Category: Technica Aquarius

Enlarge / Welcome back to the world of Wii S—er, ahem, I mean, Nintendo Switch Sports. (credit: Nintendo)

Wii Sports is dead; long live Nintendo Switch Sports.

This many years into the Switch’s life span, Nintendo has finally decided that its casual, cartoony take on sports should live on, even if its original home on the Wii is no longer supported. But what’s in a name? Are the words “Nintendo” and “Sports” enough to imply a continuation of the series’ style, mechanics, and fun?

This week, we’ve learned that, on the surface level, things look and feel quite familiar. But while Nintendo Switch Sports sometimes feels cozy and accessible, there’s no getting around an unfortunate “Switch” in the series’ direction.

Disc-appointed by the sports selection

Watch other online NSS players after you finish your bowling turn, as the mode defaults to a best-of-16 battle royale.

In some ways, NSS follows the trail blazed by 2006’s Wii Sports. If you’re one of roughly 82 million people who’ve played the original, you know the drill: motion controls reign in six dumbed-down, easy-to-play sports games, and players select a cartoony avatar to represent their wrist-waggling selves on their TV. If you don’t like NSS‘s touched-up avatars, you can select an old Wii-era Mii (learn how to create one on your Switch here) and transport back to 2006.

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.