Author: easyfilo

Enlarge / Components manufactured by ARM Holdings Plc sit inside a demonstration ARMmbed parking meter on display on the second day of Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

As Masayoshi Son tried to persuade investors of the wisdom of purchasing one of the most successful chip companies in the world in 2016, the SoftBank chief had one clear message: “For the era of the ‘Internet of things’, I think the champion will be Arm.”

But the concept of connecting billions of everyday and industrial devices to the Internet has been much slower than anticipated to materialize.

Son’s drive to capture the chip design market for the Internet of things (IoT) was the first bet he made on Arm that has not paid off. The second was a $66 billion sale of the company to Nvidia that unraveled last week.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A couple of days after the FBI warned that a ransomware group called BlackByte had compromised critical infrastructure in the US, the group hacked servers belonging to the San Francisco 49ers football team and held some of the team’s data for ransom.

Media representatives for the NFL franchise confirmed a security breach in an emailed statement following a post on BlackByte’s dark web site, on which the hacker group attempts to shame and scare victims into making big payouts in exchange for a promise not to leak the data and to provide a decryption key that allows the data to be recovered. The recent post made available for download a 379MB file named “2020 Invoices” that appeared to show hundreds of billing statements the 49ers had sent partners including AT&T, Pepsi, and the city of Santa Clara, where the 49ers play home games.

A busy three months

In an emailed statement, franchise representatives said investigators were still assessing the breach.

Enlarge / Nvidia showed off the RTX 3090 Ti at CES 2022 in January.

At CES back in January, Nvidia announced two new desktop graphics cards. One of them, the lower-midrange RTX 3050, got pricing and a release date, and the reviews have already come and gone. The other, the tippy-top-end RTX 3090 Ti, had some of its specs announced, but the company said it would have more specifics “by the end of the month.”

But we’re now halfway into February, and the company still doesn’t have any news to share. An Nvidia spokesperson told The Verge that the company does not “currently have more info to share” on the speedy-but-almost-certainly-pricey flagship GPU.

This follows reports from mid-January that the company and its partners had halted production on the 3090 Ti due to alleged issues with the GPU’s BIOS and the hardware itself. Whether fixes can be applied to GPUs that have already been manufactured is unclear, but if the GPU die itself needs to be revised in some way, limited manufacturing capacity amid the ongoing global chip shortage could cause substantial delays.

Enlarge / Will Aibo owners feel a touch of nostalgia watching the Kia Super Bowl LVI ad? (credit: Aurich Lawson | Kia)

For some people—mostly those who aren’t football fans—the commercials that accompany the Super Bowl are as important as the game itself. In 2022, we got a conflicting vision of the future—almost all the automakers showed off new electric vehicles as they try to wean themselves off dirty fossil fuels, a move surely counteracted by all the energy-sucking crypto startups also shilling their wares with on-screen QR codes between downs.

What follows is one automotive editor’s ranking of the various Super Bowl LVI car commercials.

First place goes to Kia for its Robo Dog commercial that advertises the new Kia EV6 electric crossover. It’s a heartwarming story of a robot dachshund that goes on an adventure chasing an EV6, with a little demonstration of that car’s vehicle-to-load function that allows its giant battery to power AC devices, all set to Bonnie Tyler’s best hair-rock.

Enlarge / Gov. Mike Parson at a press conference on May 29, 2019, in Jefferson City, Missouri. (credit: Getty Images | Jacob Moscovitch )

A Cole County prosecutor has rebuffed Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s request to file criminal charges against a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who identified a major security flaw in a government website by viewing publicly available HTML code.

Post-Dispatch reporter Josh Renaud had been facing the threat of prosecution since his discovery that the state website’s HTML source code exposed the full Social Security numbers of teachers and other school employees in unencrypted form. Renaud merely viewed the website’s HTML and converted the Social Security numbers into plain text, and he gave the state time to close the gaping security hole before publishing his findings. Despite Renaud helping the state improve its security, Parson called the journalist a “hacker,” sought criminal charges, and threatened a civil suit.

On Friday, Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson issued a statement saying he has closed the investigation without charges:

Enlarge / Could this guy’s mental abilities be staving off some of the impact of climate change? (credit: Andrew Howe)

Many bird species are slowly but surely getting smaller. One study from 2019 looked at more than 70,000 North American migratory birds across 52 species that met untimely ends by flying into Chicago buildings from 1978 to 2016. It suggests that birds in this diverse set had consistently grown smaller as the summers had grown hotter through climate change over the past 40 years.

While this shrinking was observed across these migratory species, new research suggests that birds with bigger brains—relative to their body size—aren’t shrinking like their smaller-brained kin. The research posits that birds like corvids may be better able to survive climate change simply because they are “smarter” in some sense.

Justin Baldwin, a PhD candidate at Washington University and one of the authors of the paper, said that brain size isn’t always a useful proxy for intelligence. But—and we’re not sure why—it does appear to hold true for many birds. “The birds with big brains are basically the ones that build tools, live in complex social groups, live and remain in harsh environments, live longer, [put] more time and energy into raising babies, and [survive] better in the wild,” he told Ars.