Tag: TechTips

Enlarge (credit: Corsair )

Apple ditched capacitive touch strips along the top of its MacBook Pro decks last year, giving Corsair the opportunity to offer a similar input bar. Corsair seems to think it has found a fitting use for the design, incorporating it into its first laptop, which it built with a heavy focus on streaming.

Corsair made a name for itself in gaming desktops, but the Corsair Voyager a1600 AMD Advantage Edition announced Monday marks the first foray for the gaming brand, also known for PC peripherals and DIY components, into Corsair-brand laptops. The move comes about two years after it acquired boutique PC-maker Origin.

In its announcement, Corsair said the 16-inch clamshell is made for the “aspiring content creator, avid gamer, or a full-time streamer.” Thus, it’s equipped with a 1080p resolution webcam with a physical shutter flanked by four microphones with ambient noise cancellation and a colorful “macro bar with center LCD display” as well as a colorful, programmable soft-touch keyboard.

Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen 7000 chips are due out in the next few months. (credit: AMD)

AMD first teased its upcoming Ryzen 7000-series CPUs and its new Zen 4 CPU architecture at CES in January. The company said that the chips would use the new AM5 CPU socket, that they would be built on a 5 nm manufacturing process from TSMC, and that they would be available this fall.

None of those facts has changed, and AMD still hasn’t announced pricing or more specific availability info for the new chips. But at its Computex keynote this week, AMD revealed a few additional details about the Ryzen 7000 processors and the motherboards and chipsets that will support them when they’re all released to the public in the next few months.

Zen 4’s foundation: Socket AM5

Before covering any specific features of Zen 4, Ryzen 7000, or AMD’s 600-series chipsets, we should cover some basic facts about the upcoming AM5 CPU socket.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The Florida law that makes it illegal for large social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to ban politicians likely violates the First Amendment, according to a unanimous ruling by a panel of three federal appeals court judges.

The ruling, released today by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, upheld key portions of a preliminary injunction issued by a US District Court judge in June 2021. Florida appealed that injunction. As a result of today’s ruling, the state still cannot enforce the law’s content-moderation requirements.

“It is substantially likely that [the Florida law’s] content-moderation restrictions and its requirement that platforms provide a thorough rationale for every content-moderation action violate the First Amendment,” the appeals court judges found in today’s ruling. It wasn’t a complete loss for Florida, as the judges said it is “unlikely that the law’s remaining (and far less burdensome) disclosure provisions violate the First Amendment.” Florida can thus enforce those less burdensome disclosure requirements while litigation is pending.

Enlarge / Let’s see, you landed on my “Google Ads” space, and with three houses… that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)

Google Play’s in-app billing crackdown sure is causing a lot of conflicts with Android’s biggest app developers. Google recently decided to enforce a long-standing Play Store rule that says Google Play must be the one-and-only in-app purchase provider for apps downloaded from the Play Store, locking out developers from using their own payment solutions.

The latest huge developer that is unhappy with Google’s new policy is Match Group, the owner of Tinder and several other dating apps. Match sued Google on May 9 for “strategic manipulation of markets, broken promises, and abuse of power in requiring Match Group to use Google’s billing system to remain in the Google Play Store.” On Friday, the two companies reached an agreement to not restrict Match Group’s Play Store access until the lawsuit concludes.

The two companies put out dueling press releases, describing the situation very differently. Match’s blog post is titled “Google Concedes Key Issues on Google Play Policies,” while Google has a more stern title: “The facts about the temporary Match Group agreement.”