Month: May 2022

Enlarge / Stoffel Vandoorne, Mercedes Benz EQ, EQ Silver Arrow 02 during the Berlin E-Prix II at Berlin Tempelhof Airport on Sunday August 15, 2021, in Berlin, Germany. Next year this team will become part of McLaren Racing. (credit: Carl Bingham / LAT Images)

McLaren Racing is set to enter Formula E next season. Rumors had been circulating that the storied Formula 1 team was expanding into the electric single-seater series alongside other new activities like Extreme E and IndyCar, but on Saturday morning the news became official.

“McLaren Racing always seeks to compete against the best and on the leading edge of technology, providing our fans, partners, and people with new ways to be excited, entertained, and inspired,” said Zak Brown, McLaren Racing CEO.

“Formula E, like all our racing series, fulfills all those criteria. As with all forms of the sport we participate in, Formula E has racing at the center but will be strategically, commercially, and technically additive to McLaren Racing overall. I firmly believe that Formula E will give McLaren Racing a competitive advantage through greater understanding of EV racing, while providing a point of difference to our fans, partners and people and continuing to drive us along our sustainability pathway,” Brown said.

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When you sign up for a newsletter, make a hotel reservation, or check out online, you probably take for granted that if you mistype your email address three times or change your mind and X out of the page, it doesn’t matter. Nothing actually happens until you hit the Submit button, right? Well, maybe not. As with so many assumptions about the web, this isn’t always the case, according to new research: A surprising number of websites are collecting some or all of your data as you type it into a digital form.

Researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites, looking at scenarios in which a user is visiting a site while in the European Union and visiting a site from the United States. They found that 1,844 websites gathered an EU user’s email address without their consent, and a staggering 2,950 logged a US user’s email in some form. Many of the sites seemingly do not intend to conduct the data-logging but incorporate third-party marketing and analytics services that cause the behavior.

After specifically crawling sites for password leaks in May 2021, the researchers also found 52 websites in which third parties, including the Russian tech giant Yandex, were incidentally collecting password data before submission. The group disclosed their findings to these sites, and all 52 instances have since been resolved.

Enlarge / The Comirnaty (Pfizer/BioNTech) and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. (credit: Getty | Marcos del Mazo)

People ages 60 and older who were initially vaccinated with two Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine doses were better protected from the omicron coronavirus variant after being boosted with a Moderna vaccine rather than another dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Those results are according to interim data from a small but randomized controlled clinical trial in Singapore and published this week in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The study—involving 98 healthy adults—can’t determine if the Moderna booster is simply superior to a Pfizer-BioNTech booster for older adults or if a mix-and-match booster strategy is inherently better. It also focused solely on antibody levels, which may or may not translate to significant differences in infection rates and other clinical differences. It also only followed people for 28 days after a booster, so it’s unclear if the Moderna booster’s edge will hold up over time.

Enlarge / Windows 11 22H2 is entering its next stage of development, according to rumors—and the OS itself. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Windows 11 has already changed quite a bit since the version we reviewed in October was released, and Microsoft has put out a steady stream of redesigned app updates, bug fixes, and user interface improvements.

But the company’s big yearly Windows updates are still important. They’re where Microsoft makes the most significant changes to Windows 11’s look and feel and under-the-hood features. This week, rumors suggested that Microsoft is wrapping up work on what will eventually be released as Windows 11 version 22H2, the OS’s first yearly update. That build, currently available to the Windows Insider Beta channel as build number 22621.1, will serve as the foundation for the next year of Windows updates.

We cover new Windows Insider builds fairly frequently, depending on how noteworthy the changes are. But to save you the trouble of scrolling through months of articles, we’ve gathered together all the most significant differences between the current public build of Windows 11 21H2 (for the record, 22000.675) and the latest beta of version 22H2.

Enlarge / The Pixel 6a. (credit: Google)

The Pixel 6a is shaping up to be one most promising smartphone releases of the year. With a flagship-class system on a chip and a $450 price tag, it looks like Google is taking a credible swing at the iPhone SE. Since Thursday’s announcement, a few more details have come out that didn’t make the keynote.

First off, the Pixel 6a will be Google’s widest smartphone release ever, by a small margin. Remember, the Pixel 5a release was Google’s smallest ever, launching in just two countries, the US and Japan. Google’s device available support page was updated Thursday, and the Pixel 6a is back up to the usual 13 Pixel launch countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and United States.

But wait! There’s more: Google also says the Pixel 6a will be coming to India later this year, bringing it to 14 countries. That’s a new record for Google’s comparability small (Apple and Samsung ship in 100-plus countries) phone hardware operation. India is a strange choice since it’s one of the most competitive global smartphone markets. Google will need to significantly drop the price of the Pixel 6a to be competitive there. We don’t know the Indian price yet, but check out the replies to that tweet announcement, which is full of Indian consumers already dragging the phone for its assumed $450 price tag and being “only” 60Hz. It’s going to be a tough battle.