Month: January 2022

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

You might have heard the news: Microsoft has announced plans to acquire gaming behemoth Activision Blizzard King (ABK) and its subsidiary development studios. The deal is valued at $68.7 billion—or roughly 17 acquisitions of the Star Wars franchise—and that kind of money isn’t spent without an expectation of major moves (and revenue) going forward.

After my colleague Kyle Orland chronicled everything we know thus far about the deal, I wanted to take a deeper look at the shape these combined companies (and their expected game launches) may take going forward.

Game Pass must be fed

The best sellers in the console industry continue to be holiday-adjacent releases, and Activision has a long track record of topping holiday sales charts. But Microsoft has been bullish about its Xbox brand growing not because of console sales and gifts under Christmas trees but because of the bigger profits possible when fans subscribe to Xbox services and spend money on the Xbox brand every month, primarily via Xbox Game Pass. In that business model, subscriber numbers are what matter, not breakout first-party games or console sales.

Enlarge / American Airline planes sit on the tarmac at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in Arlington, Virginia, on January 15, 2022. (credit: Stefani Reynolds | Getty Images)

Update, January 18, 3:50 pm EST: Verizon and AT&T have said they will postpone the launch of their advanced 5G services near certain airports in response to airlines’ threats to cancel flights. From the Financial Times:

AT&T said it had voluntarily agreed to “temporarily defer turning on” a limited number of 5G-enabled towers around “certain airport runways” as it provides more information to airlines and regulators, but added it was launching its advanced 5G services elsewhere as planned.

Verizon also said it would launch its 5G “ultra wideband” network on Wednesday, but had voluntarily decided to limit it “around airports,” without specifying the number of airports.

Original story: The imminent rollout of high-speed 5G telecoms services threatens to ground flights across the US, America’s largest airlines warned on Monday, as they urged government agencies to intervene to avoid “chaos” for passengers and “incalculable” disruptions to supply chains.

“The harm that will result from deployment on January 19 is substantially worse than we originally anticipated,” warned Airlines for America, an industry lobby group, pointing to the potential for 5G services to interfere with the sensitive equipment that aircraft use to take off and land.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday updates for Windows are generally meant to fix problems, but that isn’t how it always goes. January’s updates, released last week, caused a handful of problems for businesses in particular. The most serious, especially for people still dealing with pandemic-driven remote-work setups, was a bug that broke certain kinds of VPN connections. Microsoft has provided fixes for this and other issues as of today, a few days after acknowledging the problem on its Known Issues page.

According to Microsoft’s documentation and reporting from Bleeping Computer, the VPN connection issues affected “IPSEC connections which contain a Vendor ID,” as well as L2TP and IPSEC IKE VPN connections in Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server versions 2022, 20H2, 2019, and 2016. Windows’ built-in VPN client seems to be the most commonly affected, but third-party VPN clients using these kinds of connections could also run into the error.

The latest round of Patch Tuesday updates also caused some problems for Windows Server, including unexpected reboots for domain controllers and failed boots for Hyper-V virtual machines. These problems have all been resolved by other out-of-band patches, though not before causing problems for beleaguered IT admins.

Enlarge / Tablets of ivermectin. (credit: Getty | Nurphoto)

Detainees at an Arkansas jail were given ivermectin without their knowledge or consent, a new lawsuit alleges. As early as November 2020, Dr. Robert Karas, the jail’s doctor, told inmates who had contracted COVID that he was giving them a cocktail of vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids when in fact he was administering dangerously high doses of the dewormer. Ivermectin is not authorized by the FDA to treat or prevent COVID, and the agency has repeatedly told people not to take it outside its approved use as an anti-parasitic. 

“At no point were Plaintiffs informed that the medications they were consuming included Ivermectin,” the lawsuit says. “Further, Plaintiffs were not informed of the side effects of the drug administered to them or that any results would be used for research purposes.”

Four detainees are suing Dr. Karas and his company, the Washington County sheriff, and the Washington County Detention Center and 10 of its employees, alleging that they violated the inmates’ rights to informed consent. The ACLU of Arkansas filed the lawsuit on their behalf. The plaintiffs are seeking medical evaluations by independent providers and an injunction preventing Dr. Karas from administering ivermectin to COVID patients.