up Ireland's issue with data centers as being a mismatch in size. "Data centers are large power users, and our power system is small, so plugging more of them into a small grid will start to have an outsized impact," he said. In stark comparison, Germany, the EU's biggest data center market overall, will use less than 5% of its grid capacity to power data centers in the same period. As well as stoking fears that the industry's growth will create blackouts and power shortages for Irish consumers this winter, data centers may also derail Ireland's drive to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

This summer the Free Software Foundation campaigns manager said that while they'll never stop aiming to be a "lighthouse" for others, "we recognize that a stance like ours can sometimes be a deterrent to people making important incremental improvements in their practices." So while they'll continue holding up the principled finish line, "Now, we're developing a clear set of steps to help support individuals in making the step-by-step improvements that they can." By supporting them in taking a step at a time, we're confident that we can help bring more people to a fully free setup than ever before. We're calling this campaign the "freedom ladder," and we need your support to help others begin climbing it.
This week the Free Software Foundation's program manager explained that "Free software can only be a sustainable idea if we are continuously bringing new people into the free software community," and provided an update on their Freedom Ladder campaign: Since we recognized the need for community input at every step of the way, we started off the campaign by holding four interactive Internet Relay Chat (IRC) community meetings... In the community meetings, we once again confirmed that the "typical" free software user does not exist. It's not "one size fits all," and there are as many particular use cases as there are free software users. How do you create one single message for people that range from absolute beginners to lifelong programmers, and who span all walks of life? The answer is: you don't...

As everyone's steps will be different, we need to meet people where they are. Our goal, and something important to keep in mind, is to explain the steps on the path forward in a way that allows one to step in from anywhere. We want to recognize the progress they've made so far, while still motivating them to strive towards full freedom...

A clear result from our first conversations about the new campaign was the need for educational resources... We believe people's stories about the use cases of free software, much like the free software stories we collected for the thirtieth birthday of the FSF about how people got into free software, as well as on the difficulties that sometimes need to be overcome, will help us better represent and address the multitude of audiences we want to speak to. It will show that free software really is for everyone, and for everyone there is a step forward. The goal of the Freedom Ladder campaign is to deliver an ever-expanding journey towards free software. The ideal result would be a combination of resources, information, connections, and motivation for the future. This is a major undertaking and the campaigns team's main goal at present: delivering a framework we can accelerate building upon that will help people in their journey to freedom.

We need to help people identify with other members of the community by delivering these stories, and letting them know that it's more than acceptable to move towards freedom gradually and incrementally... We're interested in both written statements and videos, and we would love to receive yours. You can add them to the Freedom Ladder pages in the wiki, or you can email campaigns@fsf.org with your ideas. In the meantime, we will work on the infrastructure to start building this initiative and be able to integrate any information and resources we need. But we need your help...

Our work on the Freedom Ladder campaign so far has been inspiring; the community meetings were fun and everything in this post is a result of the interactive, open, and welcoming nature of those events.

White House officials are asking major software companies and developers to work with them to improve the security of open-source software, according to an administration official. From a report: The invitation follows the disclosure of a vulnerability in popular open-source Apache software that cybersecurity officials have described as one of the most serious in recent memory. In a letter Thursday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan invited major players in the software industry to discuss initiatives to improve open-source software security, the official said. Dozens of open-source software projects have become crucial components of global commerce and are mostly maintained by volunteers. The effort will start with a one-day discussion in January hosted by Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, according to the official. In the letter, Sullivan wrote that open-source software has accelerated the pace of innovation but pointed out that the fact that it is broadly used and maintained by volunteers is a "combination that is a key national security concern, as we are experiencing with the Log4j vulnerability," the official said.

A new policing system is being developed that will send autonomous drones equipped with shot-locating technology to the source of gunshots. "By analyzing the live video from its onboard camera, police officers can then gain a better sense of the situation they're heading into," reports New Atlas. From the report: Already in use in over 120 cities in the US, South Africa and the Caribbean, the American ShotSpotter system utilizes a network of microphones within a neighborhood to detect "loud, impulsive sounds." Whenever such a sound is detected, its geographical originating point can be triangulated by analyzing the millisecond differences in the times at which it was picked up by the different microphones -- the closer a mic was to the gun, the earlier it will have detected the sound of that gun firing. That said, a combination of AI software and human staff (at a control center) is used to determine if the sound is indeed gunfire.

In the existing version of the system, police are quickly dispatched to the location. If they're using ground transportation, however, it may take a while for them to get there. And even if the police department has a helicopter, performing pre-flight checks, etc will still take some time -- assuming the aircraft isn't already in the air on patrol, that is. With these potential limitations in mind, Israeli drone manufacturer Airobotics has teamed up with ShotSpotter to add autonomous drones to the mix. In the new version of the setup, police will still be dispatched, but so will the closest system-specific drone. That aircraft will be in the air within seconds, immediately flying to the source of the gunshots. By analyzing the live video from its onboard camera, police officers can then gain a better sense of the situation they're heading into.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Airbnb recently announced that it had its best quarter ever, reflecting a surging thirst for travel and tourism as the pandemic's grip loosens. But in New York City, the company is at the center of a different narrative: City leaders, after fighting for years to limit the proliferation of illegal short-term rentals, are poised to impose more stringent restrictions on the online platform. The City Council on Thursday is expected to approve a bill that would for the first time require hosts to register with the city before renting out their homes on a short-term basis or for less than 30 days. The measure mirrors regulations in other cities like Boston and Santa Monica, Calif.

In New York City, one of Airbnb's biggest domestic markets, city officials and housing advocates have long complained that landlords and tenants have exacerbated the housing crisis by circumventing laws and setting aside homes to rent out for a few days at a time to tourists or other visitors. Short-term rentals are often more lucrative than long-term leases. And the hotel industry, which has been decimated by the pandemic, has long complained about Airbnb and similar online rental companies, accusing them of siphoning away business. The new bill is designed to prevent rentals that violate those laws -- including a New York State law that largely bars apartment rentals for less than 30 days when the host is not present -- from even appearing online. Supporters said the new restrictions could lead to the gradual removal of thousands of listings for such illegal rentals from short-term rental websites.

The bill's supporters said New York's proposed law had been designed to ensure compliance because it requires online rental platforms like Airbnb to verify that a listing has been properly registered with the city before the platform can collect any fees. Fines for hosts who fail to abide by the rule could be up to $5,000, and platforms like Airbnb could be fined $1,500 for every illegal transaction. [...] It's not clear exactly how many of the listings in New York City are illegal, and the effectiveness of the new bill will depend in part on how well the city enforces the new law. In places like Santa Monica, Boston and San Francisco, data has shown a modest to significant decrease in the number of listings after a registration system went into place. Based on the number of listings advertising short-term rentals for entire homes or apartments in the city, suggesting a host may not be present, supporters of the bill estimate that up to roughly 19,000 Airbnb listings could be illegal and eventually delisted. "According to data from Inside Airbnb, an independent data-tracking website, there were more than 37,700 Airbnb listings in New York City at the beginning of November 2021," the report notes. "That was significantly below the prepandemic level of more than 49,200 in November 2019."

Stephen Smith, a co-founder of real estate firm Quantierra, said the bill would not do enough to stem the city's housing crisis. "These politicians seem to think that this is going to do something for affordability, and in fact it's likely to do very little," he said. The combination of the bill along with another city initiative to curb new hotel development could greatly reduce the number of affordable places visitors to the city can stay, Mr. Smith said. "If you really make it difficult enough for people to come to New York, they're going to stop coming to New York," he said.

The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce -- and in a way not seen in plants and animals. CNN reports: Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal. Now the scientists that developed them at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering said they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction different from any animal or plant known to science.

[T]hey found that the xenobots, which were initially sphere-shaped and made from around 3,000 cells, could replicate. But it happened rarely and only in specific circumstances. The xenobots used "kinetic replication" -- a process that is known to occur at the molecular level but has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms [...]. With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers then tested billions of body shapes to make the xenobots more effective at this type of replication. The supercomputer came up with a C-shape that resembled Pac-Man, the 1980s video game. They found it was able to find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather hundreds of them inside its mouth, and a few days later the bundle of cells became new xenobots.

The xenobots are very early technology -- think of a 1940s computer -- and don't yet have any practical applications. However, this combination of molecular biology and artificial intelligence could potentially be used in a host of tasks in the body and the environment, according to the researchers. This may include things like collecting microplastics in the oceans, inspecting root systems and regenerative medicine. While the prospect of self-replicating biotechnology could spark concern, the researchers said that the living machines were entirely contained in a lab and easily extinguished, as they are biodegradable and regulated by ethics experts. "Most people think of robots as made of metals and ceramics but it's not so much what a robot is made from but what it does, which is act on its own on behalf of people," said Josh Bongard, a computer science professor and robotics expert at the University of Vermont and lead author of the study, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "In that way it's a robot but it's also clearly an organism made from genetically unmodified frog cell."

"The AI didn't program these machines in the way we usually think about writing code. It shaped and sculpted and came up with this Pac-Man shape," Bongard said. "The shape is, in essence, the program. The shape influences how the xenobots behave to amplify this incredibly surprising process."

South Africa's government is considering new public-health restrictions to contain a fast-spreading new variant of the coronavirus that scientists say has a high number of mutations that may make it more transmissible and allow it to evade some of the immune responses triggered by previous infection or vaccination. From a report: The warning from the South African scientists and the Health Ministry, issued in a hastily called news briefing Thursday, prompted the World Health Organization to call a meeting of experts for Friday to discuss whether to declare the new strain a "variant of concern." The WHO uses this label for virus strains that have been proven to be more contagious, lead to more serious illness or decrease the effectiveness of public-health measures, tests, treatments or vaccines. Other variants of concern include the Delta variant that is now dominant world-wide and the Alpha variant that drove a deadly wave of infections across Europe and the U.S. last winter and spring. While the scientists said they were still studying the exact combination of mutations of the new variant -- currently dubbed B.1.1.529 -- and how they affect the virus, its discovery underlines how changes to the virus's genome continue to pose a risk to the world's emergence from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Drinking coffee or tea may be linked with a lower risk of stroke and dementia, according to the largest study of its kind. The Guardian reports: Strokes cause 10% of deaths globally, while dementia is one of the world's biggest health challenges -- 130 million are expected to be living with it by 2050. In the research, 365,000 people aged between 50 and 74 were followed for more than a decade. At the start the participants, who were involved in the UK Biobank study, self-reported how much coffee and tea they drank. Over the research period, 5,079 of them developed dementia and 10,053 went on to have at least one stroke.

Researchers found that people who drank two to three cups of coffee or three to five cups of tea a day, or a combination of four to six cups of coffee and tea, had the lowest risk of stroke or dementia. Those who drank two to three cups of coffee and two to three cups of tea daily had a 32% lower risk of stroke. These people had a 28% lower risk of dementia compared with those who did not drink tea or coffee. The research, by Yuan Zhang and colleagues from Tianjin Medical University, China, suggests drinking coffee alone or in combination with tea is also linked with lower risk of post-stroke dementia. "[W]hat generally happened is that the risk of stroke or dementia was lower in people who drank reasonably small amounts of coffee or tea compared to those who drank none at all, but that after a certain level of consumption, the risk started to increase again until it became higher than the risk to people who drank none," said professor Kevin McConway, an emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University who was not involved in the study.

"Once the coffee consumption got up to seven or eight cups a day, the stroke risk was greater than for people who drank no coffee, and quite a lot higher than for those who drank two or three cups a day."

The study has been published in the journal PLOS Medicine.

nickwinlund77 shares a report from SciTechDaily: Since the first observation of merging black holes by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015, astronomers have been repeatedly surprised by their large masses. Though they emit no light, black hole mergers are observed through their emission of gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Physicists originally expected that black holes would have masses less than about 40 times that of the Sun, because merging black holes arise from massive stars, which can't hold themselves together if they get too big. The LIGO and Virgo observatories, however, have found many black holes with masses greater than that of 50 suns, with some as massive as 100 suns. Numerous formation scenarios have been proposed to produce such large black holes, but no single scenario has been able to explain the diversity of black hole mergers observed so far, and there is no agreement on which combination of formation scenarios is physically viable. This new study, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is the first to show that both large and small black hole masses can result from a single pathway, wherein the black holes gain mass from the expansion of the universe itself.

Astronomers typically model black holes inside a universe that cannot expand. "It's an assumption that simplifies Einstein's equations because a universe that doesn't grow has much less to keep track of," said Kevin Croker, a professor at the UH Mnoa Department of Physics and Astronomy. "There is a trade-off though: predictions may only be reasonable for a limited amount of time." Because the individual events detectable by LIGO-Virgo only last a few seconds, when analyzing any single event, this simplification is sensible. But these same mergers are potentially billions of years in the making. During the time between the formation of a pair of black holes and their eventual merger, the universe grows profoundly. If the more subtle aspects of Einstein's theory are carefully considered, then a startling possibility emerges: the masses of black holes could grow in lockstep with the universe, a phenomenon that Croker and his team call cosmological coupling. The most well-known example of cosmologically-coupled material is light itself, which loses energy as the universe grows. "We thought to consider the opposite effect," said research co-author and UH Manoa Physics and Astronomy Professor Duncan Farrah. "What would LIGO -- Virgo observe if black holes were cosmologically coupled and gained energy without needing to consume other stars or gas?"

Pfizer's oral antiviral drug was found to reduce the risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 by 89%, according to interim results from a mid-to-late-stage study announced by the company on Friday. From a report: Antiviral drugs can be a key pandemic-fighting tool, as not everyone will get vaccinated against the virus and it may take years to fully inoculate people in certain countries -- particularly given current gaps in global vaccine supplies. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement that these findings from the phase 2/3 study marked "a real game-changer in the global efforts to halt the devastation of this pandemic." Pfizer's antiviral pill, PAXLOVID (PF-07321332), was developed specifically to treat COVID-19, by blocking activity of the main enzyme the virus needs to multiply. This was co-administered with a low dose of ritonavir, which is widely used in combination treatments for HIV infection.

Months-long silences. Mysterious rejections. Here's what's behind the shortages of a critical tool for ending the pandemic. ProPublica: A few weeks ago, a ProPublica reporter decided to test his kids for COVID-19. They had the sniffles, and with a grandparent set to visit he wanted to minimize the risk that they were infectious. This was the problem that quick, cheap COVID-19 tests were supposed to help fix. No need to go to a clinic or wait days for results. Just pick up a pack of tests at a local pharmacy whenever you want, swab your nose and learn within 15 minutes if you're likely to pass the virus along. So the ProPublican went to his neighborhood CVS, hoping to buy the required pack of two for $23.99. They were out of stock. Then he went to Rite Aid. They didn't have the tests either. Then Walgreens, then another CVS. All out of stock. The only supplier with a few tests to offer was his sister, who happened to have a few tucked away. It's a familiar experience for many Americans. But not for people in Britain, who get free rapid tests delivered to their homes on demand. Or France, Germany or Belgium, where at-home tests are ubiquitous and as cheap as a decent cappuccino. So why are at-home tests still so pricey and hard to find in the United States?

The answer appears to be a confounding combination of overzealous regulation and anemic government support -- issues that have characterized America's testing response from the beginning of the pandemic. Companies trying to get the Food and Drug Administration's approval for rapid COVID-19 tests describe an arbitrary, opaque process that meanders on, sometimes long after their products have been approved in other countries that prioritize accessibility and affordability over perfect accuracy. After the FDA put out a call for more rapid tests in the summer of 2020, Los Angeles-based biotech company WHPM, Inc. began working on one. They did a peer-reviewed trial following the agency's directions, then submitted the results this past March. In late May, WHPM head of international sales Chris Patterson said, the company got a confusing email from its FDA reviewer asking for information that had in fact already been provided. WHPM responded within two days. Months passed. In September, after a bit more back and forth, the FDA wrote to say it had identified other deficiencies, and wouldn't review the rest of the application. Even if WHPM fixed the issues, the application would be "deprioritized," or moved to the back of the line.

"We spent our own million dollars developing this thing, at their encouragement, and then they just treat you like a criminal," said Patterson. Meanwhile, the WHPM rapid test has been approved in Mexico and the European Union, where the company has received large orders. An FDA scientist who vetted COVID-19 test applications told ProPublica he became so frustrated by delays that he quit the agency earlier this year. "They're neither denying the bad ones or approving the good ones," he said, asking to remain anonymous because his current work requires dealing with the agency. FDA officials said they simply want to ensure that rapid tests detect even low levels of the virus, since false negative test results could cause people to unwittingly spread the disease. They blame the test shortages on an absence of the kind of sustained public funding that European governments have provided. Without it, manufacturers have lacked confidence that going through the FDA's process would be financially worth the trouble.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: In a new study, researchers temporarily made the blood-brain barrier more permeable, allowing a monoclonal antibody to target cancer that had spread to the brain. Scientists made it possible for the drug to cross the barrier -- a protective membrane which prevents most larger molecules from entering the brain -- using focused ultrasound beams guided by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Though there has been promising research on the technique, it had never been used to deliver a drug to the brain. Scientists also used a system of radioactive tagging to show that more of the drug had reached the tumors. No patient had notable side effects from the treatment. Though the study was preliminary, it could open the door to treating a whole range of diseases impacting the brain.

In the study, four patients with a type of metastatic breast cancer, Her2-positive, first received a treatment of trastuzumab, a common monoclonal antibody treatment also called Herceptin. Collectively, the patients received 20 treatments -- up to six each. The ultrasound therapy took place inside a high-resolution MRI scanner that the researchers used to target the treatment. The researchers used a hemispheric helmet with 1024 ultrasound transducers to deliver the ultrasound, targeting it by both moving the helmet and adjusting the voltage across individual transducers, causing a slight difference in the phase of the ultrasound that can correct for variations in the thickness of the skull. [...]

While the ultrasound was delivered, the patients were also receiving an infusion of lipid-based microbubbles. In combination with targeted ultrasound, the microbubbles produce the temporary permeability of the blood-brain barrier. Scientists still don't entirely know why this is. In the 1950s, researchers started to notice that ultrasound seemed to break down the blood-brain barrier. Hynynen came across these early studies while doing cancer research and started to try the technique to make the barrier more permeable. But in animal studies, using only ultrasound didn't consistently avoid injury. Only when the researchers tried using microbubbles did they avoid inflicting damage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: In December 2018, bling vendor Signet Jewelers fixed a weakness in their Kay Jewelers and Jared websites that exposed the order information for all of their online customers. This week, Signet subsidiary Zales.com updated its website to remediate a nearly identical customer data exposure. Last week, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a reader who was browsing Zales.com and suddenly found they were looking at someone else's order information on the website, including their name, billing address, shipping address, phone number, email address, items and total amount purchased, delivery date, tracking link, and the last four digits of the customer's credit card number. The reader noticed that the link for the order information she'd stumbled on included a lengthy numeric combination that -- when altered -- would produce yet another customer's order information. When the reader failed to get an immediate response from Signet, KrebsOnSecurity contacted the company.

In a written response, Signet said, "A concern was brought to our attention by an IT professional. We addressed it swiftly, and upon review we found no misuse or negative impact to any systems or customer data." Their statement continues: "As a business principle we make consumer information protection the highest priority, and proactively initiate independent and industry-leading security testing. As a result, we exceed industry benchmarks on data protection maturity. We always appreciate it when consumers reach out to us with feedback, and have committed to further our efforts on data protection maturity."

When Signet fixed similar weaknesses with its Jared and Kay websites back in 2018, the reader who found and reported that data exposure said his mind quickly turned to the various ways crooks might exploit access to customer order information. "My first thought was they could track a package of jewelry to someone's door and swipe it off their doorstep," said Brandon Sheehy, a Dallas-based Web developer. "My second thought was that someone could call Jared's customers and pretend to be Jared, reading the last four digits of the customer's card and saying there'd been a problem with the order, and if they could get a different card for the customer they could run it right away and get the order out quickly. That would be a pretty convincing scam. Or just targeted phishing attacks."

AnandTech reviews the recently unveiled M1 Pro and M1 Max chips : The M1 Pro and M1 Max change the narrative completely -- these designs feel like truly SoCs that have been made with power users in mind, with Apple increasing the performance metrics in all vectors. We expected large performance jumps, but we didn't expect the some of the monstrous increases that the new chips are able to achieve. On the CPU side, doubling up on the performance cores is an evident way to increase performance -- the competition also does so with some of their designs. How Apple does it differently, is that it not only scaled the CPU cores, but everything surrounding them. It's not just 4 additional performance cores, it's a whole new performance cluster with its own L2. On the memory side, Apple has scaled its memory subsystem to never before seen dimensions, and this allows the M1 Pro & Max to achieve performance figures that simply weren't even considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here aren't only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you'd have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max -- it's just generally absurd.

On the GPU side of things, Apple's gains are also straightforward. The M1 Pro is essentially 2x the M1, and the M1 Max is 4x the M1 in terms of performance. Games are still in a very weird place for macOS and the ecosystem, maybe it's a chicken-and-egg situation, maybe gaming is still something of a niche that will take a long time to see make use of the performance the new chips are able to provide in terms of GPU. What's clearer, is that the new GPU does allow immense leaps in performance for content creation and productivity workloads which rely on GPU acceleration. To further improve content creation, the new media engine is a key feature of the chip. Particularly video editors working with ProRes or ProRes RAW, will see a many-fold improvement in their workflow as the new chips can handle the formats like a breeze -- this along is likely going to have many users of that professional background quickly adopt the new MacBook Pro's. For others, it seems that Apple knows the typical MacBook Pro power users, and has designed the silicon around the use-cases in which Macs do shine. The combination of raw performance, unique acceleration, as well as sheer power efficiency, is something that you just cannot find in any other platform right now, likely making the new MacBook Pro's not just the best laptops, but outright the very best devices for the task. It's a comprehensive review, and Intel should be panicking.

Pine64 today announced its latest Linux-powered device, the PinePhone Pro, an update to the original PinePhone which sees a more powerful device running mainline Linux (Manjaro in this case) on a mobile device that works as a cellphone and a desktop computer. Tom's Hardware reports: This combination of hardware and software makes the still slightly futuristic idea of confluence between mobile and desktop devices seem a step closer. Carry it around with you, and it's a phone. Plug it into a monitor, and it's a desktop PC. The KDE Plasma Mobile front-end adapts to the circumstances. Inside, it's much like any other phone, with a Rockchip RK3399S six-core SoC operating at 1.5GHz, 4GB of dual-channel LPDDR4 RAM, and 128GB of internal eMMC flash storage. It features a 13MP main camera sensor and a 5MP front-facing camera. There's a Micro-SD slot for expanded storage, and a six-inch 1440 x 720 IPS touchscreen. The PinePhone Pro is not a typical cell phone, rather the concept of convergence, the ability to use your phone as a computer is intriguing. Plug your PinePhone Pro into an external display and use it as a low-power desktop computer is something that has been attempted by a number of companies, including Canonical's attempt with Ubuntu Edge.

PinePhone Pro offers something that is missing from the majority of phones, privacy. A series of hardware DIP-switches, hidden under a rear cover, cut off access to the cameras, microphone, Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.1 chips, headphone jack, and LTE modem (including GPS) should you ever need to. The layout and Pogo Pins of the new phone are identical to the original PinePhone, so all existing accessories should work. Retailing at $399, the PinePhone Pro's makers are realistic about the challenges of putting desktop Linux on a mobile device, especially in an ecosystem dominated by iOS and Android.

Quadrupedal robots are one of the most interesting developments in robotics in recent years. They're small, nimble, and able to traverse environments that frustrate wheeled machines. So, of course, it was only a matter of time until someone put a gun on one. From a report: The image in the linked story shows a quadrupedal robot -- a Vision 60 unit built by US firm Ghost Robotics -- that's been equipped with a custom gun by small-arms specialists Sword International. It seems the gun itself (dubbed the SPUR or "special purpose unmanned rifle") is designed to be fitted onto a variety of robotic platforms. It has a 30x optical zoom, thermal camera for targeting in the dark, and an effective range of 1,200 meters. What's not clear is whether or not Sword International or Ghost Robotics are currently selling this combination of gun and robot. But if they're not, it seems they will be soon. As the marketing copy on Sword's website boasts: "The SWORD Defense Systems SPUR is the future of unmanned weapon systems, and that future is now."

A new study (PDF) by a team of university researchers in the UK has unveiled a host of privacy issues that arise from using Android smartphones. BleepingComputer reports: The researchers have focused on Samsung, Xiaomi, Realme, and Huawei Android devices, and LineageOS and /e/OS, two forks of Android that aim to offer long-term support and a de-Googled experience. The conclusion of the study is worrying for the vast majority of Android users: "With the notable exception of /e/OS, even when minimally configured and the handset is idle these vendor-customized Android variants transmit substantial amounts of information to the OS developer and also to third parties (Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) that have pre-installed system apps." As the summary table indicates, sensitive user data like persistent identifiers, app usage details, and telemetry information are not only shared with the device vendors, but also go to various third parties, such as Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And to make matters worse, Google appears at the receiving end of all collected data almost across the entire table.

It is important to note that this concerns the collection of data for which there's no option to opt-out, so Android users are powerless against this type of telemetry. This is particularly concerning when smartphone vendors include third-party apps that are silently collecting data even if they're not used by the device owner, and which cannot be uninstalled. For some of the built-in system apps like miui.analytics (Xiaomi), Heytap (Realme), and Hicloud (Huawei), the researchers found that the encrypted data can sometimes be decoded, putting the data at risk to man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. As the study points out, even if the user resets the advertising identifiers for their Google Account on Android, the data-collection system can trivially re-link the new ID back to the same device and append it to the original tracking history. The deanonymization of users takes place using various methods, such as looking at the SIM, IMEI, location data history, IP address, network SSID, or a combination of these. In response to the report, a Google spokesperson said: "While we appreciate the work of the researchers, we disagree that this behavior is unexpected -- this is how modern smartphones work. As explained in our Google Play Services Help Center article, this data is essential for core device services such as push notifications and software updates across a diverse ecosystem of devices and software builds. For example, Google Play services uses data on certified Android devices to support core device features. Collection of limited basic information, such as a device's IMEI, is necessary to deliver critical updates reliably across Android devices and apps."

The number of people quitting their jobs has surged to record highs, pushed by a combination of factors that include Americans sensing ample opportunity and better pay elsewhere. From a report: Some 4.3 million people quit jobs in August, according to the monthly survey -- about 2.9 percent of the workforce, according to new data released Tuesday from the Department of Labor. Those numbers are up from the previous records set in April and nearly matched in July, of about 4 million people quitting. The phenomenon is being driven in part by workers who are less willing to endure inconvenient hours and poor compensation, quitting at this stage in the pandemic to find better opportunities elsewhere. According to the report, there were 10.4 million job openings in the country at the end of August -- down slightly from July's record high, which was adjusted up to 11.1 million, but still a tremendously high number.

The "quits" numbers include about 892,000 workers in restaurants, bars and hotels, as well as 721,000 workers in retail. An additional 706,000 employees in professional business services and 534,000 workers in health care and social assistance also left jobs. Nick Bunker, economist at the jobs site Indeed, said the numbers were a reflection of the leverage workers have in the current economic market, with job openings outnumbering unemployed workers. The high level of people quitting their jobs was likely due in large part to people leaving jobs to take other positions, although the data doesn't specify why people are quitting and where they are ending up.