Month: May 2022

Enlarge / Batteries roll through an automated assembly line. (credit: xPACIFICA/Getty Images)

On Monday, the US Department of Energy announced that it was releasing over $3 billion in funds to stimulate the production of batteries within the country. The funding is divided into two chunks, one intended to spur the processing of battery materials and manufacturing demos and the second for stimulating the reuse and recycling of electric vehicle batteries.

Shortly after taking office, President Joe Biden’s administration started a review of the lithium battery industry in the US. The result was a “National Blueprint” that set out a series of priorities for stimulating domestic production and use.

These include:

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

Android’s May security update is out, and that means the Pixel 6 is finally getting a patch for the Dirty Pipe vulnerability. The update comes one month after Samsung shipped Google’s patch to the Galaxy S22, but at least it’s finally arriving.

Dirty Pipe, aka CVE-2022-0847, is one of the biggest Linux vulnerabilities to come around in recent years. The vulnerability lets an unprivileged user overwrite data that is supposed to be read-only, which can lead to additional privilege escalation. Android actually has a working demo of this. Twitter user @Fire30_ demoed using the bug to root a Pixel 6. Linux devices running 5.8 and up are affected, and after the vulnerability was discovered on February 19, patches for PC distributions of Linux started rolling out after 17 days.

Android has been a different story, though. First, not that many devices run Linux kernel 5.8 yet. Despite that version releasing in August 2020, Android only jumped from 5.4 to 5.10 with the release of Android 12 in November. Since existing devices typically don’t jump major kernel versions when they get an Android update, that means only new devices coming with Android 12 have kernel 5.10. That’s a very small number of new devices that launched in the past eight months or so—namely the Pixel 6, Galaxy S22, and OnePlus 10 Pro.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

Twitter warned that it may lose key employees and have difficulty hiring during the period before it closes its $44 billion sale to Elon Musk. Twitter also warned that it could have trouble keeping advertisers on board.

“During the period prior to the closing of the merger, our business is exposed to certain inherent risks and certain restrictions on our business under the terms of the Merger Agreement that could harm our business relationships, financial condition, operating results, cash flows, and business,” Twitter said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Monday.

Twitter’s stated list of risks includes “whether advertisers continue their spending on our platform” and “our inability to attract and retain key personnel and recruit prospective employees, and the possibility that our current employees could be distracted, and their productivity decline as a result, due to uncertainty regarding the merger.”