Long-time Slashdot reader BoredStiff shares this report from Fortune: Moore's law of ever-increasing miniaturization seemingly never reached the automotive industry. Dozens of chips found in everything from electronic brake systems to airbag control units tend to rely on obsolete technology often well over a decade old. These employ comparatively simple transistors that can be anywhere from 45 nanometers to as much as 90 nanometers in size, far too large — and too primitive — to be suitable for today's smartphones.

When the pandemic hit, replacement demand for big-ticket items like new cars was pushed back while sales of all kinds of home devices soared. When the car market roared back months later, chipmakers had already reallocated their capacity. Now these processors are in short supply, and chipmakers are telling car companies to wake up and finally join the 2010s. "I'll make them as many Intel 16 [nanometer] chips as they want," Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger told Fortune last week during his visit to an auto industry trade show in Germany.

Carmakers have bombarded him with requests to invest in brand-new production capacity for semiconductors featuring designs that, at best, were state of the art when the first Apple iPhone launched. "It just makes no economic or strategic sense," said Gelsinger, who came to the auto show to convince carmakers they need to let go of the distant past. "Rather than spending billions on new 'old' fabs, let's spend millions to help migrate designs to modern ones...."

Reliability plays a major concern. Most systems in cars are safety-critical and need to perform in practically every situation regardless of temperature, humidity, vibrations, and even minor road debris. With so much at stake, tried and true is better than new and improved....

If semiconductor suppliers like Intel and Qualcomm have their way, however, the days of the auto industry relying on these cheap commodity chips are numbered.
The article cites a prediction that 10% of pre-pandemic car production could be eliminated due to chip shortages — and includes this quote from a press briefing by the Volkswagen Group's head of procurement.

"Because of a 50-cent chip, we are unable to build a car that sells for $50,000."

Americans are habitually unattuned to the massive and profoundly human apparatus that brings us basically everything in our lives. Much of the country's pandemic response has treated us as somehow separate from the rest of the world and the challenges it endures, but unpredictably empty shelves, rising prices, and long waits are just more proof of how foolish that belief has always been. The Atlantic: When I called up Dan Hearsch, a managing director at the consulting firm AlixPartners who specializes in supply-chain management, I described the current state of the industry to him as a little wonky. He laughed. "'A little wonky' is one way to say it," he said. "'Everything's broken' is another way." Hearsch told me about a friend whose company imports consumer goods -- stuff that's normally available in abundance at any Walmart or Target -- from China. Before the pandemic, according to the friend, shipping a container of that merchandise to the U.S. would have cost the company $2,000 to $5,000. Recently, though, the number is more like $30,000, at least for anything shipped on a predictable timeline. You can get it down to $20,000 if you're willing to deal with the possibility of your stuff arriving in a few months, or whenever space on a ship eventually opens up that's not already accounted for by companies willing to pay more.

Such severe price hikes aren't supposed to happen. Wealthy Western countries offloaded much of their manufacturing to Asia and Latin America precisely because container shipping has made moving goods between hemispheres so inexpensive. When that math tips into unprofitability, either companies stop shipping goods and wait for better rates, or they start charging you a lot more for the things they ship. Both options constrain supply further and raise prices on what's available. "You look at the price of cars, you look at the price of food -- the price of practically anything is up significantly from one year ago, from two years ago," Hearsch told me. "The differences are really, really quite shocking." The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that as of July, consumer prices had grown almost 5 percent since before the pandemic, with some types of goods showing much larger increases.

Overseas shipping is currently slow and expensive for lots of very complicated reasons and one big, important, relatively uncomplicated one: The countries trying to meet the huge demands of wealthy markets such as the United States are also trying to prevent mass-casualty events. Infection-prevention measures have recently closed high-volume shipping ports in China, the country that supplies the largest share of goods imported to the United States. In Vietnam and Malaysia, where workers churn out products as varied as a third of all shoes imported to the U.S. and chip components that are crucial to auto manufacturing, controlling the far more transmissible [...] Domestically, things aren't a whole lot better. Offshoring has systematically decimated America's capacity to manufacture most things at home, and even products that are made in the United States likely use at least some raw materials or components that need to be imported or are in short supply for other reasons.

Emergency software patches, in which users are pushed to immediately update phones and computers because hackers have figured out some novel way to break in, are becoming more common. From a report: Researchers raised the alarm Monday about a big one: The Israeli spyware company NSO Group, which sells programs for governments to remotely take over people's smartphones and computers, had figured out a new way into practically any Apple device by sending a fake GIF through iMessage. The only way to guard against it is to install Apple's emergency software update. Such emergency vulnerabilities are called "zero days" -- a reference to the fact that they're such an urgent vulnerability in a program that software engineers have zero days to write a patch for it. Against a hacker with the right zero day, there is nothing consumers can do other than wait for software updates or ditch devices altogether.

Once considered highly valuable cyberweapons held mostly by elite government hackers, publicly disclosed zero-day exploits are on a sharp rise. Project Zero, a Google team devoted to identifying and cataloging zero days, has tallied 44 this year alone where hackers had likely discovered them before researchers did. That's already a sharp rise from last year, which saw 25. The number has increased every year since 2018. Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security, a company that connects cybersecurity researchers and companies with vulnerabilities, said that the rise in zero days is thanks to the ad hoc way that software is usually programmed, which often treats security as an afterthought. "It was absolutely inevitable," she said. "We've never addressed the root cause of all of these vulnerabilities, which is not building security in from the ground up." But almost paradoxically, the rise in zero days reflects an online world in which certain individuals are more vulnerable, but most are actually safer from hackers.

A 22-year-old Bitcoin millionaire wants Republicans to ditch their iPhones for a low-end handset that he hopes to turn into a political tool. From a report: It was a pitch tuned for a politically polarized audience. Erik Finman, a 22-year-old who called himself the world's youngest Bitcoin millionaire, posted a video on Twitter for a new kind of smartphone that he said would liberate Americans from their "Big Tech overlords." His splashy video, posted in July, had stirring music, American flags and references to former Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Donald J. Trump. Conservative pundits hawked Mr. Finman's Freedom Phone, and his video amassed 1.8 million views. Mr. Finman soon had thousands of orders for the $500 device. Then came the hard part: Building and delivering the phones. First, he received bad early reviews for a plan to simply put his software on a cheap Chinese phone. And then there was the unglamorous work of shipping phones, hiring customer-service agents, collecting sales taxes and dealing with regulators.

"I feel like practically I was prepared for anything," he said in a recent interview. "But I guess it's kind of like how you hope for world peace, in the sense you don't think it's going to happen." For even the most lavishly funded start-ups, it is hard to compete with tech industry giants that have a death grip on their markets and are valued in the trillions of dollars. Mr. Finman was part of a growing right-wing tech industry taking on the challenge nonetheless, relying more on their conservative customers' distaste for Silicon Valley than expertise or experience. [...] To make a smartphone, however, he had to rely on Google. The company's Android software already works with millions of apps, and Google makes a free, open version of the software for developers to modify. So Mr. Finman hired engineers to strip it of any sign of Google and load it with apps from conservative social networks and news outlets. Then he uploaded the software on phones he bought from China. To unveil the phone, he recorded an infomercial in which he cast the tech companies as enemies of the American way. "Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg banned MLK or Abraham Lincoln," he said in the video. "The course of history would have been altered forever."

[...] Thousands of people bought the $500 phone. Others, including some conservatives, quickly panned the animated pitch. Quickly, news outlets reported that the Freedom Phone was based on a low-cost handset from Umidigi, a Chinese manufacturer that had used chips shown to be vulnerable to hacks. Mr. Finman, who marketed the device as "the best phone in the world," was on the defensive. In an interview in July, Mr. Finman admitted that Umidigi made the phone but still said he was "100 percent" sure it was more secure than the latest iPhone. Apple has tens of thousands of engineers. Mr. Finman said he employed 15 people in Utah and Idaho.

"Loneliness among adolescents around the globe has skyrocketed since a decade ago," reports the Washington Post, "and it may be tied to smartphone use, a new study finds." In 36 out of 37 countries, feelings of loneliness among teenagers rose sharply between 2012 and 2018, with higher increases among girls, according to a report released Tuesday in the Journal of Adolescence. Researchers used data from the Programme for International Student Assessment, a survey of over 1 million 15- and 16-year-old students. The survey included a six-item measure of loneliness at school in 2000, 2003, 2012, 2015 and 2018. Before 2012, the trends had stayed relatively flat. But between 2012 and 2018, nearly twice as many teens displayed high elevated levels of "school loneliness," an established predictor of depression and mental health issues. (The study did not cover the period of the coronavirus pandemic, which also may have affected teen well-being.)

"It's surprising that the trend would be so similar across so many different countries," said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the study's lead author. "On the other hand, if this trend is caused by smartphones or electronic communication, a worldwide increase is exactly what you'd expect to see." In an earlier study, Twenge had identified 2012 as the year when smartphone ownership passed 50 percent in the United States...

In the worldwide study, school loneliness was not correlated with factors such as income inequality, gross domestic product and family size, but it did correlate with increases in smartphone and Internet use. By 2012, most of the countries in the study had reached a point where at least half of teens had access to smartphones, and that is when teen loneliness levels began to rise, Twenge said. "When it got to that saturation point where social media was virtually mandatory and practically everybody had a phone, it changed things," she said. As smartphone adoption spread in the 2010s, adolescents spent less time interacting in person and more time using digital media, the paper said, adding, "Given that digital media does not produce as much emotional closeness as in-person interaction, the result may be more loneliness in recent years...."

School administrators and teachers have noted the changes. Lunchrooms and hallways, formerly raucous places, have in recent years fallen silent as teens have turned to their devices. Some are taking action on the local or national level. In 2018, France stopped allowing smartphones at school for students in elementary and middle school.

Qualys has discovered a new systemd security bug that enables any unprivileged user to cause a denial of service via a kernel panic. Slashdot reader inode_buddha shares the news via ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: As Bharat Jogi, Qualys's senior manager of Vulnerabilities and Signatures, wrote, "Given the breadth of the attack surface for this vulnerability, Qualys recommends users apply patches for this vulnerability immediately." You can say that again. Systemd is used in almost all modern Linux distributions. This particular security hole arrived in the systemd code in April 2015.

It works by enabling attackers to misuse the alloca() function in a way that would result in memory corruption. This, in turn, allows a hacker to crash systemd and hence the entire operating system. Practically speaking, this can be done by a local attacker mounting a filesystem on a very long path. This causes too much memory space to be used in the systemd stack, which results in a system crash. That's the bad news. The good news is that Red Hat Product Security and systemd's developers have immediately patched the hole.

Patrick Klepek writes via Motherboard: Few role-playing experiences are as beloved as the original Final Fantasy games, which is why Square Enix announcing a new brand it's calling Pixel Remasters for the first six games was greeted with equal parts shock and horror. For every brilliant reinvention, like last year's Final Fantasy 7 Remake, you have these nightmarish updates to classics like Final Fantasy 6 that are so abjectly awful to look at that fans created mods to try and replace the visuals. It's not really clear what Square Enix wants to accomplish with these Pixel Remasters, but what's abundantly clear is that Square Enix intends to revisit the visuals across each 2D game. The new sprites aren't massive departures from the originals, but they're different, and it's led to speculation about whether the company is going to address a longstanding issue with older games being released on fancy new televisions and computer monitors.

I've always loved the way video games looked -- fuzzy and crunchy -- on those humorously heavy and bulky older cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs that used to populate family rooms. What I didn't know until earlier this year, however, was the science behind it all. It's not just that high-definition displays provide a crisper look at art made in earlier eras of video games, but that art was specifically drawn knowing it would ultimately pipe through a CRT, and when that art is viewed on a modern, non-CRT display, you're actually losing some intended detail. [...] The problem is many people will never experience it in real-life, and so filters and similar technologies are essentially forms of emulation for television tech. More than 705 million CRT TVs have been sold in the United States since 1980, and the vast majority of these environmentally unfriendly devices are in the process of being broken down and recycled. That process will take years. But more practically, nobody is making CRT TVs anymore, and as the existing supply naturally breaks down, it falls to hobbyists to keep them ticking. No great shock to learn that Starkweather isn't a huge fan of Square Enix's approach for the Pixel Remasters, partially because it risks erasing the work of the original artists. One solution that Starkweather proposes is Square Enix spending time on a refined CRT filter.

"Filters are simply filters and they change visuals without having any artistic intention behind," said renowned pixel artist Thomas Feichtmeir. "I have not yet seen any CRT filter implemented in a game which truly simulated a realistic CRT experience." While naive folks like myself learned about CRT through a Twitter account, Feichtmeir had a similar realization years ago. At home, Feichtmeir had a CRT monitor next to an LCD laptop, and as he transferred his dawn pixels from one to the other, it dawned upon him that they looked different. He noticed a similar issue playing games re-released on modern displays. "If you make a piece of pixel art on a LCD and you put it on a CRT," he said, "it's the equivalent of taking one of your articles, putting it through Google Translate and to expect that the other language it comes out [with] will have perfect meaning and grammar. A whole field of 'localization' exists for writing and in the game industry to address those issues." Though Feichtmeir has no specific insight into what Square Enix is or isn't planning for its Pixel Remasters series, watching what's been released gave him pause on the CRT theory. "Considering the couple of screenshots and snippets we saw in the presentation, I would not say any of it really accounts for the gap between CRT and LCDs," he said. "We still can see a lot of techniques which theoretically should stay on a CRT -- like overly dithered textures or just color optimized battle backgrounds. The biggest change are the characters, where they basically removed the volumetric shading in exchange for a dark outlined flat style. In my eyes this just changes the style to something which does not feel close to the original. And I think what a remaster should deliver on is to recreate the feeling how the original game felt."

Proof-assistant software handles an abstract concept at the cutting edge of research, revealing a bigger role for software in mathematics. From a report: Mathematicians have long used computers to do numerical calculations or manipulate complex formulas. In some cases, they have proved major results by making computers do massive amounts of repetitive work -- the most famous being a proof in the 1970s that any map can be coloured with just four different colours, and without filling any two adjacent countries with the same colour. But systems known as proof assistants go deeper. The user enters statements into the system to teach it the definition of a mathematical concept -- an object -- based on simpler objects that the machine already knows about.

A statement can also just refer to known objects, and the proof assistant will answer whether the fact is 'obviously' true or false based on its current knowledge. If the answer is not obvious, the user has to enter more details. Proof assistants thus force the user to lay out the logic of their arguments in a rigorous way, and they fill in simpler steps that human mathematicians had consciously or unconsciously skipped. Once researchers have done the hard work of translating a set of mathematical concepts into a proof assistant, the program generates a library of computer code that can be built on by other researchers and used to define higher-level mathematical objects. In this way, proof assistants can help to verify mathematical proofs that would otherwise be time-consuming and difficult, perhaps even practically impossible, for a human to check. Proof assistants have long had their fans, but this is the first time that they had a major role at the cutting edge of a field, says Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London who was part of a collaboration that checked Scholze and Clausen's result. "The big remaining question was: can they handle complex mathematics?" says Buzzard. "We showed that they can."

The New York Times shares footage from a flying car's test flight in California — "a single-person aircraft for use in rural areas — essentially a private flying car for the rich — that could start selling this year." (You can read the text of the article here.)

"It may look like a strange beast, but it will change the way transportation happens," they're told by Marcus Leng, the Canadian inventor who designed the aircraft (which he named BlackFly): BlackFly is what is often called a flying car. Engineers and entrepreneurs like Mr. Leng have spent more than a decade nurturing this new breed of aircraft, electric vehicles that can take off and land without a runway. They believe these vehicles will be cheaper and safer than helicopters, providing practically anyone with the means of speeding above crowded streets. "Our dream is to free the world from traffic," said Sebastian Thrun, another engineer at the heart of this movement.

That dream, most experts agree, is a long way from reality. But the idea is gathering steam. Dozens of companies are now building these aircraft, and three recently agreed to go public in deals that value them as high as $6 billion. For years, people like Mr. Leng and Mr. Thrun have kept their prototypes hidden from the rest of the world — few people have seen them, much less flown in them — but they are now beginning to lift the curtain...

Others are building larger vehicles they hope to deploy as city air taxis as soon as 2024 — an Uber for the skies. Some are designing vehicles that can fly without a pilot. One of the air taxi companies, Kitty Hawk, is run by Mr. Thrun, the Stanford University computer science professor who founded Google's self-driving car project. He now says that autonomy will be far more powerful in the air than on the ground, and that it will enter our daily lives much sooner. "You can fly in a straight line and you don't have the massive weight or the stop-and-go of a car" on the ground, he said...

The next few years will be crucial to the industry as it transitions from what Silicon Valley is known for — building cutting-edge technology — to something much harder: the messy details of actually getting it into the world.

One of the creators of dogecoin has noted that he "didn't consider" the environmental impact of the cryptocurrency, which was initially created as a joke. The Independent reports: The comments from Billy Markus, one of the people who helped create dogecoin in the first place, when it was intended partly as a joke, came in response to a tweet from Elon Musk. Mr Musk had been attempting to clarify his position on cryptocurrency generally, in the wake of his statement about Tesla. "To be clear, I strongly believe in crypto, but it can't drive a massive increase in fossil fuel use, especially coal," Mr Musk had written. In response, Mr Markus sent a crying face emoji, which he later clarified he had meant to indicate "aw man, you right, environment stuff." In reply to that, Mr Markus was asked whether he had considered energy usage when creating the cryptocurrency. "i made doge in like 2 hours i didn't consider anything," he wrote.

Dogecoin was created in 2013, in reference to the meme and to poke fun at the vast numbers of cryptocurrencies that had been launched. But Mr Markus helped build the technical foundations that allow it to practically work, too. Like bitcoin, dogecoin requires miners to undertake complex cryptographical puzzles to create new bitcoins. That system, known as proof-of-work, relies on large amounts of computing power that use considerable amounts of energy, much of which is generated from fossil fuels.

A biotechnology firm has released genetically modified mosquitoes into the United States for the first time. Long-time Slashdot reader clovis shares the report via Nature: The experiment, launched this week in the Florida Keys -- over the objections of some local critics -- tests a method for suppressing populations of wild Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which can carry diseases such as Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever. [...] Aedes aegypti makes up about 4% of the mosquito population in the Keys, a chain of tropical islands off the southern tip of Florida. But it is responsible for practically all mosquito-borne disease transmitted to humans in the region, according to the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District (FKMCD), which is working closely with Oxitec on the project. [...] In late April of this year, project researchers placed boxes containing Oxitec's mosquito eggs at six locations in three areas of the Keys. The first males are expected to emerge within the first two weeks of May. About 12,000 males will exit the boxes each week over the next 12 weeks. In a second phase later this year, intended to collect even more data, nearly 20 million mosquitoes will emerge over a period of about 16 weeks, according to Oxitec. "There is the usual opposition of the 'It's GMO, so it should not be done' variety," adds clovis. "As for ecological food chain considerations, one should know that aedes aegypti is not native to the western hemisphere. It is believed to have been imported from Africa during the slave trade era."

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: Why is sugar not transparent? Because light that penetrates a piece of sugar is scattered, altered and deflected in a highly complicated way. However, as a research team from TU Wien (Vienna) and Utrecht University (Netherlands) has now been able to show, there is a class of very special light waves for which this does not apply: for any specific disordered medium -- such as the sugar cube you may just have put in your coffee -- tailor-made light beams can be constructed that are practically not changed by this medium, but only attenuated. The light beam penetrates the medium, and a light pattern arrives on the other side that has the same shape as if the medium were not there at all. This idea of "scattering-invariant modes of light" can also be used to specifically examine the interior of objects. The results have now been published in the journal Nature Photonics. This method of finding light patterns that penetrate an object largely undisturbed could also be used for imaging procedures. "In hospitals, X-rays are used to look inside the body -- they have a shorter wavelength and can therefore penetrate our skin. But the way a light wave penetrates an object depends not only on the wavelength, but also on the waveform," says Matthias Kuhmayer, who works as a Ph.D. student on computer simulations of wave propagation. "If you want to focus light inside an object at certain points, then our method opens up completely new possibilities. We were able to show that using our approach the light distribution inside the zinc oxide layer can also be specifically controlled."

Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho developed many of the fundamental concepts that researchers use when they build new software. From a report: When Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman met while waiting in the registration line on their first day of graduate school at Princeton University in 1963, computer science was still a strange new world. Using a computer required a set of esoteric skills typically reserved for trained engineers and mathematicians. But today, thanks in part to the work of Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman, practically anyone can use a computer and program it to perform new tasks. On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, said Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman would receive this year's Turing Award for their work on the fundamental concepts that underpin computer programming languages. Given since 1966 and often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize, which the two academics and longtime friends will split. Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman helped refine one of the key components of a computer: the "compiler" that takes in software programs written by humans and turns them into something computers can understand.

Over the past five decades, computer scientists have built increasingly intuitive programming languages, making it easier and easier for people to create software for desktops, laptops, smartphones, cars and even supercomputers. Compilers ensure that these languages are efficiently translated into the ones and zeros that computers understand. Without their work, "we would not be able to write an app for our phones," said Krysta Svore, a researcher at Microsoft who studied with Mr. Aho at Columbia University, where he was chairman of the computer science department. "We would not have the cars we drive these days." The researchers also wrote many textbooks and taught generations of students as they defined how computer software development was different from electrical engineering or mathematics. "Their fingerprints are all over the field," said Graydon Hoare, the creator of a programming language called Rust. He added that two of Dr. Ullman's books were sitting on the shelf beside him. After leaving Princeton, both Dr. Aho, a Canadian by birth who is 79, and Dr. Ullman, a native New Yorker who is 78, joined the New Jersey headquarters of Bell Labs, which was then one of the world's leading research labs.

This week Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg posted a remarkable reflection on the 23rd anniversary of his command-line data tool, cURL: curl was adopted in Red Hat Linux in late 1998, became a Debian package in May 1999, shipped in Mac OS X 10.1 in August 2001. Today, it is also shipped by default in Windows 10 and in iOS and Android devices. Not to mention the game consoles, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Sony PS5.

Amusingly, libcurl is used by the two major mobile OSes but not provided as an API by them, so lots of apps, including many extremely large volume apps bundle their own libcurl build: YouTube, Skype, Instagram, Spotify, Google Photos, Netflix etc. Meaning that most smartphone users today have many separate curl installations in their phones.

Further, libcurl is used by some of the most played computer games of all times: GTA V, Fortnite, PUBG mobile, Red Dead Redemption 2 etc.

libcurl powers media players and set-top boxes such as Roku, Apple TV by maybe half a billion TVs.

curl and libcurl ships in virtually every Internet server and is the default transfer engine in PHP, which is found in almost 80% of the world's almost two billion websites.

Cars are Internet-connected now. libcurl is used in virtually every modern car these days to transfer data to and from the vehicles.

Then add media players, kitchen and medical devices, printers, smart watches and lots of "smart"; IoT things. Practically speaking, just about every Internet-connected device in existence runs curl.

I'm convinced I'm not exaggerating when I claim that curl exists in over ten billion installations world-wide...

Those 300 lines of code in late 1996 have grown to 172,000 lines in March 2021.
Stenberg attributes cURL's success to persistence. "We hold out. We endure and keep polishing. We're here for the long run. It took me two years (counting from the precursors) to reach 300 downloads. It took another ten or so until it was really widely available and used." But he adds that 22 different CPU architectures and 86 different operating systems are now known to have run curl.

In a later blog post titled "GitHub Steel," Stenberg also reveals that GitHub gave him a 3D-printed steel version of his 2020 GitHub contribution matrix — accompanied by a friendly note. "Please accept this small gift as a token of appreciation on behalf of all of us here at GitHub, and everyone who benefits from your work."

An otherwise meaningless game during Monday's preliminary stage of the $200,000 Magnus Carlsen Invitational left a pair of grandmasters in stitches while thrusting one of chess's most bizarre and least effective openings into the mainstream. From a report: Norway's Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura of the United States had already qualified for the knockout stage of the competition with one game left to play between them. Carlsen, the world's top-ranked player and reigning world champion, started the dead rubber typically enough by moving his king's pawn with the common 1 e4. Nakamura, the five-time US champion and current world No 18, mirrored it with 1 ... e5. And then all hell broke loose. Carlsen inched his king one space forward to the rank where his pawn had started. The self-destructive opening (2 Ke2) is known as the bongcloud for a simple reason: you'd have to be stoned to the gills to think it was a good idea.

The wink-wink move immediately sent Nakamura, who's been a visible champion of the bongcloud in recent years, into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Naturally, the American played along with 2 ... Ke7, which marked the first double bongcloud ever played in a major tournament and its official entry to chess theory (namely, the Bongcloud Counter-Gambit: Hotbox Variation). "Don't do this!" cried the Hungarian grandmaster Peter Leko from the commentary booth, looking on in disbelief as the friendly rivals quickly settled for a draw by repetition after six moves. "Is this, uh, called bongcloud? Yeah? It was something like of a bongcloud business. This Ke2-Ke7 stuff. Please definitely don't try it at home. Guys, just forget about it." Why is the bongcloud so bad? For one, it manages to break practically all of the principles you're taught about chess openings from day one: it doesn't fight for the center, it leaves the king exposed and it wastes time, all while eliminating the possibility of castling and managing to impede the development of the bishop and queen. Even the worst openings tend to have some redeeming quality. The bongcloud, not so much. What makes it funny (well, not to everyone) is the idea that two of the best players on the planet would use an opening so pure in its defiance of conventional wisdom.

Adobe just dropped its latest software updates via the Creative Cloud and among those updates is a new feature in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) called "Super Resolution." You can mark this day down as a major shift in the photo industry, writes PetaPixel. From the report: I have seen a bit of reporting out there on this topic from the likes of PetaPixel and Fstoppers, but other than that the ramifications of this new feature in ACR have not been widely promoted from what I can see. The new Super Resolution feature in ACR essentially upsizes the image by a factor of four using machine learning, i.e. Artificial Intelligence (AI). The PetaPixel article on this new feature quoted Eric Chan from Adobe:

Super Resolution builds on a technology Adobe launched two years ago called Enhance Details, which uses machine learning to interpolate RAW files with a high degree of fidelity, which resulted in images with crisp details and fewer artifacts. The term 'Super Resolution' refers to the process of improving the quality of a photo by boosting its apparent resolution," Chan explains. "Enlarging a photo often produces blurry details, but Super Resolution has an ace up its sleeve: an advanced machine learning model trained on millions of photos. Backed by this vast training set, Super Resolution can intelligently enlarge photos while maintaining clean edges and preserving important details."

What does this mean practically? Well, I immediately tested this out and was pretty shocked by the results. Though it might be hard to make out in the screenshot below, I took the surfing image shown below, which was captured a decade ago with a Nikon D700 -- a 12MP camera -- and ran the Super Resolution tool on it and the end result is a 48.2MP image that looks to be every bit as sharp (if not sharper) than the original image file. This means that I can now print that old 12MP image at significantly larger sizes than I ever could before. What this also means is that anyone with a lower resolution camera, i.e. the current crop of 24MP cameras, can now output huge image files for prints or any other usage that requires a higher resolution image file. In the three or four images I have run through this new feature in Photoshop I have found the results to be astoundingly good.

Asus, best known for its PC and gaming enthusiast gear, launched the latest in its Republic of Gamers smartphone line targeting Android gamers in markets like China. From a report: The ROG Phone 5 maintains the heritage of over-the-top specs and design: its exterior is decorated with angular motifs and its interior is populated with up to 18GB of memory and Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 888 processor. It has a custom-made 6.8-inch Samsung OLED display, contains two battery cells and is cooled by a vapor chamber system -- and its higher-tier models bundle an attachable fan cooler for even more performance. In the commodified Android device market, Asus is betting on its brand association with gaming and the broad enthusiasm for a tailored user experience. The ROG Phone 5 comes with an app providing a console-like interface and Asus is working with game makers to add support for the highest refresh rates its display is capable of. Though to break past its 0.2% global market share, the company will need some help, according to Neil Mawston of Strategy Analytics.

Asus has found success partnering with Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings. The two companies have collaborated on the marketing of ROG Phones and certification of games in China for several generations and the country is one of Asus' main focus markets, the Taiwanese manufacturer said. Unlike the PC market, where higher clock speeds and more memory can translate into being able to play at higher fidelity or on larger screens, in the mobile realm practically every company relies on the same basic architecture. And the leading duo of Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics consistently tout their devices' gaming capabilities, pushing brands like Asus to focus on hardcore gaming fans.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has signed an agreement with Intel to add it to its Data Protection in Virtual Environments project, which aims to create a practically useful form of fully homomorphic encryption. From a report: Fully homomorphic encryption has been described as the "holy grail" of encryption because it allows encrypted data to be used without ever having to decrypt it. Fully homomorphic encryption isn't fantasy -- it already exists and is usable, but it is incredibly impractical. "FHE adoption in the industry has been slow because processing data using fully homomorphic encryption methods on cryptograms is data intensive and incurs a huge 'performance tax' even for simple operations," Intel said in a press release.

The potential benefits of fully homomorphic encryption make creating a practical way to use it a cybersecurity imperative. Intel succinctly describes the biggest problem in data security as being caused by "encryption techniques [that] require that data be decrypted for processing. It is during this decrypted state that data can become more vulnerable for misuse." The goal of the Data Protection in Virtual Environments program is to develop an accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption that will make it more practical and scalable, which is where Intel comes in. The chip manufacturer's role in the project will be academic research and the development of an application-specific integrated circuit that will accelerate fully homomorphic encryption processing. Intel said that, when fully realized, its accelerator chip could reduce processing times by five orders of magnitude over existing CPU-driven fully homomorphic encryption systems.

Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Deno, gave a new interview this week to the IT outsourcing company Evrone: Evrone: You have hands-on experience with lots of programming languages: C, Rust, Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript. Which one do you enjoy the most to work with?

Ryan: I have the most fun writing Rust these days. It has a steep learning curve and is not appropriate for many problems; but for the stuff I'm working on now it's perfect. It's a much better C++. I'm convinced that I will never start a new C++ project. Rust is beautiful in its ability to express low-level machinery with such simplicity.

JavaScript has never been my favorite language — it's just the most common language — and for that reason it is a useful way to express many ideas. I don't consider TypeScript a separate language; its beauty is that it's just marked up JavaScript. TypeScript allows one to build larger, more robust systems in JavaScript, and I'd say it's my go-to language for small everyday tasks.

With Deno we are trying to remove a lot of the complexity inherent in transpiling TypeScript code down to JavaScript with the hope this will enable more people to utilize it.

Evrone: Gradual typing was successfully added into core Python, PHP, and Ruby. What, in your opinion, is the main showstopper for adding types into JavaScript?

Ryan: Types were added to JavaScript (with TypeScript) far more successfully than has been accomplished in Python, PHP, or Ruby. TypeScript is JavaScript with types. The better question is: what is blocking the JavaScript standardization organization (TC39) from adopting TypeScript? Standardization, by design, moves slowly and carefully. They are first looking into proposing Types-As-Comments, which would allow the JavaScript runtimes to execute TypeScript syntax by ignoring the types. I think eventually TypeScript (or something like it) will be proposed as part of the JavaScript standard, but that will take time.

Evrone: As a respectable VIM user, what do you think of modern programmer editors like Visual Studio Code? Are they good enough for the old guard?

Ryan: Everyone I work with uses vscode and they love it. Probably most people should use that.

I continue to use VIM for two reasons. 1) I'm just very familiar and fast with it, I like being able to work over ssh and tmux and I enjoy the serenity of a full screen terminal. 2) It's important for software infrastructure to be text-based and accessible with simple tools. In the Java world they made the mistake of tying the IDEs too much into the worldflows of the language, creating a situation where practically one was forced to use an IDE to program Java. By using simple tooling myself, I ensure that the software I develop does not become unnecessarily reliant on IDEs. If you use grep instead of jump-to-definition too much indirection becomes intolerable. For what I do, I think this results in better software.

Over the past several weeks, developer Kosta Eleftheriou has been highlighting many apparent scam applications on the App Store. The formula for each scam application is virtually identical, and it centers on fake reviews and ratings paired with a deceptive weekly subscription. From a report: Eleftheriou is the developer behind FlickType, a popular Apple Watch keyboard application that brings gesture typing to the wearable device. He was also one of the creators of the Flesky keyboard app, acquired by Pinterest, and Blind Type, acquired by Google. The thread began two weeks ago, when Eleftheriou began highlighting applications that were essentially non-functional ripoffs of FlickType. One of the most blatant ones was KeyWatch: "Just a few months ago, I was way ahead of my competition. By the time they figured out just how hard autocorrect algorithms were, I was already rolling out the swipe version of my keyboard, quickly approaching iPhone typing speeds. So how did they beat me? First, they made an app that appeared to fulfill the promise of a watch keyboard -- but was practically unusable. Then, they started heavily advertising on FB & Instagram, using my own promo video, of my own app, with my actual name on it."

When users downloaded the app, the first screen was a blank interface with an "Unlock now" button. Tap the "Unlock now" button, and you'd be prompted with Apple's buy screen to confirm an $8/week subscription for an app that was nonfunctional.