Month: March 2022

Enlarge (credit: Sefa Karacan / Anadolu Agency)

Twitter has launched a new Tor onion service, a move that has been in the works for years but debuts as Russian President Vladimir Putin has clamped down on protests and independent media following his stalled invasion of Ukraine.

“On behalf of @Twitter, I am delighted to announce their new @TorProject onion service,” tweeted Alec Muffett, a security researcher who developed the Enterprise Onion Toolkit. EOTK, as it’s also known, allows websites to quickly add onion services.

“This is possibly the most important and long-awaited tweet that I’ve ever composed,” he added.

Enlarge / If you’d like to explore these wilds on foot in Elite Dangerous‘s 2021 Odyssey DLC, that’s no longer an option on console. And for existing non-DLC players, the news gets worse. (credit: Frontier Developments)

On Thursday, console players of the seven-year-old space sim adventure Elite Dangerous were dealt a massive blow. Instead of getting word that the series’ 2021 Odyssey DLC expansion would finally arrive on console, they were instead told that the game’s versions on Xbox and PlayStation would no longer receive any substantial gameplay updates, DLC or otherwise.

Frontier Developments director David Braben broke the news by saying that the game has had two completely different codebases in operation for some time: one for PC, which supports Odyssey, and one for consoles. This week, Frontier made the decision to “focus on a single codebase” so the studio can “move forward with the story of the game.”

As a result, existing Xbox and PlayStation owners of the game will only receive “critical updates” from here on out, while all “new content” will land exclusively on PC.

Enlarge / Health care workers treat a COVID-19 patient at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, on Monday, Jan. 31, 2022. Photographer: Allison Dinner/Bloomberg via Getty Images. (credit: Getty| Bloomberg)

People over 60 who survive COVID-19 have higher risks of dementia, mild cognitive impairment, and cognitive decline—particularly if they had severe COVID-19—according to a study out this week in JAMA Neurology.

The study followed over 1,400 older COVID survivors in Wuhan, China, who were among some of the first people in the world to be hospitalized for COVID-19. The patients were discharged between February 10 and April 10, 2020, from three COVID-19–designated hospitals in Wuhan. Researchers followed their neurological health for a full year afterward.

Their experiences in that year do not bode well for the rest of the world. The study authors, led by neurologist Yan-Jiang Wang of the Third Military Medical University, found that long-term cognitive decline is common after an infection with the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. As such, health care systems around the world need to prepare for what could be a substantial increase in the number of people requiring dementia care.

Enlarge / Apple’s Mac Studio and Studio Display. (credit: Apple)

Apple’s announcements of the Mac Studio, the Studio Display, and the new top-end M1 Ultra chip earlier this week focused on those devices’ headlining features, but there are always more details to explore as people dig through the spec sheets and Apple responds to questions from the press. Ahead of our full reviews, we’ve compiled some of the most interesting details about the new hardware.

M1 Ultra: It’s not really “chiplets”

All the members of the M1 family. (credit: Apple)

When the M1 Ultra was announced, we speculated based on how Apple was describing it that the processor was using a chiplet-based design, connecting two separate M1 Max processor dies together using a high-speed interconnect like AMD’s Infinity Fabric. That turns out not to be strictly true—the M1 Ultra will look like one big piece of silicon, just as it appears in Apple’s render shots, two M1 Max chips packaged together with a silicon interposer between the two. ComputerWorld describes it as one large “840mm squared die.”

The main risk with creating such a huge chip is that manufacturing yields will be low, as more surface area increases the likelihood that there will be a defect somewhere in the chip. But TSMC has been making M1-based chips on its 5 nm process for well over a year now, giving it plenty of time to optimize yields. And Apple is able to do some binning with the M1 Ultra (i.e., selling some chips with defects as lower-end models with the defective parts turned off), since there are versions with both 48 and 64 GPU cores.

Enlarge / Just some of the consoles that Russian consumers can no longer purchase or make full use of in Russia. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Russian consumers are no longer a part of the console gaming market, as Nintendo and Sony have officially followed Microsoft in cutting off new console and game sales in the country in response to the continuing invasion of Ukraine.

In a statement provided to the press, Nintendo said overnight that it has “decided to suspend shipping all Nintendo products to Russia for the foreseeable future” due to “considerable volatility surrounding the logistics of shipping and distributing physical goods.”

Nintendo Russia had previously announced that its online eShop had been put into an inaccessible “maintenance mode” in Russia “due to the fact that the payment service used in Nintendo eShop has suspended the processing of payments in rubles.”

Enlarge / Optical drive included. (credit: connor55/MacRumors)

You may be disheartened about the discontinuation of the 27-inch iMac, but fans of 2002’s iMac G4 have had to live much longer without their favorite all-in-one. Thankfully, a good modder can bring old tech back to life.

The iMac G4 still holds a special place in many enthusiasts’ hearts, so the machine has been modded into the modern era before, including with an Intel NUC. The second-generation iMac sported an LCD screen on a unique arm connected to a striking circular base. The look is still distinct, but the G4’s specs obviously can’t compete today.

Apple’s 15-inch iMac G4 had a resolution of 1024×768, a far cry from the 4480×2520 that Apple offers in its current 24-inch iMac. The 2002 machine came with a PowerPC G4 processor running at 1 GHz, an Nvidia GeForce4 MX, 256MB of DDR SDRAM running at 333 MHz, and an 80GB hard drive running at 7,200 rpm.