President Biden has become the first president to extensively, formally back the right-to-repair movement. The right-to-repair movement calls for companies to release the knowledge and tools required to repair many common devices. Support for the movement has been growing in recent years. Under President Trump, the FTC began an investigation into how manufacturers restrict the rights of consumer to fix their own equipment. Under President Biden, the FTC has declared it will against companies that prevent customers from fixing products. This is not the first time President Biden has commented on repair issues. A July 9, 2021 executive order instructed the FTC to prohibit manufacturers from locking away critical information.
(Photo: Brett Jordan/Unsplash)Google has gotten itself into hot water yet again, this time due to a pair of lawsuits claiming that the tech giant has deceptively led its customers to believe they could turn off location tracking when they actually couldn’t. Washington, D.C. and Texas filed their complaints against Google Monday, with Indiana and Washington state expected to follow. The suits allege that Google violated D.C.’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA) and Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Consumer Protection Act by customers a false sense of control over the company’s access to their data. While Google’s smartphones and web browser provide customers with plenty of chances to “opt out” of location tracking, the states argue that such opportunities merely provide customers with an illusion of choice.
Nvidia’s takeover of ARM Ltd. from Softbank isn’t going so well. Ever since the deal was first announced in September of 2020, the mega merger has run into a series of roadblocks, lawsuits, and disapproval from industry giants that has company insiders reportedly ready to throw up their hands and move on. According to , Nvidia executives can see the writing on the wall, and has told its partners it does not expect the deal to be successful. With the deal in shambles, Softbank has reportedly begun preparing for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) as an alternative to merging with Nvidia.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has . NASA reported on the afternoon of January 24th that Webb successfully fired its thrusters to enter a “halo” orbit around the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point. It is from this vantage that the Webb telescope will observe the cosmos in greater detail than has ever been possible before, but don’t expect pretty pictures right away. NASA began work on the JWST back in the 1990s in the wake of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment and repair. Construction started in earnest in the early 2000s, but a series of redesigns and budget constraints slowed the project.
On Earth, water is the key to all life, but there doesn’t seem to be much of it on other planets… at least at first glance. As we explore more of our solar system, water has been appearing in some surprising places. We now know Mars is not entirely bone dry, and the moon has deposits of water ice. There are even worlds like Europa and Enceladus where there is most likely a subsurface ocean. Researchers from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) set out to prove that Saturn’s innermost moon Mimas didn’t have any water. Instead, they . You might not know Mimas by name, but you’ve probably seen pictures — it’s the one that looks shockingly like the Death Star with a giant impact crater standing in for the battle station’s planet-destroying laser.
The “Father of the Playstation” pulled no punches when asked about his thoughts on the Metaverse in an interview with Bloomberg, echoing what a lot of the naysayers have been expressing since it became the buzzword du jour in the tech world. Bloomberg interviewed gaming industry legend Ken Kutaragi, former CEO and Chairman of Sony’s gaming division, asking his thoughts about this virtual future we will all be experiencing someday, and he didn’t mince words. “Headsets would isolate you from the real world, and I can’t agree with that,” he said, referring to the fact that we will need some kind of head-mounted display (HMD) to enter this fantasy realm.
The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is rewriting the rules for living with COVID-19, like the Delta variant did before it. The biggest difference is that it is much more transmissible than previous variants. Along with that, current vaccines are less effective at preventing infection. Fortunately, it appears to cause less-serious illness on average, especially among vaccinated individuals. But it is still killing thousands of people every day around the world. After two years of living with COVID-19, and nearly a year of tasting relief in the form of better treatments and vaccines, no one wants to lock down again.
Some of the equipment a diabetes patient may traditionally use. (Photo: Matt Chesin/Unsplash)A group of researchers at MIT are working on a new type of diabetes treatment that could make long-term management more accessible and sustainable. Giovanni Traverso, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, has teamed up with postdocs and visiting students at the university to design devices that could provide diabetes patients with a one-stop shop that mitigates the inconvenience of treating their condition at home. Current diabetes management is far from practical. In order to avoid a dangerous blood sugar spike after mealtime, diabetes patients have to inject themselves with insulin.
Game publishers have taken a real shine to microtransactions in recent years, so it’s not surprising there’s so much interest in or “non-fungible tokens” in games. These are essentially blockchain-backed microtransactions on steroids. A survey from the organizers of the Game Developers Conference shows it’s not the actual game developers who are in love with NFTs. , the overwhelming majority of those surveyed by GDC said they have no interest in NFTs. The first time you heard about NFTs, it probably had something to do with an expensive JPEG. Most NFTs are just items that are registered on a blockchain, which proves ownership and can be bought and sold like an asset.
