A new finding suggests Samsung is throttling the performance of thousands of Android apps on Galaxy smartphones, including Google and Samsung's first-party apps. XDA Developers reports: Samsung has an app called Game Optimization Service that comes preinstalled on many Galaxy phones. Although the name suggests the app helps improve gaming performance, it's apparently being used to limit the performance of non-gaming apps. Users on the Korean tech forum Meeco have posted a list of affected apps that are subject to performance throttling. The list includes 10,000 popular apps, including Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, Microsoft Office, Google Keep, Spotify, Snapchat, YouTube Music, and more. Samsung's own apps such as Samsung Pay, Secure Folder, Bixby, and others are also on the list. Notably, there are no benchmark apps on this blacklist.

A video posted by Korean YouTuber shows how blacklisted apps are subject to inferior performance while benchmark apps are given a free hand. In his test, the YouTuber changed the package name of the 3DMark benchmark app to Genshin Impact, one of the apps on the blacklist. The unmodified version of 3D Mark scored 2618 points in the Wild Life Extreme test. When he ran the same test with the spoofed version, there was a significant drop in the score -- 1141 points. In other words, the spoofed version performed 56% worse than the unmodified version. It's not immediately clear if the Game Optimization Service app is installed on every Galaxy phone. Samsung is reportedly aware of the issue and conducting an internal investigation. "While Samsung hasn't clarified why it's throttling Android apps, it's likely in an attempt to improve battery life," notes XDA.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan says that following a legal process, the Federal Bureau of Investigations has gained access to data in her Google account. Google itself informed her of the data release this week noting that due to a court order, the company wasn't allowed to inform her sooner. In January 2021, Twitter suspended the official Sci-Hub account so when site updates are published, they now tend to appear on Elbakyan's personal account. A new tweet this week reveals that Google was also required to hand over her account data.

In an email to Elbakyan dated March 2, 2022, Google advises that following a legal process issued by the FBI, Google was required to hand over data associated with Elbakyan's account. Exactly what data was targeted isn't made clear but according to Google, a court order required the company to keep the request a secret. [...] Google notes that since it is "not in a position" to provide Elbakyan with legal advice or to discuss the substance of the legal process, the Sci-Hub founder may wish to contact an attorney. The big question remains -- what exactly is the investigation about?

Given the scale of Sci-Hub and its notoriety around the world, it's certainly possible that a criminal copyright infringement investigation is underway in the United States that could feasibly lead to an indictment for Elbakyan and any cohorts involved in the operation. However, more serious allegations have been made in the past. Back in December 2019, The Washington Post reported that Elbakyan was being investigated by the US Justice Department on suspicion that she "may" be working with Russian intelligence to "steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors." No solid evidence was published to back up those allegations but the publication did note that Elbakyan may have collected log-in credentials from journal subscribers in order to access academic literature, presumably so that it can be offered on Sci-Hub. "I know there are some reasons to suspect me: after all, I have education in computer security and was a hobby hacker in teenage years," said Elbakyan in a statement. "But hacking is not my occupation, and I do not have any job within any intelligence, either Russian or some another."

She added: "I think that whether I can be a Russian spy is being investigated by U.S. government since they learned about Sci-Hub, because that is very logical: a Russian project, that uses university accounts to access some information, of course that is suspicious. But in fact Sci-Hub has always been my personal enterprise."

Thelasko shares a report from CNET: NASA's Curiosity rover snapped a gorgeous, delicate formation on Mars that looks like it could be a branching piece of ocean coral. It's not coral, but it's worth contemplating how we see familiar Earth objects in random shapes on Mars. The miniscule Martian sculpture invites poetic comparisons. It resembles a water droplet captured at the moment of explosion against a surface, or the tendrils of an anemone in a tide pool.

The image comes from Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager (Mahli) instrument, which NASA describes as "the rover's version of the magnifying hand lens that geologists usually carry with them into the field." So the formation in the image is quite small. Abigail Fraeman, a deputy project scientist for Curiosity, tweeted a helpful visual guide that compares the object with a US penny to give an approximate sense of the scale. Fraeman writes that the image "shows teeny, tiny delicate structures that formed by mineral precipitating from water."

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm quotes IEEE Spectrum: A whiskey connoisseur can take a whiff of a dram and know exactly the brand, region, and style of whiskey in hand. But how do our human noses compare to electronic noses in distinguishing the qualities of a whiskey? A study published 1 February in IEEE Sensors Journal describes a new e-nose that is surprisingly accurate at analyzing whiskies — and can identify the brand of whiskey with more than 95 percent accuracy after just one "whiff."

E-noses have been gaining in popularity over recent years thanks to their range of valuable applications, from sensing when crops are ready for harvest to identifying food products on the cusp of expiring. It is perhaps unsurprising that many e-noses have also been developed to analyze alcoholic beverages, including whiskey, which had an estimated international market worth US $58 billion in 2018 alone. "This lucrative industry has the potential to be a target of fraudulent activities such as mislabeling and adulteration," explains Steven Su, an associate professor at the Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney....

Su and his colleagues sought to adapt one of their e-noses so that it could analyze some key qualities of whiskey. Their original e-nose was designed to detect illegal animal parts sold on the black market, such as rhino horns, and they have since also adapted their e-nose for breath analysis and assessing food quality. Their newest, whiskey-sniffing e-nose, called Nos.e, contains a little vial where the whiskey sample is added. The scent of the whiskey is injected into a gas sensor chamber, which detects the various odors and sends the data to a computer for analysis. The most important scent features are then extracted and analyzed by machine learning algorithms designed to recognize the brand, region, and style of whiskey.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In 2021, Reddit's users created nearly 5.8 billion posts, comments, private messages and chats across the platform, with 297,161,752 later being removed by moderators (around 175.8k), removed by site admins (108.6K), and the authors themselves (12.6K). Content can be removed for a variety of reasons. 'Content manipulation' is the largest category and encompasses spam, community interference (so-call 'brigading'), vote manipulation, and similar issues. For the purpose of this report, however, we'll home in on the copyright issues faced by Reddit during the last year and how the site responded to them.

In common with the vast majority of large companies based in the US, Reddit has to follow the requirements of the DMCA which means that when it receives a valid copyright notice, it must comply by taking the identified content down. On the other hand, when submitters send notices that are incomplete or invalid in some other way, Reddit does not. "In 2021, Reddit received 177,450 copyright notices reporting 920,672 pieces of content. This represents an increase of 104% from 2020. We removed 665,898 pieces of content in response to these takedown notices," the company reveals in the latest edition of its transparency report.

Under the DMCA, Reddit is also required to take "appropriate action" against so-called "repeat infringers", which in the company's case can involve the termination of not only user accounts but also entire subreddit communities, especially ones where "excessive amounts" of infringing content keep getting posted. "In 2021, Reddit permanently suspended 2,813 users and banned 2,625 subreddits for excessive copyright infringement," the company writes. These figures represent a substantial increase over those published for 2020. In that year, Reddit banned just 303 users and terminated 514 subreddits. Although overall copyright complaints are up 104% on the previous year, the site's termination policy doesn't appear to have changed significantly. "With around 297 million pieces of content removed by Reddit in 2021, the 665,898 pieces removed on copyright grounds represent a small fraction of the overall problem," concludes the report. "However, with user accounts and entire communities on the line, consequences can be great when errant users repeatedly and intentionally overstep the line."

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin has said many crypto developers wouldn't be unhappy to see a continued slide in the price of digital currencies, as the slump could clear out less-viable projects. From a report: Cryptocurrencies have fallen in recent weeks alongside stocks, as investors grow more cautious about taking risks given persistent rises in inflation, expected interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, and geopolitical tensions. But the prospect of more losses and a bear market -- generally, where prices fall 20% from a recent high -- won't deter some in the crypto world, Buterin told Bloomberg. "The people who are deep into crypto, and especially building things, a lot of them welcome a bear market," he said in an interview published Saturday. [...] On the other hand, falling prices separate the curious from the serious, he argued. That is why a "crypto winter" -- when prices keep crashing and fail to recover for a long time -- could be seen as a positive. "The winters are the time when a lot of those applications fall away, and you can see which projects are actually long-term sustainable, like both in their models and in their teams and their people," the ethereum cofounder said.

Linux programmers fixed bugs faster than anyone — in an average of just 25 days (improving from 32 days in 2019 to just 15 in 2021). That's the conclusion of Google's "Project Zero" security research team, which studied the speed of bug-fixing from January 2019 to December 2021.

ZDNet reports that Linux's competition "didn't do nearly as well." For instance, Apple, 69 days; Google, 44 days; and Mozilla, 46 days. Coming in at the bottom was Microsoft, 83 days, and Oracle, albeit with only a handful of security problems, with 109 days.

By Project Zero's count, others, which included primarily open-source organizations and companies such as Apache, Canonical, Github, and Kubernetes, came in with a respectable 44 days.

Generally, everyone's getting faster at fixing security bugs. In 2021, vendors took an average of 52 days to fix reported security vulnerabilities. Only three years ago the average was 80 days. In particular, the Project Zero crew noted that Microsoft, Apple, and Linux all significantly reduced their time to fix over the last two years.

As for mobile operating systems, Apple iOS with an average of 70 days is a nose better than Android with its 72 days. On the other hand, iOS had far more bugs, 72, than Android with its 10 problems.

Browsers problems are also being fixed at a faster pace. Chrome fixed its 40 problems with an average of just under 30 days. Mozilla Firefox, with a mere 8 security holes, patched them in an average of 37.8 days. Webkit, Apple's web browser engine, which is primarily used by Safari, has a much poorer track record. Webkit's programmers take an average of over 72 days to fix bugs.

According to a new exclusive analysis of NPD Game Pulse data conducted by Ars Technica, the number of physical console game releases continues to decline even as the number of digital console games explodes. From the report: In terms of distinct game titles released in the United States, the raw number of new games available on physical media (i.e. discs or cartridges) declined from 321 in 2018 to just 226 in 2021, a nearly 30 percent decline (games released on multiple consoles are counted as a single title in this measure). The number of digital games released each year, on the other hand, remained relatively flat from 2018 through 2020. Then, in 2021, that number exploded to nearly 2,200 digital titles, a 64 percent increase from 2020. All told, the proportion of all new console games available exclusively as digital downloads increased from 75 percent in 2018 to nearly 90 percent in 2021.

These divergent trends suggest that the decline in new physical releases is not simply an artifact of consoles like the Xbox One and PS4 nearing the end of their lifecycles. Instead, as a whole, publishers seem to see a physical release as a less relevant market for an increasing proportion of titles. But the transition away from physical console games is not distributed evenly across all publishers. The largest publishers are much more likely to go through the hassle and expense of a physical release for their marquee titles. Among major publishers, a slight majority (56.4 percent) of distinct titles released in 2021 were available as physical releases. That's still a major decline from 2018, though, when nearly 80 percent of titles from those publishers merited a physical launch. When those large publishers are filtered out, though, physical game releases quickly become a very minor part of the market. Just 8.1 percent of new games from those smaller companies were available on physical media in 2021, down in terms of both proportion and raw numbers from 2018.

The Google-backed firm taught a reinforcement learning algorithm to control the fiery plasma inside a tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. From a report: The inside of a tokamak -- the doughnut-shaped vessel designed to contain a nuclear fusion reaction -- presents a special kind of chaos. Hydrogen atoms are smashed together at unfathomably high temperatures, creating a whirling, roiling plasma that's hotter than the surface of the sun. Finding smart ways to control and confine that plasma will be key to unlocking the potential of nuclear fusion, which has been mooted as the clean energy source of the future for decades. At this point, the science underlying fusion seems sound, so what remains is an engineering challenge.

That's where DeepMind comes in. The artificial intelligence firm, backed by Google parent company Alphabet, has previously turned its hand to video games and protein folding, and has been working on a joint research project with the Swiss Plasma Center to develop an AI for controlling a nuclear fusion reaction. In stars, which are also powered by fusion, the sheer gravitational mass is enough to pull hydrogen atoms together and overcome their opposing charges. On Earth, scientists instead use powerful magnetic coils to confine the nuclear fusion reaction, nudging it into the desired position and shaping it like a potter manipulating clay on a wheel. The coils have to be carefully controlled to prevent the plasma from touching the sides of the vessel: this can damage the walls and slow down the fusion reaction. (There's little risk of an explosion as the fusion reaction cannot survive without magnetic confinement).

But every time researchers want to change the configuration of the plasma and try out different shapes that may yield more power or a cleaner plasma, it necessitates a huge amount of engineering and design work. Conventional systems are computer-controlled and based on models and careful simulations, but they are, Ambrogio Fasoli, director of the Swiss Plasma Center at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. says, "complex and not always necessarily optimized." DeepMind has developed an AI that can control the plasma autonomously. A paper published in the journal Nature describes how researchers from the two groups taught a deep reinforcement learning system to control the 19 magnetic coils inside TCV, the variable-configuration tokamak at the Swiss Plasma Center, which is used to carry out research that will inform the design of bigger fusion reactors in the future.

"A new museum exhibit hopes to uncover the secrets behind the doodles, in-jokes and coded messages on a blackboard that legendary physicist Stephen Hawking kept untouched for more than 35 years," reports Live Science: The blackboard dates from 1980, when Hawking joined fellow physicists at a conference on superspace and supergravity at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., according to The Guardian. While attempting to come up with a cosmological "theory of everything" — a set of equations that would combine the rules of general relativity and quantum mechanics — Hawking's colleagues used the blackboard as a welcome distraction, filling it with a mishmash of half-finished equations, perplexing puns and inscrutable doodles.

Still preserved more than 40 years later, the befuddling blackboard has just gone on public display for the first time ever as the centerpiece of a new exhibition on Hawking's office, which opened Feb. 10 at the Science Museum of London. The museum will welcome physicists and friends of Hawking — who died in 2018 at the age of 76 — from around the world in hopes that they may be able to decipher some of the hand-scrawled doodles.

What, for example, does "stupor symmetry" mean? Who is the shaggy-bearded Martian drawn large at the blackboard's center? Why is there a floppy-nosed squid climbing over a brick wall? What is hiding inside the tin can labeled "Exxon supergravity?" Hopefully, the world's great minds of math and physics can rise to the occasion with answers.
The exhibit includes dozens of other Hawking artifacts, including a formal bet that information swallowed by a black hole is lost for ever and a copy of his 1966 Ph.D. thesis on the expansion of the universe. The exhibt runs through June 12th at the Science Museum in London before touring other museums around the U.K.

Samsung held a launch event for its new Galaxy smartphones in a metaverse this week but many people struggled to gain access as they encountered technical difficulties. CNBC reports: The South Korean tech giant hosted the event Wednesday on Decentraland, a cryptocurrency-focused virtual world that users can create, explore and trade in. Decentraland, one of many metaverse efforts, is accessed via a desktop browser. Users create an avatar which they can then navigate around the blockchain-powered virtual world using a mouse and keyboard -- something that isn't exactly intuitive for non-gamers. The event specifically took place in Samsung 837X, a virtual building that Samsung has built on Decentraland that's designed to be a replica of its flagship New York experience center. Samsung 837X is there all the time but there just happened to be an event inside the building's "Connectivity Theatre" on Wednesday. But CNBC, and many others, struggled to find the 837X building and when we did many of us were unable to gain access to it.

When an avatar is first created on Decentraland, it lands in a sort of atrium where clouds appear to be gliding across the floor. There's a round pool in the middle that has a worrying vortex in the center. Our avatar was soon surrounded by around 20 others. A chat box in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen was full of messages like "help" and "I hate this game." One user named claireinnit#87fa, boldly claimed "we're in the ----in future." On the opposite side of the intimidating pool, three large boards read "classics, events and crowd." An ad for Samsung 837X hang on the "crowd" board. Once clicked (easier said than done), you're then given the option to "jump in." After jumping in, you're transported to Samsung's little world on Decentraland and you can see the 837X building. There's a pizza store next door, but not much else.

CNBC immediately noticed a large line of people at the main entrance to the 837X building. People were struggling to get in. Some users were getting their avatars to jump on other people's heads as they clambered to the front of the queue but it didn't help. The doors wouldn't open and the chatbox was again full of pleas for help. A rumor circulated that a YouTuber had managed to find a way in, while a CNET journalist wrote on Twitter that they had managed to gain access by switching to the "ATHENA" server. It wasn't immediately obvious how to do this. "Many people were unable to actually enter Samsung 837X before the event started," wrote CNET's Russell Holly. [...] After around 30 minutes of trying to access Samsung's building in the metaverse, CNBC gave up and went back to the real world.

jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which will also be powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck hand-held gaming console. Today, KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates and bug fixes until the final Plasma 5 version, before transition to Plasma 6.

This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment. Highlights include: Overview effect for managing all your desktops and application windows, easy discovery of KRunner features with the help assistant, and unlocking screen and authentication using fingerprint reader. You will also notice a new Honeywave wallpaper, the ability to pick any color for accent, and critically important Plasma notifications now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages.

magzteel shares a report: For almost five years, an international consortium of scientists was chasing clouds, determined to solve a problem that bedeviled climate-change forecasts for a generation: How do these wisps of water vapor affect global warming? They reworked 2.1 million lines of supercomputer code used to explore the future of climate change, adding more-intricate equations for clouds and hundreds of other improvements. They tested the equations, debugged them and tested again. The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can't model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region. When they ran the updated simulation in 2018, the conclusion jolted them: Earth's atmosphere was much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than decades of previous models had predicted, and future temperatures could be much higher than feared -- perhaps even beyond hope of practical remedy. "We thought this was really strange," said Gokhan Danabasoglu, chief scientist for the climate-model project at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. "If that number was correct, that was really bad news." At least 20 older, simpler global-climate models disagreed with the new one at NCAR, an open-source model called the Community Earth System Model 2, or CESM2, funded mainly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and arguably the world's most influential climate program. Then, one by one, a dozen climate-modeling groups around the world produced similar forecasts. "It was not just us," Dr. Danabasoglu said.

The scientists soon concluded their new calculations had been thrown off kilter by the physics of clouds in a warming world, which may amplify or damp climate change. "The old way is just wrong, we know that," said Andrew Gettelman, a physicist at NCAR who specializes in clouds and helped develop the CESM2 model. "I think our higher sensitivity is wrong too. It's probably a consequence of other things we did by making clouds better and more realistic. You solve one problem and create another." Since then the CESM2 scientists have been reworking their climate-change algorithms using a deluge of new information about the effects of rising temperatures to better understand the physics at work. They have abandoned their most extreme calculations of climate sensitivity, but their more recent projections of future global warming are still dire -- and still in flux. As world leaders consider how to limit greenhouse gases, they depend heavily on what computer climate models predict. But as algorithms and the computer they run on become more powerful -- able to crunch far more data and do better simulations -- that very complexity has left climate scientists grappling with mismatches among competing computer models.

A top VR web browser is closing down. Today, Mozilla announced it's shutting down its Firefox Reality browser -- the four-year-old browser built for use in virtual reality environments. The technology had allowed users to access the web from within their VR headset, doing things like visiting URLs, performing searches, and browsing both the 2D and 3D internet using your VR hand controllers, instead of a mouse. From a report: Firefox Reality first launched in fall 2018 and has been available on Viveport, Oculus, Pico, and Hololens platforms through their various app stores. While capable of surfing the 2D web, the expectation was that users would largely use the new technology to browse and interact with the web's 3D content, like 360-degree panoramic images and videos, 3D models, and WebVR games, for example. But in an announcement published today, Mozilla says the browser will be removed from the stores where it's been available for download in the "coming weeks." Mozilla is instead directing users who still want to utilize a web browser in VR to Igalia's upcoming open-source browser, Wolvic, which is based on Firefox Reality's source code. This browser will be available for download starting next week, so users won't have to go without -- they'll just have to make the switch.

An intelligence panel investigating the cause of a spate of mysterious incidents that have struck dozens of US officials across the globe has said that some of the episodes could "plausibly" have been caused by "pulsed electromagnetic energy" emitted by an external source, according to an executive summary of the panel's findings released Wednesday. CNN reports: But the panel stopped short of making a definitive determination, saying only that both electromagnetic energy and, in limited circumstances, ultrasound could explain the key symptoms -- highlighting the degree to which the murky illness known colloquially as "Havana Syndrome" has remained one of the intelligence community's most stubborn mysteries. "We've learned a lot," an intelligence official familiar with the panel's work told reporters, speaking on anonymity under terms set by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "While we don't have the specific mechanism for each case, what we do know is if you report quickly and promptly get medical care, most people are getting well."

The scientific panel emphasized that the cases it studied were "genuine and compelling," noting that some incidents have affected multiple people in the same space and clinical samples from a few victims have shown signs of "cellular injury to the nervous system." An executive summary of the panel's work provided new details about how the government is categorizing cases as possible Havana Syndrome, a clinically vague illness that has long frustrated firm diagnosis because victims have suffered from such a diverse array of symptoms. Although officials declined to say how many cases the panel examined as part of its inquiry, they said they studied cases that met four "core characteristics": the acute onset of sounds or pressure, sometimes in only one ear or on one side of the head; simultaneous symptoms of vertigo, loss of balance and ear pain; "a strong sense of locality or directionality"; and the absence of any known environmental or medical conditions that could have caused the other symptoms.

Both pulsed electromagnetic energy, "particularly in the radiofrequency range," and ultrasonic arrays could feasibly cause the four core symptoms, the panel found. Both could originate from "a concealable source." But ultrasound can't travel through walls, the panel found, "restricting its applicability to scenarios in which the source is near the target." Sources of radiofrequency energy, on the other hand, are known to exist, "could generate the required stimulus, are concealable, and have moderate power requirements," the panel said. "Using nonstandard antennas and techniques, the signals could be propagated with low loss through air for tens to hundreds of meters, and with some loss, through most building materials." But intelligence officials familiar with the panel's work emphasized that important information gaps remained, forestalling them from reaching firmer conclusions. The experts panel also ruled out so-called psycho-social factors. They also ruled out "ionizing radiation, chemical and biological agents, infrasound, audible sound, ultrasound propagated over large distances, and bulk heating from electromagnetic energy."

"The panel made seven recommendations, including developing better biomarkers that are 'more specific and more sensitive for diagnosis and triage' of cases," reports CNN. "It also recommended utilizing 'detectors' and obtaining 'devices to aid research.' Finally, officials urged swift action by medical officials whenever a case is reported, emphasizing that individuals who have been treated immediately after an event have improved."

India on Tuesday announced plans to launch a digital currency by next year and tax cryptocurrencies and NFTs as the country moves closer to recognizing cryptocurrencies as legal tender in the world's second largest internet market. From a report: Income from the the transfer of any virtual assets will be taxed at 30%, the nation's finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Tuesday. To capture details of all such crypto transactions, she also proposed a 1% tax deduction at source on payments made related to purchase of virtual assets. "No deduction in respect of any expenditure or allowance shall be allowed while computing such income except cost of acquisition. Further, loss from transfer of digital asset cannot be set off against any other income," she said in one of New Delhi's most remarkable tech and business-focused federal budgets. "Gift of virtual digital asset is also proposed to be taxed at the hand of the recipient."

A venture capital-backed battle is raging in New York City in the burgeoning field of instant delivery. From a report: At least six startups, including Gorillas, Jokr SARL, Getir Perakende Lojistik and Buyk, are vying to win the chance to ferry groceries to customers within 10 to 20 minutes of their order placement on an app. Prices are similar to grocery stores, discounts are plentiful, and many services don't have a fee or minimum order, allowing consumers to request a single pint of Ben & Jerry's delivered to their doorstep. Food-delivery app DoorDash, based in San Francisco, also recently entered the fray in New York City.

While these consumer-friendly offerings have brought surging sales, losses are heavy given the high cost of prolific advertising and paying couriers to hand-deliver potato chips, soap and eggs in a short time frame, industry investors and executives said. Some of the companies are averaging a loss of over $20 per order when factoring in costs like advertising, those people said. "The economics are brutal," said Damir Becirovic, a principal at venture-capital firm Index Ventures, which hasn't invested in any of the startups. He added that if any of the companies can build a giant business with efficiencies from scale, that picture could change, but the short-term challenges seem daunting. Take for example Fridge No More, a New York-based company that launched in 2020. As of September, its average order value was $33, according to a 2021 investor presentation viewed by The Wall Street Journal. After paying for the products, the people packaging them, delivery riders, waste and other expenses related to storage, it lost $3.30 on every order. That doesn't include marketing costs. Fridge No More spent $70 on advertising to win the average customer, an investment that resulted in a $78 loss for every customer that stayed in the 10 months through September, according to the presentation.

IEEE Spectrum has republished an article from nearly 40 years ago remembering one of the long-forgotten secrets of the classic video game Space Invaders.

It's about that iconic descending musical notes accompanying the onslaught of the aliens... The more aliens a player shot, the faster they approached; their drumbeat quickened, the tension mounted. Ironically, says Bill Adams, director of game development for Midway Manufacturing Co., of Chicago, Ill., which licensed Space Invaders for sale in the United States, these features of the game were accidental. "The speeding up of the space invaders was just a function of the way the machine worked," he explained. "The hardware had a limitation — it could only move 24 objects efficiently. Once some of the invaders got shot, the hardware did not have as many objects to move, and the remaining invaders sped up. And the designer happened to put out a sound whenever the invaders moved, so when they sped up, so did the tone."

Accident or not, the game worked. As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of the book Video Invaders, more than 4 billion quarters had been dropped into Space Invaders games around the world — "which roughly adds up to one game per earthling."
But Space Invaders also enjoyed at least one special home-grown revival earlier this month. One hobbyist used an Arduino Pro Micro board to build their own Space Invaders arcade cabinet that's just 3.15 inches tall (80 millimeters).

Made from thin hand cut plywood with pinhead joysticks, "Its Microchip ATmega328 microcontroller contains a processor running at 16MHz," reports the projects site Hackster.io, "which is far faster than the processor in the original Space Invaders arcade cabinet."

"Focus on the horse race and the flashy news and you'll miss the real stories," argues Mike Loukides, the content strategy VP at O'Reilly Media. So instead he shares trends observed on O'Reilly's learning platform in the first nine months of 2021: While new technologies may appear on the scene suddenly, the long, slow process of making things that work rarely attracts as much attention. We start with an explosion of fantastic achievements that seem like science fiction — imagine, GPT-3 can write stories! — but that burst of activity is followed by the process of putting that science fiction into production, of turning it into real products that work reliably, consistently, and fairly. AI is making that transition now; we can see it in our data. But what other transitions are in progress...?

Important signals often appear in technologies that have been fairly stable. For example, interest in security, after being steady for a few years, has suddenly jumped up, partly due to some spectacular ransomware attacks. What's important for us isn't the newsworthy attacks but the concomitant surge of interest in security practices — in protecting personal and corporate assets against criminal attackers. That surge is belated but healthy.... Usage of content about ransomware has almost tripled (270% increase). Content about privacy is up 90%; threat modeling is up 58%; identity is up 50%; application security is up 45%; malware is up 34%; and zero trust is up 23%. Safety of the supply chain isn't yet appearing as a security topic, but usage of content about supply chain management has seen a healthy 30% increase....

Another important sign is that usage of content about compliance and governance was significantly up (30% and 35%, respectively). This kind of content is frequently a hard sell to a technical audience, but that may be changing.... This increase points to a growing sense that the technology industry has gotten a regulatory free ride and that free ride is coming to an end. Whether it's stockholders, users, or government agencies who demand accountability, enterprises will be held accountable. Our data shows that they're getting the message.

According to a study by UC Berkeley's School of Information, cybersecurity salaries have crept slightly ahead of programmer salaries in most states, suggesting increased demand for security professionals. And an increase in demand suggests the need for training materials to prepare people to supply that demand. We saw that play out on our platform....

C++ has grown significantly (13%) in the past year, with usage that is roughly twice C's. (Usage of content about C is essentially flat, down 3%.) We know that C++ dominates game programming, but we suspect that it's also coming to dominate embedded systems, which is really just a more formal way to say "internet of things." We also suspect (but don't know) that C++ is becoming more widely used to develop microservices. On the other hand, while C has traditionally been the language of tool developers (all of the Unix and Linux utilities are written in C), that role may have moved on to newer languages like Go and Rust. Go and Rust continue to grow. Usage of content about Go is up 23% since last year, and Rust is up 31%. This growth continues a trend that we noticed last year, when Go was up 16% and Rust was up 94%....

Both Rust and Go are here to stay. Rust reflects significantly new ways of thinking about memory management and concurrency. And in addition to providing a clean and relatively simple model for concurrency, Go represents a turn from languages that have become increasingly complex with every new release.
Other highlights from their report:

• "Quantum computing remains a topic of interest. Units viewed is still small, but year-over-year growth is 39%. That's not bad for a technology that, honestly, hasn't been invented yet...."

• "Whether it's the future of finance or history's biggest Ponzi scheme, use of content about cryptocurrency is up 271%, with content about the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum (ether) up 166% and 185% respectively...."

• "Use of JavaScript content on our platform is surprisingly low — though use of content on TypeScript (a version of JavaScript with optional static typing) is up.... Even with 19% growth, TypeScript has a ways to go before it catches up; TypeScript content usage is roughly a quarter of JavaScript's..."

• "Python, Java, and JavaScript are still the leaders, with Java up 4%, Python down 6%, and JavaScript down 3%...."

• "Finally, look at the units viewed for Linux: it's second only to Kubernetes. While down very slightly in 2021, we don't believe that's significant. Linux has long been the most widely used server operating system, and it's not ceding that top spot soon."

LG has announced a new offering to advertisers that promises to be able to reach the company's millions of connected devices in households across the country, pummeling TV viewers with -- you guessed it -- targeted ads. From a report: While ads playing on your connected TV might not be anything new, some of the metrics the company plans to hand over to advertisers include targeting viewers by specific demographics, for example, or being able to tie a TV ad view to someone's in-store purchase down the line. If you swap out a TV screen for a computer screen, the kind of microtargeting that LG's offering doesn't sound any different than what a company like Facebook or Google would offer. That's kind of the point.

Online ad spending reached more than $490 billion by the end of last year, and those numbers are only going to keep going up as more advertisers look for more ways to track and target more people online. Traditional TV ad spend, meanwhile, has tanked since its peak around 2016. In order to lure ad dollars back, folks in the television space, like LG, are using every tool at their disposal to claw back the ad dollars the internet's taken away. And it's clearly working. While traditional TV ad spend has plummeted, there's never been more money spent on advertising across the digitally connected TVs offered by companies like LG. Roku, for example, recently announced an upcoming Shopify integration that would let retailers target TV viewers with more ads for more of their products. Amazon rolled out a new beta platform that lets networks promote apps, movies, or TV shows to people right from the device's home screen. And I don't need to remind Samsung TV owners how their devices are getting absolutely plastered with ads from every conceivable angle.